Micajah Harpe and Wiley Harpe are known as Big Harpe and Little Harpe. They are remembered as two men who moved through the settlements of east Tennessee and Kentucky in the last years of the 1790s, leaving a trail of killings that later writers attribute to them. The word "attributed" matters in their case. Neither man was ever convicted of a killing. Micajah was charged with one murder in Kentucky, escaped from jail before trial, and was killed a few months later by a posse. Wiley was charged with the same murder and escaped with him; he lived another four and a half years, was convicted in the Mississippi Territory in January 1804 of robbery, and was executed that February. Nearly everything else said about the Harpes comes from writers who set it down decades after the events, and the record that survives is thin, contradictory and often colored by legend.
What is on record is still substantial. A Kentucky county court sent the Harpes to trial for a murder in December 1798. A governor's journal records the pursuit and the reward. A territorial governor wrote to the Secretary of State about the cost of trying one of them. The Tennessee Historical Society, the Kentucky Historical Society and a Kentucky state historical marker all tell the story in outline. The outline is clear enough; the detail that later writers add to it is less secure.
For most of the nineteenth century the two men were described as brothers. Later accounts say they were first cousins, the sons of two Scottish immigrants named Harper who settled in Orange County, North Carolina, and that the family name was changed to Harpe. The Tennessee Encyclopedia calls them "likely brothers" and dates Micajah to about 1768 and Wiley to about 1770. Joshua J. Mark, writing for World History Encyclopedia, gives their birth names as Joshua, called Micajah, and William, called Wiley. A 1799 reward notice, as described by a modern columnist, said Micajah was about six feet tall and stout, and that Wiley had a thin face and was a couple of years younger.
Some accounts say the families sided with the British in the Revolution and that the two young men fought as Loyalists, with Kings Mountain and Cowpens sometimes named. They are said to have lived for a time among the Chickamauga Cherokee in what is now southeast Tennessee. The Kentucky Historical Society's ExploreKYHistory page gives the Loyalist background and the Cherokee years as part of the Harpe story. The Nashville Scene, in a 2013 feature, treats a good deal of this as speculation, noting that the record is unclear on the brothers' origins, their relationship and even the color of their hair, and that many details come from later sources such as an 1887 history and a 1962 study. A claim that their parents were put to death by neighbors for loyalist sympathies is reported by Mark with the word "allegedly," and no record is cited for it.
The Harpes did not travel alone. Three women went with them for much of the time, and later writers tell their story in different ways. Wiley is said to have married Sarah Rice, called Sally, about 1797. Two other women, described in some accounts as sisters named Roberts and in others as Maria Davidson and Susan Wood, lived with Micajah. Some later writers say the two were taken against their will; others say they stayed by choice. The Nashville Scene lists the question of whether the women were kidnapped or willing among the points on which the record is unclear.
According to the accounts of the Kentucky jail, the women gave birth to children while in custody in 1799. What happened to them afterward is one of the few parts of the story that reaches a documented end: they were tried in Kentucky and cleared.
The Tennessee Encyclopedia, in an entry by Blythe Semmer for the Tennessee Historical Society, records that the Harpes moved from North Carolina to east Tennessee in 1797 and settled on Beaver Creek, about eight miles west of Knoxville, with at least one woman they had brought with them. They farmed at first. Neighbors then began to lose hogs, sheep and horses, and the Harpes were suspected.
The Nashville Scene reports that in April 1797 the brothers robbed a traveler named William Lambuth and let him go, and that a neighbor, Edward Tiel, later took them into custody for horse theft, after which they escaped on the march toward Knoxville. The same feature says their life on Beaver Creek ended in a dispute over a horse race and livestock. The family was driven out of the neighborhood.
The first killing later writers attribute to the Harpes is that of a man named Johnson in Knox County. The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives it as the beginning of the Knox County deaths. In the Nashville Scene's telling, the killings began in late 1798 near a tavern on the Holston River, and the Harpes were not charged with it. A columnist for the Courier News of Clinton, Tennessee, Jadon Gibson, writes that the keeper of the tavern and two others were arrested and released for lack of evidence, and that regulators then drove the keeper out. These accounts are later retellings. They show that the death was blamed on the tavern keeper at the time and on the Harpes afterward.
The Tennessee Encyclopedia also notes that accounts claim the Harpes killed their own children, and describes this as a tale, not a confirmed fact. J. T. Gooch, in a 1982 essay on the Harpes, quotes the historian Edward Coffman to the same effect, calling the child-killing stories unproven.
