Ben 00:01-00:02

Scott, welcome back to the show.

Scott 00:03-00:04

It's a pleasure to be here again.

Ben 00:06-00:55

Where you left us last week was with a 5,000 square mile tract of land that was a haven for outlaws and tomfoolery and rapscallions and every other kind of person that my 8th grade English teacher always warned us about when we were going up in school. This, No Man's Land, is the heart and soul of what you're writing about, and it is a fascinating place. What I would love for you to do for us, just right from the jump here, is can you describe—funny question, but I think you'll see where I'm going—can you describe how this place worked. I mean, you had settlers, you had outlaws, you had bandits, you had traders, you had companies, you had roots, and none of it was regulated in the slightest at all.

Scott 00:56-02:50

How did it work? It didn't work. That's the whole case. So literally, the no man's land agreement stated that neither country could have laws, could have soldiers, or could have officers of government, police officers, in the region. Because if they had that, then they could have said, oh, we've been governing this region. It's now ours by default. So there was literally no laws. And literally everybody that was in it, except for a handful of people, were technically outlaws at this point, because settlement had been outlawed in the area.

So that would be a big thing in the future when they had brought this area back to the United States, was how to determine who was a legal settler and who wasn't. So you had a handful of Spanish descendants and even a few Americans who had Spanish land grants who were living there legitimately. Most everybody else, especially at first, were outlaws who were coming in because not only was there no police, but there was an international trade highway running between Nacogdoches and Natchitoches because those two communities were closer to each other than it was from Nacogdoches to Mexico City.

So the garrison in Nacogdoches got most of their supplies from Nacogdoches transported back and forth and there are all kinds of legends in our area of Spanish silver shipments that were attacked or they were buried or the outlaws would take the silver then bury it and then they would either get killed before they could go back and dig it up or they forget where it was. But you had literally some of the trading houses in Nacogdoches who told the Spanish government by 1815, if they didn't do something, they were gonna have to stop sending caravans through the region, which would have shut the economy of Nacogdoches down completely.

Ben 02:52-03:03

And we should say, just for point of clarification, just to be, so folks are absolutely clear, France is out of the picture completely at this point. It is toast, yeah, Napoleon's tied up over in Europe, yeah.

Scott 03:03-03:10

Yeah, there were French descendants in the area, but yes, France was completely out of the picture at this point.

Ben 03:10-03:45

Yep. So, with this agreement, which is kind of an agreement to not agree on anything except that there is no agreement, I mean, how did folks make a living or what was the kind of dominant form of activity? Was it just sort of homesteading at the time? Did you have these kind of wayfarers' inns where people who were bringing their goods could stay? Were there you know, sort of private security companies, so to speak, that you could hire protection for your goods as they were in transit east to west?

Scott 03:45-07:56

Yeah, again, kind of an all the above statement. All those things happen. Usually the caravans would wait until they were large enough that they had enough, well, firepower, basically, to get across no man's land. And in the book, there's several stories of different, there was one where a mule train was passing through. Well, mules were a big commodity at the time. Well, the owner of the train was going to head to scout and he got ambushed by some outlaws. They basically said, well, let you go, but we're going to ambush and kill everybody else to get the mules. So I said, okay, well, that's okay. I mean, my life's more important than theirs. So what he did was he slipped behind the outlaws, got back to his mule train and warned them what was going to happen. So they set up an ambush for the people trying to ambush them. And it wasn't just Americans going through or Spanish, it was both. You had Spanish gangs attacking Spanish and American traders. You had Americans attacking both. So it didn't matter what nationality you were, they just wanted what you had. You had several inns that were in the area.

