A Counterfeiter's Paradise (21 page)

Six days later, William Findlay issued a reward for Lewis’s arrest. This was the bandit’s third jailbreak since the governor’s pardon, and with the election in October almost four months away, the outlaw had once again made Findlay look weak and foolish. He didn’t need more bad press: his tenure had been a disaster. His handling of Lewis reflected his governing style: he moved slowly, reacting to events rather than trying to influence them, and rarely took a strong stand. When the Panic hit in 1819, demanding forceful leadership from Harrisburg, Findlay met the greatest challenge of his career with a characteristically feeble response.

Findlay wasn’t stupid and his ascent hadn’t been easy. The son of a
farmer, he descended from Scotch-Irish settlers, an ethnic group that had historically been poorer and less powerful than Pennsylvania’s other two blocs, the Germans and the Quakers. Findlay drew his support from the same demographic as Lewis did: the Scotch-Irish farmers, laborers, and tradesmen who dominated the Allegheny and western counties. With their help, Findlay became the state’s first Scotch-Irish governor. But anyone who expected his election to inaugurate a new era would be sorely disappointed. Findlay succeeded because he had thoroughly absorbed Pennsylvania’s corrupt politics. The state constitution gave the governor the power to appoint almost every officer in the state, from his cabinet in Harrisburg all the way down to positions at the county level. With so many spoils to divide up, Findlay had little time for actual governing. He faced a difficult task: in addition to keeping his opponents at bay, he had to prevent his friends from becoming enemies if they didn’t get the jobs they wanted. Although Findlay may have looked sluggish and impotent, he was actually in a frenzy of activity: dispensing favors, building alliances—doing everything except managing the state’s affairs. Frustrated office-seekers turned against him and loudly accused him of graft. As Pennsylvania sank deeper into economic despair, its legislature spent three months wrangling over an ultimately unsuccessful effort to impeach Findlay, initiated by people angered by their exclusion from his patronage.

As Findlay’s opponents scrambled for new ways to disgrace him, Lewis gave them just what they needed. Well-known throughout Pennsylvania for a crime spree made possible by Findlay’s pardon, he regularly flouted the governor’s authority. Even better, people read about Lewis in newspapers, and newspapers in those days were intensely partisan. Almost all editors were loyal to a particular party; their role wasn’t to report the news impartially but to praise or condemn a certain candidate or cause. In an era when politics ruled journalism, it was only a matter of time before an anti-Findlay editor began using his coverage of Lewis for political ends. He could run an absorbing account of the robber’s latest exploits that
doubled as a polemic against Findlay’s administration, thus entertaining and indoctrinating his readers at the same time.

John McFarland, the hotheaded Scotch-Irish editor of the -
Carlisle
Republican
, epitomized the combative newspapermen of his day. In the early nineteenth century, journalists abused public figures and rival newspapers with a ferocity that by today’s standards would be considered defamatory. Their fights often spilled off the printed page and into the street. A competing publisher once brought charges against McFarland for whacking him with a cowhide, slashing him from “neck to heel.” Similar skirmishes happened all the time: anyone brave enough to put his words into print had to be prepared to give or take a beating when the opportunity arose.

Like many of the governor’s enemies, McFarland had once been a Findlay supporter but, months before the election in 1817, switched sides. The reasons for McFarland’s apostasy were debated in the partisan press. One camp said the editor decided to support the governor’s opponent in the upcoming race, and in retaliation, Findlay’s people bought the paper where McFarland worked and forced him out. Another claimed that McFarland blamed Findlay when he didn’t get appointed county treasurer; if the story was true, it wouldn’t be the first time a personal grudge led to a political rivalry. By 1820, McFarland was publishing the -
Carlisle Republican
, a four-page weekly that printed advertisements placed by local merchants, the discount rates for different banknotes, and broadsides against the incumbent in Harrisburg.