From Tennessee the Harpes and the women moved north along the Wilderness Road toward Kentucky. The Kentucky Historical Society's ExploreKYHistory page, written by Tim Talbott, says that in December 1798 they killed a man in what is now Rockcastle County. Gooch names the victim of the Wilderness Road killings as Stephen Langford, and lists others: Peyton, two people from Maryland, and Langford. Donald Todd, writing on the Harpes and the Brasel killing, puts Langford's death in early December and the arrest near Stanford, Kentucky, without bloodshed. His date is printed as 1787, which his own note treats as a slip. The Kentucky Monthly feature by Ron Soodalter carries the same 1787 date.
What the record settles is the charge. Langford's was the one killing for which either Harpe was ever formally accused, and the accusation was made by a court in Lincoln County.
Captain Joseph Ballenger and a posse from Stanford took the group into custody late in December 1798 near Stanford; the Nashville Scene gives the date as Christmas Day. The group was held in the Stanford jail.
On January 4, 1799, as Gooch tells it, the Lincoln County Court of Quarter Sessions heard testimony and sent the five prisoners to Danville. The court ordered that they be tried for Langford's murder before the District Court at Danville in April. Harold Utley, of the Hopkins County Historical Society, dates the move to Danville to January 5. The five were the two men and three women. The Nashville Scene gives the same sequence: held at Stanford, moved to Danville in January 1799, and the Lincoln County court ordering them held for trial.
Otto Rothert's 1924 book, The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock, adds a point about names. After the Langford killing, it says, both men were indicted under the name Roberts, which they appear to have assumed, and the Governor of Kentucky later referred to them in his proclamation as "Harpe alias Roberts." No other account mentions an indictment by that name, and the book appeared well over a century after the events. The charge of murder itself is confirmed from a second direction: a Kentucky Historical Society feature quotes Governor James Garrard's First Executive Journal, which records that Wiley and Micajah were charged with the murder of a man named Langford.
Both men broke out of the Danville jail on March 16, 1799, leaving the women and their newborns behind. Gooch and Utley agree on the date. Todd's piece prints 1798, but the sequence of events, with the Lincoln County court's order not made until January 1799, supports March 1799.
The governor's journal, quoted by the Kentucky Historical Society, shows what followed. Governor Garrard authorized a man named Joseph Bullinger to pursue the two men into Tennessee and other states and to ask the executive authorities there to surrender them. He issued a proclamation offering a reward for their capture. On a later June 7, according to the same excerpt, he deputized Alexander McFarland and others to take custody of them if they were found in a neighboring state. Utley dates the proclamation to April 22, 1799, and puts the reward at 300 dollars for each brother. Gibson, in the Courier News, describes posters offering the same sum from the public treasury.
Neither man was brought back to a Kentucky courtroom. The charge of murder against them in the Lincoln County case was never tried. No verdict was ever returned on it.
The three women were tried in the District Court at Danville in April 1799 and found not guilty, according to Utley's dates, which place the trial in mid-April, and Gooch, who says it began on April 15, although each of the three had given birth while in custody. Danville residents collected money and clothing for them and gave them a horse, Utley and Gooch both report. The Nashville Scene, by contrast, says their case ended in a mistrial, and that a later separate proceeding for murder ended in acquittal. Whether the first proceeding ended in a verdict or in a mistrial is not settled.
The women did not go back to Tennessee. They settled near Henderson, Kentucky, posing as widows, Gooch reports. Their legal troubles were not over. After the killings of late August 1799, they were examined by two justices and sent to Russellville, in Logan County, for a grand jury. Gooch says the court cleared them, and Coffman, whom he quotes, says the court records show they were tried for murder at Russellville in 1799. Moses Stegall, whose wife and young son had been killed, wanted the women executed. According to Mark's account, the judge at Russellville ruled that they were victims of the Harpes and not accomplices. They were released. Mark and Soodalter say they went on to live ordinary lives; Soodalter adds that Wiley's wife returned to her father and later married a respectable man.
After the escape the two men are said to have gone to Cave-in-Rock, a bluff on the Ohio River in what is now southern Illinois where Samuel Mason's gang preyed on river traffic. The Scotsman, Mark and Soodalter all say they were expelled from the gang for their conduct. The reasons given rest on the accounts Judge James Hall wrote in the 1820s and on Rothert, and they are not on firm record.
The Kentucky Historical Society and the Webster County marker say the Harpes and their companions committed crimes across Kentucky in 1798 and 1799. Later writers name Stockton's Valley, the Cumberland River, the Barren River and Metcalfe County as places where they struck, and Gibson names a man called Dooley as one more victim. Gooch dates the death of a boy to April 1799. Children are among the victims attributed to the Harpes. None of these killings was ever brought before a court against either man.
