Samuel Mason - Piracy

Piracy

Mason moved his family in the early 1790s, to the Red Banks, now Henderson, Kentucky. He later settled downriver on Diamond Island and engaged in criminal activity. By 1797, he moved the base of his river piracy further downriver to Cave-in-Rock on the Illinois shore. Mason's gang of pirates openly based themselves at Cave-in-Rock, where they had a brief association with serial killers Micajah Harpe and Wiley Harpe, until the summer of 1799, when they were expelled by the "Exterminators" under the leadership of Capt. Young of Mercer County, Kentucky. Mason moved his operations downriver and settled his family in Spanish Louisiana and became a highwayman on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi. In April 1802 Mississippi Governor William C. C. Claiborne was informed Mason and Wiley Harpe had attempted to board a boat of a Colonel Joshua Baker between Yazoo and Walnut Hills, which is now Vicksburg, Mississippi.