McFarland hammered Findlay relentlessly about Lewis, never missing an opportunity to remind his readers of the governor’s negligence in freeing the convict from the Walnut Street Jail. “We have fallen indeed on evil times when the pardoning power of the Executive is thus ignorantly and improperly prostituted to the dangerous purpose of liberating infamous cut-throats, robbers, and counterfeiters, for the sake of acquiring a short-lived popularity, or obtaining the reputation of a false humanity,”
read one typical harangue. He alleged that Findlay visited Lewis in the Chambersburg jail to pay “his respects to this noted character”—a claim contested by other newspapers—and when Lewis escaped along with the other inmates, caustically noted that the jailbreak saved the governor “the trouble of signing their pardons.” He even insinuated that Findlay had conducted secret dealings with the robber and aided his flight from Chambersburg. Hardly a week went by without another bulletin from the
Carlisle Republican
, its editorial voice amplified by the liberal use of italics and exclamation marks. The most imaginative of McFarland’s attacks on Findlay was a poem written from Lewis’s perspective entitled “Farewell to Chambersburg.” In its final stanza, Lewis likens the governor to the jail’s flimsy “nail-rod” locks that enabled his getaway:

LEWIS WAS ONLY TWENTY MILES
away from McFarland’s offices when those verses appeared in newsprint. He was hiding near Doubling Gap, a mountain pass north of Carlisle where a ridge of the Alleghenies bends back on itself like a hairpin. Indians and early settlers used it to travel between Pennsylvania’s rugged central regions and the Cumberland Valley, the fertile stretch of land that by Lewis’s time included Harrisburg, Carlisle, and Chambersburg. Later generations knew the Gap from old stories of Indian massacres that happened nearby and for its sulfur springs, which spouted water that smelled vile but was supposed to have a curative effect on anyone brave enough to bathe in it.

By this point Lewis had become an expert at wilderness living, and his camp at Doubling Gap reflected his years of experience. On a slope not
far from the springs, mossy slabs of stone had been thrust against a rock to form an artificial cave large enough for four or five people. Inside were Lewis and the other prisoners from Chambersburg, as well as Connelly, who had joined the fugitives soon after their escape. They lived comfortably and ate well. What they couldn’t steal they obtained from the Gap’s residents, who, whether out of love or fear, gave the outlaws whatever they wanted—a shoemaker even made Connelly a new pair of shoes. A local named Robert, whose tavern stood on the opposite side of the road that passed through the Gap, regularly hiked to their hideout to bring provisions and the latest news from town. Thirty-three years later, Robert Moffitt, an old-timer living near the Gap, claimed to be this man. He reminisced fondly about his time with the bandits:

If Robert had looked out his window on the night of June 15, 1820, he might have made out a figure working his way downhill from Lewis’s cave in the darkness. Caesar Rodney, a man of mixed race whom newspapers referred to as the “yellow fellow,” had broken out of jail with Lewis and accompanied him to Doubling Gap. But he soon began missing his wife—dancing with the mountain ladies apparently didn’t help—and decided to return home to Bedford. While Lewis and the others slept, he crept out of the camp and began the long, difficult journey west. Seventy-five
miles and several Allegheny ranges later, Rodney arrived in town and was promptly arrested. He confessed everything, describing Lewis’s retreat and even offering to lead the authorities there. By the time they reached the Gap, however, the criminals had cleared out: “The cage was found but the birds were flown,” announced the
Franklin Repository
from Chambersburg. All that remained were “symptoms of good living” found scattered around the cave, the
Repository
said, presumably leftovers from their last round of merrymaking. The locals didn’t seem eager to cooperate. “We have been told that
suspicion
rests upon several of the inhabitants in the neighbourhood,” reported the
American Volunteer
.

The few weeks Lewis spent carousing at Doubling Gap would be tranquil compared with what came next. Rather than retiring to another refuge deeper in the Alleghenies, he descended into the Cumberland Valley and began plundering the countryside at a feverish pace. Never before had he committed so many robberies in such a short period of time. Joined by Connelly and an escapee from the Chambersburg jail named Felix McGuire, Lewis raided homes, looted stores, and ransacked springhouses—storerooms that farmers used to refrigerate food by funneling running water up from the ground and into troughs that cooled the building’s interior. As the summer weather set in, the criminals ate chilled meat and butter and drank cold milk to keep up their strength between burglaries.