Todd's article, which cites the Knoxville Gazette of August 7, 1799, says James Brasel, a Knox County settler, was killed on July 29, 1799, and attributes it to the Harpes. Todd argues that the killing took place in what is now Morgan County, near the Emory River, though earlier accounts place it in Anderson or Knox County. He lists about 16 known killings in the published accounts and says he believes the true number was higher.
The Brasel account is the most specific Tennessee case in the record, because a newspaper report of the time is cited for it. It sits awkwardly with the Kentucky timeline, which has the Harpes at the Ohio River and in western Kentucky that summer. Todd does not reconcile the two.
The best-known episode of the Harpe story took place in late August 1799 in what is now Webster County, Kentucky. The Kentucky Historical Society, the state marker, Gooch and Soodalter all place it there, and all attribute to the Harpes the killing of a woman, her young son and a guest of the Stegall family. The guest was William Love, according to Gooch, Soodalter, Mark and Utley. Gooch dates the killings to August 20 and 21; Soodalter gives August 21.
Moses Stegall was away from home when it happened. He returned, learned what had occurred and joined a posse. Every account places John Leiper in the posse and, in some accounts, men named Christian and Tompkins. Mark and the Beacon, a University of Tennessee student paper, date the pursuit's end to August 24, 1799.
Micajah Harpe was killed by members of the pursuing posse in late August 1799, in the area of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. The Kentucky Historical Society's account says that Stegall caught Micajah and killed him. Gooch writes that "the comforting certainty is that Big Harpe was dead," after noting that accounts of the circumstances differ. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says a posse caught up with the brothers and that Micajah was killed while Wiley escaped; Gibson says only that Micajah was killed in a confrontation and Wiley got away.
No indictment, no trial and no verdict stands behind Micajah's death. He had been charged with Langford's murder in Lincoln County; the charge was never tried. A 1799 act of the Kentucky legislature, quoted by Rothert, refers to him as an offender and mentions murders of an extraordinary kind, but an act of the legislature is not a verdict. Nothing about his death was a legal sentence. The accounts of what the posse did afterward, and the stories later told about his last words, disagree with one another. The Nashville Scene says that accounts of his last words differ, and Soodalter calls a popular story about his final moments legend.
A Kentucky state historical marker in Webster County, number 1004, is titled "Frontier Justice," a fitting name for a case in which Micajah was never given a court.
Wiley escaped in the confusion and, by most accounts, rejoined Samuel Mason's gang, with which the Tennessee Encyclopedia says he became an associate, robbing and killing travelers on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee and Mississippi. Mark says he spent about four years with the gang and reportedly stopped the extreme behavior attributed to him earlier. Soodalter says he became second in command. The Tennessee Encyclopedia gives no formal charge for those killings.
In 1803 Governor William C. C. Claiborne of the Mississippi Territory offered a reward for Mason. The Madison Papers record that the Secretary of War offered 400 dollars for the gang's capture and that Claiborne offered 500 dollars as governor. Later writers give larger sums, among them Gibson and Soodalter, but Claiborne's own letter names these two figures. Mason was captured in 1803 and escaped, the Tennessee Encyclopedia says, on the way to Natchez.
Two men then came to the authorities in the Mississippi Territory to claim the reward for Mason. They used the names John Sutton, sometimes spelled Setton, and James May. May is identified in other writing as Peter Alston. Mark says the pair were recognized and arrested. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says John Bowman of Tennessee identified one of them as Little Harpe, and the Nashville Scene adds that a distinguishing mark confirmed it. The editors of the Madison Papers, in a footnote, identify John Sutton as "apparently" the outlaw Wiley Harpe. Mason's death is attributed to the pair in accounts by Mark, Soodalter and others; the court record of 1804 does not make it a charge. Claiborne's own letter says only that Sutton and May were convicted of "piracy and felony."
Sutton and May were held in a jail that Claiborne described as insecure, and he ordered a militia guard kept on it constantly. The trial was delayed for several months. The two escaped and were recaptured almost at once in Greenville, in Jefferson County, according to Robert Coates's 1930 book The Outlaw Years, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia puts the recapture in the same town.
They were tried at Greenville in January 1804. Rothert says they were tried before the circuit court there. Gooch, Utley and Soodalter agree on the place and the month. The sentence Rothert quotes refers to Setton as "found guilty of robbery at the present term." That wording and Claiborne's differ: Claiborne's letter of March 15, 1804, to Secretary of State James Madison says the two were convicted of "piracy and felony" and executed, and that the offenses were against federal law committed outside the Territory. He asked Madison whether the United States should pay the costs of confining and trying them, since the Territory's treasury was already strained. A Frankfort newspaper's 1804 report, quoted by Rothert, said one of the two was "proved to be the villain" known as Little or Redheaded Harpe.
