Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [23]
The Crow’s Nest was a river islet about 175 miles up from Natchez. It was small, steep, and densely forested; it had a sheltered cove on its downriver bank, and it also had a couple of very deep caves. It was like any other of the countless islets scattered along the river—it stood out only because of its inhabitants. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was the base for the most feared pirates in the whole river valley.
The river in those days was infamous for its lawlessness. It was infested with thieves, brigands, and pirates. There were also “land pirates” who terrorized travelers on the few existing roads, like the Old Wilderness Road and the Natchez Trace, that ran from the river through the wild country to the east. But even for that time, the Crow’s Nest pirates were exceptional. They were renowned for their ruthlessness and wanton cruelty. They snuck aboard docked boats at night, drilled holes in their hulls, and waited until the boats were foundering the next morning before attacking them and killing everybody aboard. They painted false markers on the rocks to indicate channels where there were none, and once the misled boats were wrecked or beached on a sandbar and their passengers killed, they were looted at leisure. They routinely disposed of their victims by gutting them, filling their body cavities with rocks and stones, sewing them up again, and throwing them overboard so they’d sink without a trace.
They stalked the lower river for several decades. At the end of the eighteenth century, the governor of the Louisiana Territory issued a desperate decree banning unlashed boats from the lower river; only convoys of ten or more lashed boats were permitted to proceed past the Crow’s Nest toward the delta. The governor had no other recourse. There was little in the way of formal law and order on the frontier then. A few garrisons of federal soldiers were stationed along the river, but they were tasked only with defending the settlers from attacks by small Indian raiding parties—not a large, heavily armed, and well-organized band of pirates. The river people were on their own.
They did their best to stay in business. Their boats were heavily armed to fend off the pirates. One boat making regular runs on the river advertised that it offered “a large crew, skilful in the use of arms, a plentiful supply of muskets and ammunition, an equipment on each boat of six one-pound cannon, and a rifle-proof cabin for the use of the passengers.” But in the end the river men had no choice but to take direct action against the Crow’s Nest themselves.
The story goes that one night in the late autumn of 1809, a large group of keelboats and barges had been stranded by contrary winds a few miles upriver from the Crow’s Nest. The crews lashed boats and created an impromptu floating city in the deserted waters. When they all crossed from boat to boat, hailing acquaintances and passing on gossip, the Crow’s Nest was the only thing anybody wanted to talk about. Over the course of that evening, they decided that the time had come to do something about it: they were going to put an end to the Crow’s Nest gang once and for all.
By midnight a plan had jelled; in the dead hours afterward it launched. More than a hundred of the toughest raftsmen and voyageurs had agreed to take part. They descended the river silently, in skiffs and canoes, until they saw the shadow of the islet ahead. The pirates had posted no lookouts; after all, there was never any traffic worth looting after sundown. Then the leader of the boatmen stood