Harpe Brothers
Micajah "Big" Harpe (1768? – August 1799) and Wiley "Little" Harpe (1770? – January 1804), pronounced (Mick-ah-zhah) and (Why-lee), were murderers, highwaymen, and river pirates, who operated in Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Mississippi in the late 18th century. Their crimes appear to have been motivated more by blood lust than financial gain and many historians have called them the America's first true "serial killers". The Harpes are said to have been brothers (though some sources say cousins), born in Orange County, North Carolina to Scottish parents. Their father or their uncles, were allegedly of Tory allegiance, who fought on the British side during the Revolutionary War. Big Harpe is known to have had two wives, sisters Susan and Betsey Roberts. Little Harpe married Sally Rice, daughter of a Baptist minister.
Read more about Harpe Brothers: Disputed Claims of Early Lives and Involvement in Revolutionary War and Indian Wars, Atrocities, Deaths, Harpe Women, Descendants, Appearances in Literature, Stage, Television, and Film
Famous quotes containing the words harpe and/or brothers:
“We always weaken whatever we exaggerate.”
—Jean-François De La Harpe (1739–1803)
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)