Satan's Ferryman: A True Tale of the Old Frontier

by W.D. Snively Jr., Louanna Furbee-Losee

'The friendly proprietor of Ford's All-Weather Ferry floated pioneers across the wide Ohio in fair times or foul - to murder them on the far bank if they carried gold. Its setting the 1830s when bank failures and depression spurred a fresh migration westward, its characters the men and women of history - this book tells of fact stranger than fiction, in an account pieced together from old newspapers, court records, fragments of remenmbered legend, and the blurred physical evidence of wagon trails. James Ford, the scion of patriots, had land, wealth, family, position - he even served as sheriff. His nose for business sensed correctly the potential of a ferry situated for use throughout the year and convenient to the Wilderness Road which hundreds of travellers would follow westward. His taste for crime selected as well an isolated site. Ford's Ferry flourished, and lured a thriving - though luckless - trade. And years passed before the respectable Ford could be linked with the murder and robbery that brought a lurid notoriety to the area. If Ford was a cruel man, the soil of his Kentucky home was also harsh. Violence had followed violence since the time that Indian tribes clashed over hunting rights on this "dark and bloody ground." The authors researched beyond Ford's Ferry itself to the robber bands who congregated at an island cave of the Ohio.to the mad Harp brothers who feverishly roamed the countryside and indiscriminately shot whom they met. We read of historical trails, mudchoked in springtime, danger-riddled during Indian raids, over which men carried their families in cumbersome wagons - and of a girl who escaped Ford's trap and lived to doctor her neighbours in Ohio and to make a significant medical discovery. Violence, treachery, courage, craftiness - the gamut of characteristics that figured in the winning of the West - colour this piece of Americana'.

Genres: True Crime

244 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

Reviews

[Trace · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fellow named James Ford fell in amongst the bandits at Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, along the Ohio River and organized and ran their murderous piracy. Ford owned an "all-weather" ferry that utilized horses and stern-wheel paddles to ferry travelers across the Ohio through both floods and low water. He managed an intricate system of scouts and lookouts that spanned the road that led from Nashville through Kentucky and up into Illinois. Well dressed and articulate scouts coaxed families heading west to use Ford's Ferry to ensure they would not have to marshall their wagons to wait for passage across the river. A system of express riders then relayed information up the road to James Ford and his bandits that prosperous looking families were headed to his crossing. Once into his lair, the bandits sprang their trap and robbed the families of everything. To guarantee they would not be discovered they shot the men and cut the throats of the women and children. Often times, they forced the young boys to drive the families stock onto nearby islands -- one called Diamond and the other Hurricane. Once the stock was on the island, then the bandits would murder the boys. To hide the corpses, they split open their chests, filled them with rocks, and pitched them in the Ohio.

This is not a modern tale. Ford commanded these bandits from around 1814 to 1833, when a group of regulators from around Smithland, Salem, and Marion, Kentucky, murdered him. Ford prospered, acquiring hundreds of acres of lands, two dozen slaves, and riches he passed on to his children to obscure his true financial and real estate value. These guys make guys like Al Capone and his gang look like pikers.

The interesting thing is that I often work in this part of Kentucky and have been on the ground of Ford's farm, which was called Ferry Ohio. I've listened to locals tell me these tales and recount finding pieces of the wagons that the bandits burned and some told me about their grandparents finding human bones in some of the caves and fields in the area. It's unclear how many people the men killed, but it is possibly more than a thousand. I've read some of the court cases cited in the book's endnotes (and have possibly discovered documents the authors missed, which is not a criticism).

W.D. Snively, Jr., and Louanna Furbee did an excellent job researching and writing this fabulous piece of Kentucky history. It is thorough without being a pedantic piece of history. It is written to tell a story -- a shocking non-fiction story -- and not to please professors.

Readers' jaws will drop as they read this tale.

Oh yeah, good luck finding a copy of this book. While it doesn't fit the definition of rare, it is hard to come by. I'm sure that people who own it cherish having it, so not many hit the market. I haven't checked eBay or Amazon to discern it availability, but I do know that I was the first to enter its bibliographical information on Goodreads.

[Robin]

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