Lewis’s newly aggressive approach didn’t suit his Robin Hood repu-tation. He wasn’t helping the needy or punishing the greedy; he was pil-laging everyday people’s property. To the Pennsylvanians who had their farms and households ransacked by armed men, the tall, blond bandit lead-ing the pack couldn’t have seemed further from the romantic folk hero of legend. Of course, Lewis’s depredations delighted the anti-Findlay crowd. The worse he behaved, the stronger their position. “The country is kept in continual alarm for which the citizens have to thank the humanity of William Findlay in letting loose so many hardened malefactors, to prey on society,” declared the anti-Findlay
Harrisburg Chronicle
. In the
Carlisle
Republican
, McFarland noted that “the daily accounts of [Lewis’s] nightly adventures” came mostly from the Cumberland Valley, near Harrisburg. The robber stayed close to the state capital, McFarland proposed, because there was a “remarkable connection” between him and Findlay—possibly a secret partnership, although the editor didn’t try to explain why the governor would collude with someone who continued to be such an embarrassment to his administration.

As Lewis stepped up his attacks, people became increasingly vigilant for any sign of the robber. In late June, when the smell of something burning wafted down the banks of the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, nearby residents left their homes to investigate. It came from an area close to the confluence of the Susquehanna and Bald Eagle Creek, a waterway that drained the valley where Lewis had been born. As the locals approached, they found the source of the smell. On a summer day in a remote corner of the Alleghenies, miles from the nearest marketplace, a pile of expensive merchandise was on fire. And near this strange sight stood a suspicious-looking man who, once captured and committed to jail, identified himself as Felix McGuire, one of Lewis’s cronies.

Lewis, Connelly, and McGuire had robbed $1,200 worth of goods a few days before from a wagon that broke down in the mountains south of Bellefonte. The men loaded the loot into a stolen canoe and paddled up Bald Eagle Creek but, once they reached the Susquehanna, decided to ditch the boat and continue overland. They had too much to carry, however, and needed to lighten their load. The bonfire they built, while practical from the fugitives’ point of view, would undoubtedly be a grotesque spectacle to the Alleghenies’ impoverished inhabitants, a savage act equivalent to destroying money or food at a time when people didn’t have nearly enough of either.

The cost of leaving Lewis at large had become unacceptably high. In the midst of a depression, the citizens of the counties where Lewis operated couldn’t afford to lose whatever assets they had left to a desperado who kept ravaging their communities. So they resolved to do something
about it. On June 26, the day before the flaming merchandise was discovered, a posse assembled at Bellefonte. The townsfolk knew Lewis long before he made headlines in Bedford and Chambersburg; seven years earlier, they had accused Philander Noble of spying for the British, and while they never managed to convict him, they were determined to put a stop to his protégé. The group numbered around twelve and included a wide range of characters: a co-owner of the wagon whose cargo Lewis had incinerated, a one-armed war veteran, the county coroner, and, most likely, the county sheriff. The men rode northwest from their hometown toward a place past the Alleghenies that the
Bellefonte Patriot
called “a wild, unfrequented part of the world, inhabited only by beasts of prey.”

Lewis and Connelly were well armed, skilled at avoiding arrest, and seasoned in wilderness survival. Capturing them would be difficult anywhere. In this case, the landscape presented its own challenges. The
Pa-triot
may have been a little dramatic in its description, but it was essentially accurate: the area above Bellefonte, north of the Alleghenies, was still mostly wilderness. Topographically the two regions looked completely different. The Alleghenies made broad strokes across central Pennsylvania; along their long, curved ridges were well-watered valleys that served as excellent sites for towns like Bellefonte and Bedford. Farther up, the terrain stayed mountainous but became more jagged. From above it resembled the veined surface of a leaf: rivers forked endlessly into branches, creeks, and streams, cutting ravines that broke up the land into smaller, saw-toothed pieces. Most of the area’s inhabitants lived along these waterways, which in many places were obstructed by shoals and stray chunks of wood that fell from the dense pine forests lining the shore, making it harder for settlers to penetrate too deeply into the backcountry.