The record therefore supports two statements. Wiley Harpe, under the name John Sutton, was convicted in the Mississippi Territory in January 1804 of an offense that the sentence calls robbery and the governor calls piracy and felony. And no verdict on any killing is on record.
The Madison Papers footnote, which draws on Rothert, gives the date of execution as February 8, 1804, about five weeks before Claiborne's letter. Mark, quoting Rothert's account of the sentence, says the court ordered him executed on Wednesday, the eighth, and that he and May were executed at Greenville. Coates gives the same date. Gooch alone gives February 4, and Mark's overview article says February 1804 without a day. The date of February 8 is the one supported by the governor's records and two other sources.
No reliable count of the killings is on record. Mark estimates at least 39, possibly as many as 50. The Nashville Scene says that "by a conservative reckoning" the number is at least 28, and treats it as an estimate. Todd says the published accounts list about 16 known murders. Soodalter writes of 50 to 100. Each of these figures is a later writer's estimate. The only killing for which either man was charged in a court was that of Stephen Langford, and no verdict was reached on it.
Cousins or brothers: early writers said brothers; later writers say cousins with the birth name Harper. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says "likely brothers."
The Revolutionary War service, the Cherokee years and the fate of the parents: reported by Mark and by Soodalter with qualifiers, and treated by the Nashville Scene as speculation.
The women: the accounts of their origins differ; whether the first Danville proceeding ended in acquittal or mistrial differs between Utley and the Nashville Scene; Russellville's records show a trial for murder in 1799 according to Coffman.
The children: the stories that the Harpes killed their own children are called unproven by the Tennessee Encyclopedia and by Coffman.
The date of Langford's death and of the escape: Todd and Soodalter print December 1787 for Langford, and Todd prints March 1798 for the escape; the Kentucky Historical Society, Utley and Gooch give December 1798 and March 1799.
Micajah's death: accounts of the moments around it differ, and a story told about his last words is treated as legend.
The offense for which Wiley was convicted: robbery in the sentence Rothert quotes, "piracy and felony" in Claiborne's letter.
The date of Wiley's execution: February 8 in the governor's records and two other sources; February 4 in one.
Mason's death: attributed to Wiley and May by later writers; Mark says Mason may have died of wounds, or Wiley may have killed him.
Tim Talbott's ExploreKYHistory entry and the state marker present the Harpes as part of Kentucky's frontier story, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia gives them an entry with a bibliography that includes Breazeale's 1842 Life As It Is, Rothert's 1924 book, Coates's 1930 book and John D. W. Guice's 1991 article "A Trace of Violence?" in the Southern Quarterly. Later writers have called them the first American serial killers. That description comes from the writers, not from any court: no court convicted either man of a killing.
About 1768 and 1770: Micajah and Wiley are born, probably in North Carolina (the Tennessee Encyclopedia gives these years).
1797: the Harpes settle on Beaver Creek, Knox County, Tennessee; Wiley takes a wife.
April 1797: a traveler is robbed and left alive; a neighbor takes the Harpes into custody for horse theft and they escape.
Late 1798: a man named Johnson is killed in Knox County; the killing is attributed to the Harpes by later writers.
December 1798: Stephen Langford is killed in Lincoln County, Kentucky; the Harpes and three women are taken into custody near Stanford.
January 4 or 5, 1799: the Lincoln County court sends the five to Danville for trial in April on the Langford charge.
March 16, 1799: Micajah and Wiley escape from the Danville jail.
April 1799: the three women are tried at Danville and found not guilty (one source says mistrial); the governor's reward of 300 dollars each is dated April 22.
July 29, 1799: James Brasel is killed in Tennessee (attributed).
Late August 1799: a woman, her young son and a guest of the Stegall family in what is now Webster County are killed (attributed); a posse pursues the Harpes and Micajah is killed.
Late 1799: the women are examined at Henderson and tried at Russellville; cleared.
1803: Governor Claiborne offers a reward for Samuel Mason; two men using the names John Sutton and James May go to the authorities to claim it and are arrested.
January 1804: Sutton, identified as Wiley Harpe, and May are tried at Greenville, Mississippi Territory, and convicted.
February 8, 1804: the two are executed at Greenville.
March 15, 1804: Claiborne writes to Madison about the cost of confining and trying them.