Excerpt from The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock: Historical Accounts of the Famous Highwaymen and River Pirates Who Operated in Pioneer Days Upon the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and Over the Old Natchez Trace Any history of these outlaws would doubtless be looked upon as wild fiction unless the statements were carefully verified by court records and contemporary newspaper notices, and the records Of early writers who gathered the facts regarding them when these facts were told by men and women who lived at the time the atrocities were committed. The adage that truth is stranger than fiction is exemplified fully in their careers. The lives and exploits of these men constitute an im portant phase in pioneer life because their deeds greatly affected the settlement Of the new country. Dread of them brought peaceful settlers together in communities and helped to hasten the establishment of law and order. Their histories are therefore a part of the his tory of the country. The historian who passes them over as mere blood-and-thunder tales misses entirely one of the high lights in the great adventure of the settling of the Mississippi basin. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.