One of them was run by the Parkers called the 20 Mile Inn. It was one of those places where if you showed up and you had a nice horse, a nice saddle, and some money in your wallet, you might not wake up the next day. Oh boy. Because they were literally killing people in the night to steal things from them. Then you also had some legitimate settlers because about the same time the no man's land started, and I guess we should clarify a little bit, there's two ideas here. we have the era of the neutral strip, which is the geographic area that was from 1806 until 1821. Then you have the cultural aspect of no man's land, which if anybody has ever visited this area knows pretty much is still going on today in some cases. My wife said after she read the book, she got a lot better understanding of why things work. She's from Texas originally. So she understood why things work here the way they do. So there's a cultural thing that basically lasted a lot longer than that neutral strip era. So right now we're talking about the original neutral strip area between 1806 and 1821. And around 1806, 1807, there was a major financial panic, what we would now call a recession, that hit America. So land prices skyrocketed and the government changed the rules on how to get land and you had to have a down payment of gold. in order to make a down payment on land. Well, most Americans couldn't afford that. So you have this strip that has free land and no government taxes.

So people made a beeline to it. And a lot of them were legitimate settlers who just simply could not afford land where they lived. So they would come in and they would basically homestead. They were what we call subsistence farmers. where they're growing enough food to live off the land. They may have some livestock, but again, it's mostly to feed the family. And if they were doing things to make money on the side, it was a lot of wood products like making cypress shingles or making fence posts or fence rails, different things like that. And they were, like I said, they just wanted to be left alone.

They just wanted to farm. have a comfortable life and raise their children. So a lot of times they would start working together, especially they were family units. And this is where you get that mistrust of outsiders, which sometimes so happens in our area. And because you only could trust the people you knew. Anybody who walked into your neighborhood, you didn't know why were they there. And then you had a lot of, especially later in the post-neutral strip, so no man's land era, you'd have a lot of trouble where people would move in and wouldn't know whose hogs were running in the forest, whose cattle. They might shoot one thinking it was wild and that could start a family feud.

Ben 07:58-09:43

That's a lot of pressures that are kind of taking place there. And I actually want to come back to that cultural dimension a little bit later, because I thought that you wrote well about the, you know, that kind of distrustful attitude, which was really, as you read your account, Scott, it's totally reasonable. It's just completely reasonable. It's not the kind of thing that we should really look on with much historical judgment today. But, you know, one thing i did want to ask you about we have to remember the specific context of the time and you have heroes and villains you know even within the kind of um the the no man's land territory and you know one of the great heroes of course is jean lafitte uh the pirate who assisted the americans and you know battle of 18 war of 1812 and you know helped drive off the british from the louisiana territory and so forth you know we just you know we look back on jean lafitte um as one of these great sort of non-American American heroes, right? And we can talk all day long about him and his contribution. But you write that, you know, the true history there is actually much more checkered, and there's much more of a mixed bag. And in particular, because this is the early 1800s, that history ties directly into slave smuggling. And I was wondering if you could just for our listeners who may not be aware of what the practice of slave smuggling was, explain that, as well as what the outlaw gangs used to do in order to profit two and three times off of the practice. Because it, you know, you read this particular part of your account, and you see the true depth of the lawlessness in this area.

Scott 09:44-13:00

Right, and John Lafitte's an interesting character, and you would think, being kind of a seafaring person, he would only be connected to the southern part around the Lake Charles area, which he had a lot of ties there, but they were traveling all through no man's land. And you're asking how people survived. John Lafitte was one of the people that sort of helped in that as people who had extra food or extra supplies would trade those foodstuffs to his crews for the manufactured goods that they were smuggling. And that's where John Lafitte kind of fall in a foul with the American government. He was pardoned after the War of 1812 for everything that he had done before the War of 1812. But after that, he was still raiding Spanish ships.

