Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 - (Page 63)

Louisiana Regional folklorist with Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. “It was an easy place to be lawless.” Lee said in any developing community, there’s a moment when the fate of the area is being decided. “There’s always that nexus when it can go either way. Either the churches and schools come in and you have a nice family community or you get a whole lot of men and not a lot of women and children and then it develops on its own,” she said. The fact that governments were expressly forbidden by treaty to enter the Neutral Strip made it a haven for the most vile outlaws and desperados who could plunder from the citizens of either government, and then escape back to the relative safety of the No Man’s Land. Lee compared it to a speeding motorist on a Mississippi highway making it across the border into Louisiana before the state trooper could stop him. “The law in Mississippi can’t come across the state line. It was that kind of attitude,” she said. Since there was no government in the wild region, no records exist of what actually transpired during the lawless years, but one man’s dominion in the No Man’s Land has attained legendary status. John A. Murrell (sometimes spelled Murel) became one of the area’s most infamous land pirates who, at one time, boasted the allegiance of 1,200 men. Known as the Reverend Devil, Murrell was said to preach the gospel on Sunday and cut throats on weekdays. In his book, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain compared Murrell to Jesse James: “Murel was (James’) equal in boldness; in pluck; in rapacity; in cruelty, brutality, heartlessness, treachery, and in general and competitive vileness and shamelessness; and very much his superior in some larger aspects. James was a retail rascal; Murel, wholesale. James’s modest genius dreamed of no loftier flight than the planning of raids upon cars, coaches, and country banks; Murel projected negro insurrection, and the capture of New Orleans; and furthermore, on occasion, this Murel could go into a pulpit and edify the congregation. What are James and his half-dozen vulgar rascals compared with this stately old-time criminal, with his sermons, his meditated insurrections and city-captures, and his majestic following of ten hundred men, sworn to do his evil will!” Twain goes on to describe Murrell enticing slaves to run away from their masters so that they might be sold in another quarter. “They would tell a negro that if he would run away from his master, and allow them to sell him, he should receive a portion of the money paid for him, and that upon his return to them a second time they would send him to a free State, where he would be safe,” Twain wrote. What ultimately would happen, explained Cornial Cox, interpretive ranger at Los Adaes State Historic Site, was that Murrell would realize he couldn’t sell the slave indefinitely. When the slave had ceased to be profitable and was becoming a liability, Murrell would kill him and throw his body in the river, Cox said. Murrell wasn’t the only well-known outlaw working the Strip. Jean Lafitte ran a healthy business marketing slaves omest eader in the s Neut St were said t ral rip o k their valuable in eep s "post hole bank Money and s." gold were placed in posthole and s the post slid int place on t t o op o disguise the hiding place. H Fall 2005/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 63

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005 Contents Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Louisiana State Museum After Katrina and Rita Tabasco: Edmund McIlhenny and the Birth of a Louisiana Pepper Sauce Historic New Orleans Collection Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans’ Coffee Connection No Man’s Land Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism Bookstand (Book Review by Thomas Uskali) Sound Advice (Music Review by Ben Sandmel) Forum (Commentary by Roy Blount, Jr. )

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2005

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