The Outlaw Years - (Pelican Pouch) by Robert Coates (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Outlaws who preyed on traffic along the Natchez Trace from Natchez to New Orleans from about 1880 until 1885, among other violent and lawless acts, planned to build an empire using the labor of stolen slaves. This is the 90th anniversary edition, original and unabridged.

From the Back Cover

The years just before 1880 until about 1885 are considered the "outlaw years." Lawlessness developed a law of its own and planned an empire.

Operating along the Natchez Trace, an overland trading and postal-rider route that in places was barely a trail, the outlaws preyed upon the traffic along this line. Their plans were laid in the dives under the bluffs of the river towns--Natchez and Vicksburg and as far south as New Orleans.

One gang of outlaws under John Murrell even threatened national stability for a time in his plot to steal slaves and organize insurrection, in order to disorganize the government and establish his own state.

Robert M. Coates has built his research on this little-known period of American history into a vividly told, unified story, which restores the outlaw to his prominent place in the frontier during a critical period in American history, without making outlaws into heroes.

About the Author

Interested in many subjects, Robert Myron Coates was a writer of fiction, nonfiction, history, art criticism, and short stories. He was born in 1897 in New Haven, Connecticut. Although he moved often as a child, he returned to his hometown to attend Yale University and graduated in 1919. Starting in 1927, he became a longtime columnist for the New Yorker, reviewing art until 1967. He also contibuted a variety of different texts--among which were more than a hundred short stories.

Mr. Coates wrote his first novel, The Eater of Darkness, after moving to Paris in 1921 and went on to create four more: Yesterday's Burdens, The Bitter Season, Wisteria Cottage, and The Farther Shore. He also wrote three collections of short stories, an autobiography, and three other nonfiction books, including The Outlaw Years, a vividly told story that restores the outlaw to his prominent place in the American frontier history without making him into a hero.

Mr. Coates' short stories were selected to appear in The Best American Short Stories in 1939, 1953, 1956, and 1959. He died of cancer in New York City in 1973.