And in fact, he had said he was making more money raiding them for manufactured goods than he was raiding them for money by this point. But Spain and the United States after the Napoleonic Wars, Tension had thawed they were trying to start working together more and basically Spain said if you want to work with us You need to get rid of Jean Lafitte. So he was basically chased out of the Gulf and Started setting up operations at Galveston Island and then was moving in to the neutral strip because nobody could follow him there And one of the things that he was doing other than stealing from manufactured goods was he was also raiding Spanish slave ships under American law by this point the international slave trade had been outlawed, so you could no longer import slaves. The only slaves who could be sold were ones that had been born in the United States. Well, he was raiding these Spanish slave ships, bringing them to Galveston Island, and then he was selling them at a discount to different people. And what a lot of the people, especially the Bowie brothers, Jim Bowie, they had a system where they would go to Galveston Island, They would buy slaves from him. They would take them through no man's land. Now you have to picture the fear that these people had to be under. Most of them were either from the Caribbean or recently from Africa. They did not speak English. They either spoke Spanish or their native language.

They're being driven through this wilderness, basically a wilderness with alligators and snakes and everything else to an uncertain future. So what the, Buoys would do is they would take them, because there was a law in America, basically if you captured a runaway slave, quote unquote, that they would sell the slave at auction, and the person who turned them in would get half of the purchase price. So the buoy brothers would take the slaves, they would take them and turn them in to a U.S. Marshal, and then they would be sold at auction.

But they would have people that they were actually would buy the slaves, and then turn around and sell them, and they had people in the auction that would drive the prices up. So you had the Booers that were making double profit because they were getting more than their initial purchase price of these enslaved people, and they were getting half the reward money from when they had been sold the first time.

Ben 13:01-13:04

It's a hell of a scheme. Yeah. I mean, it's a hell of a scheme.

Scott 13:07-13:28

And that was very common. And you did have some runaways who would try and live in no man's land because there was no government. A lot of times they were usually trying to pass through because if they were caught, even if they were a free person of color, if they were caught in no man's land, they were more likely, the outlaws was gonna tear their papers up and try and sell them again.

Ben 13:31-13:41

And then you describe, of course, the even worse practice of what you call the slave Judases, who were the slaves who were themselves complicit in the act.

Scott 13:41-14:30

Yeah. Right. They would send it, they would have actual, you know, the people that were working, the former slaves that would go into the plantations and say, hey, I know how we can escape. There's these gentlemen that will help you get out if you'll, you know, so they would, during the night, they would escape and meet somewhere. and then they would take those and count them as runaways and turn them in for the reward money in different areas than did their scheme again. And unfortunately for the Judases, a lot of times they didn't live more than two or three times after doing this because they didn't want the people running these different schemes, didn't want them to be able to be recognized. So after a couple of times of doing this, they would kill the Judas and leave them in a well or in a spring where nobody could find them.

Ben 14:32-15:38

It's a chilling history, Scott, and I think it's one of these sobering reminders of what the reality was back then, and just how much danger, you know, lurked around every corner in so many different ways, and why you could not really trust anybody except someone that you know, as you say. Now, one interesting dimension of your account is that you write both the Spanish and the American territorial authorities attempted to go in and route this kind of behavior out. I mean, they tried to go in with different detachments of troops and so forth. But one of the conclusions that you draw is that neither side, whether the Spanish coming in from the West or the Americans coming in from the East, Neither was successful. I mean, it's just, you know, the river rats and the smugglers and the, you know, the wayside-in murder families, you know, they would just kind of melt away as soon as the troops arrived and then go right back to where they were as soon as the troops left.

Scott 15:39-17:07

And even if you burned a cabin, like the soldiers would do a lot of times, they would burn structures, They were fairly easy to rebuild. So within a week or two, a lot of these places were rebuilt. And the detachments did try to determine who was a legal settler, although nobody was legally a legal settler at this point, you know, who was there not to commit crimes and who was to commit crimes. And you had lots of issues with that. And especially you had several, even the Spanish would arrest the wrong Spaniards sometimes, saying that they were or were not criminals. And the first couple of times they did, they were joint operations between Spain and the United States. By the late, after the War of 1812, the late 1810s, Spain had become so weak and they could just barely mount military operations in the region. So it was mostly up to the Americans to do And again, like I said, they usually failed miserably. And eventually what started to happen, you asked earlier about bodyguards, basically. After about 1817, the government started allowing troops from Fort Claiborne to escort some of the caravans back and forth under the condition that the owner of the caravan would provide the horses and pay a fee basically to rent these soldiers as they were moving back and forth.

Ben 17:08-18:00

Yeah. And you write, of course, that part of that movement and part of the tension, still the political tension in the area, centered on the river, you know, on the Sabine, and the Sabine as the boundary was also the site of the transgression of the boundary by different troops at different times. And, you know, you had these little probing maneuvers, exploratory maneuvers, you know, you would have a little skirmish that would generate some refugees and refugees would go to one side of the river or the other side of the river, kind of just depending on how the conflict worked out. It's interesting, because, frankly, Scott, I just don't think a lot of folks outside this region, and I confess, even living in eastern, southeastern Louisiana, had not fully appreciated just how important the Sabine River was to the history of this region.

Scott 18:01-19:25

It is, and during a lot of this time, Spain was involved in a civil war between Spain and the people that wanted to eventually found Mexico. Mexico was fighting for its independence. And the Americans would often get involved in these, either sometimes with the support of the government, sometimes not, But you'd have, as you said, you had all these different expeditions, and we called them filibusters at the time, which we think of that being a long Senate debate to shut down a vote. At this time, a filibuster was any basically illegal operation against a country the United States was at peace with. And you'd have all these regs, you'd have the Americans join the Spanish armies, they would usually win the first battle, and then the Spanish would send reinforcements, they would be defeated, you'd have arguments, between the Spanish and the Americans of who was going to set up the new government. And usually they would split apart and get, you know, basically wiped out a lot of cases. But it did cause a lot of settlers to flee back. You had a large Spanish population that came back and settled in what was now the Roebling area at the time of Lasodias and founded Spanish Town, which moved a couple of miles depending on other settlement. You had a lot of people who came and settled in Natchitoches who were Americans who had come from other states, had been in the filibusters, lost and survived, and then set up shop in Natchitoches.

Ben 19:28-20:29

your account of these movements and of the flow of refugees from place to place and the kind of constant tug-of-war over pockets of land and areas and spheres of influence and so forth, all of this eventually, after about 10 to 15 years, does come to I won't call it an end, but we could at least say it starts a new chapter with the arrival of Fort Jessup. And we talked a little bit about that last week. I guess I'm kind of curious, you know, you have the Transcontinental Agreement, which does officially secure the border for the first time in over a decade. And then you have Fort Jessup arrived to kind of cement that, right? We're now approaching the late 18-teens into kind of 1820 kind of period. How long did it take, really, for that kind of lawlessness of the entire region to begin to subside?

Scott 20:30-24:45

It took a while. And the treaty itself took three years. Spain and the United States signed it in 1819. And basically, we gained Florida in exchange for giving up any claims to Texas, because Jefferson was claiming that Louisiana Purchase included everything to the Rio Grande River. But it took a long time for it to be ratified by both governments. There were some legal issues.

There was land grants that had to be sorted out. And then right after the King of Spain signed it in 1821, he within a few days signed the proclamation freeing Mexico from Spain. So then you had to go back and have a new treaty with Spain, which was basically just a repeat of the treaty that already existed. Then you had, like I said, the time before Jess was over, which was 1822 until 1846. And it started to kind of cement the fact that this is American territory.

They sent troops to set up a camp at Spanish Town, Los Islas area, because they weren't sure if the people at Spanish Lake, who they were gonna be loyal to. Turned out very quickly, the Spanish settlers were either didn't care who ran their area, or were not gonna rise in revolt, so those troops were brought back. Troops were sent to the area that became Lake Charles, because the custom agents needed help with all the pirates that were moving through those bayous because it was an easy place to hide. We were protecting the El Camino Real, the Royal Road that had run between them, and that was where all the settlers going to Texas were coming through.

So it was this gradual, and the soldiers were just, did at times act as a police force, but mostly it was just their presence. their patrolling and the settlers knowing that they were there to be called on, it started to open the area for more legitimate settlers to move in.

You had the beginning of communities, you had the beginning of churches, and kind of the taming of gradually of no man's land. And that worked great until about the Civil War. Let me actually, in 1848, you have the end of the Mexican-American War. Of course, Texas became a state in 1846. So that's why Fort Jess was closed. It was all we needed was a frontier outpost or a border post. So at that point, you didn't have the tension of this being a border region anymore.

The boundary moved first the Rio Grande and then two years later to the Pacific Ocean. So the 1850s was kind of a quiet era. Then you had the Civil War and all that chaos. And as most of the male members of the households were leaving to either fight in Virginia or be deployed in other areas, you had a lot of other outlaws coming in to prey on the base of the women and children left behind. You had what we called Jayhawkers at the time who were pro-Northern supporters that were in the area. You had draft dodgers, and you just had general criminal element that were taking advantage of there not being a police force. And that went on really until the 1880s or so. You had a lot of that. In the 1890s, you started having a little bit more communication, a little bit more roads, you didn't have quite, the area wasn't quite as isolated as it had been. And you started having lumber mills come in, and that actually created a whole new set of problems, because you have these people that have always been very close-knit and only trusting their friends and neighbors and family, and now you have people coming in not only from all these other states, but even other countries. and saying of lumber mills and new communities, and there was always arguments. Were the older settlers or the newer settlers going to control the politics of the region? A lot of the lumber mills, some of the lumber mills were owned by very good, kind businessmen who really were concerned about their employees, but not most of them. So you had a lot of riots in the area. And finally, around the end of World War II is really when you start seeing this area becoming part of America and kind of calming down a little bit.

Ben 24:46-26:45

It's amazing how long it takes and, you know, the feeling of being forgotten and overlooked almost half by accident and half by choice, you know, for this region is such an interesting tension to deal with over that long, long 19th century and, you know, I really appreciated your discussion. of that, and as well as the way that those kind of frontier elements persisted for ages and ages. You know, your discussion of what happens down in Shawneytown or Shantytown, however you want to call it. That was not a good place to be a goose. And I can't say why on this podcast. This is ostensibly a family podcast. And all I can say is that for anybody who wants to know why you do not want to be a goose in colonial era territorial Western Louisiana, Scott's book has the answer. So, I'm just going to leave you with that. And we're just going to say no more. So, there's your teaser. But before we go, thinking about all these different elements. kind of the lost lore, the, you know, the forgotten swathe of the map, the warring powers, you know, the geopolitics made intensely local, all of these different elements coming together. To my mind, they almost kind of reached their focal point in a guy named John Murrell. And I just wanted to ask you, John Murrell is one of these, every southern area has its legendary outlaw, right? We have the Copeland gang in Mississippi where I grew up, right? And everybody knows Copelands and all their misfit adventures and so forth. You know, there's a lot of them. But John Merle seems to be Louisiana's, or at least, you know, middle-western Louisiana's, you know, kind of golden bad boy, so to speak. And there's a ton to say about him. And I'm just wondering if you would tell us maybe your favorite John Merle story, whether it is true or not.

Scott 26:48-27:54

The fastest way to start a fight in this area is start a John Murrell conversation. Because you have some people that are bound and determined that he was not in the area at all. You have some that say everything about him is completely true. And then there's those of us in the middle that think that there probably was some truth. The historical problem is there was a documented John Murrell in Tennessee. And a lot of people have gotten, and the early biographers kind of meld that history with our local legends, creating kind of the same person. A lot of historians point out that the dates for Tennessee Mural don't necessarily match with our mural, because our mural was still causing trouble in the 1870s and 1880s. And that John Mural was supposed to be, had passed away in the 1840s. So there's a lot of controversy. But whether or not it's Tennessee Murrell or somebody else, we all, one of my favorite stories.

Ben 27:54-27:56

There's all sorts of John Murrells out there.

Scott 27:56-28:35

Every time you turn over a rock, you find one. Tennessee, when they didn't call him the Reverend Devil. The one in our area, that's his name because he was a fire and brimstone preacher. He was very, he was a very good speaker. very entertaining and kept the audience engaged. That was a good thing because while they were learning about the Bible, he was robbing the blind. His men were going out and robbing their homes. They were robbing the saddlebags. They were taking note of who had the best saddles. But the couple of real quick ones, he would have a scale that he would put out during his sermon.

Ben 28:35-28:36

Oh yeah, love it.

Scott 28:36-28:49

And he would say, he would put a heavy Bible on it and say, okay, your sins will be forgiven if the scale tips. And we put enough gold and silver on this to tip the scale. Now granted, that's not doctrinally correct at any level.

Ben 28:50-28:51

At any level.

Scott 28:51-29:08

At any level. And he would have some of his gang members would be the first ones to make the donation. They were, you know, wrapping people up to get them to donate more money. And eventually the scale would tilt. Well, I guarantee you that none of that money was ever spent on a widow or an orphan.

Ben 29:09-29:53

I believe it. I believe it. Just the thought of it and, you know, how they get away with it over and over and over is just absolutely incredible. One of the things I really appreciate your discussion of him, Scott, and about your discussion of the whole region of Louisiana, no man's land, is that separating fact from fiction in this area is really hard. I mean, in some cases, it is downright impossible. It cannot be done. But that fact alone does not make it worth ignoring. You know, it's like, that is what gives it so much color and flavor and spice, and it's just this part of it.

Scott 29:54-31:22

It's one of the things I mentioned in the book. There wasn't enough room to do this part justice, and I didn't want it to become an anthropological, sociological rant. But basically, those legends, whether they're true or not, have shaped the culture of this region. So at some point, those legends are just as important as the historic facts because they have led to our culture that has developed. There's hardly anybody in our area that's been here for more than 100 years that doesn't have some outlaw story hiding in the corner. Either their great-great-great-grandfather was an outlaw, or their great-great-grandfather beat an outlaw, or outsmarted an outlaw, or did something. So that is, again, shaped, that whole, and people talk about it like it was yesterday, especially at family reunions, and that's what I mentioned kind of early in the book. When I first started, especially when I was touring out of Fort Jessup, because it was such a narrow historical time period, we didn't really look at a lot of the stories that happened after 1821 or 1848. But the longer you do research and people talk about these stories, whether it happened in 1790 or 1880, like it's all the same. It all happened during no man's land. And that's why I kind of have started referring to it as much of a cultural area as a geographic area. Maybe not necessarily as much of a time period as just this geographic and cultural area.

Ben 31:23-31:47

Well, that's a useful distinction to make and certainly helps to account for the way that these things, these trends persist through time. Well, last question I have for you, Scott, is where can folks find a copy of your new book? And if they want to reach out and get a hold of you or pick up, you know, one of these off the shelf, what's the best place for them to do that?

Scott 31:48-32:18

Of course, they were published by Arcadia Publishing, the History Press, and they're available on their website. They're available in most of the major online bookstores. And then they're also available locally through our Walgreens and a couple other places, so they can reach out. directly to me and I can get them in touch with how to order them as well. You got a website or something like that? I don't yet, just an email. I'm hoping to get a website eventually.

Ben 32:19-32:49

good deal. Well, let us know when you do, but in the meantime, that's how folks can take their own journey down into the no man's land, and there is a great deal of joy and adventure to be found there. Scott, thank you so much for joining us. And I just got to say, next time you are down in New Orleans, we will meet at John Lafitte's blacksmith shop, which is still serving up, you know, cold beer and tall tales, you know, after 200 years.

Scott 32:49-33:00

I haven't been to New Orleans in about 10, 15 years. I used to go a lot for different conventions, but that was one of our favorite places to eat growing up. So I'll be happy to meet you there.

Ben 33:00-33:05

The first round's on me. I'll look forward to it. Thank you so much for joining us, Scott. We'll see you soon.