Cave-In-Rock, Illinois

We visited Cave-In-Rock, Illinois on September 13, 2018. This area attraction was a film location for John Wayne’s epic movie, “How The West Was Won”. For those of us living on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, the journey offers an opportunity we seldom get to experience. We crossed over the Ohio by the ferry at Crittenden County, Kentucky. The ferry is a joint venture between the two states and was free to all riders. One of the reasons we chose to visit now is because the ferry’s funding may not go past this month. Hopefully, the states will continue to fund its operation.

Crossing over the river on a ferry is quite a bit different than on a bridge. You go at a slower pace and you notice all kinds of debris floating in the water. When we were returning, our vehicle was the lead one and we saw how the pilot navigated the currents to align the ferry with the ramp on the Kentucky shore. The ferry doesn’t travel in a straight line but in an arc to compensate for the current. I must admit, I had to fight the urge to turn my steering wheel when he appeared to be drifting off course. 

Once we arrived on the Illinois side of the river, the state park was just a few minutes away. The population sign for Cave-In-Rock proudly informs visitors that 350 people live there. According to Wikipedia, the earliest known permanent white settlers arrived in 1816 and started building the town. However, it’s the history of the area before that settlement that makes it a tourist destination.

Beginning in the 1790’s, Cave-In-Rock became a refuge for frontier outlaws. An assortment of river pirates, highwaymen, robbers, counterfeiters, and killers used the cave into the 1800’s. The most notorious of them all was the “Harpe Brothers”. They were known and feared throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, and Illinois.

Micajah “Big” Harpe and his younger brother Wiley “Little” Harpe have the dubious distinction of being America’s first documented serial killers. Their murderous reign was thought to have started with a murder in Knoxville, Tennessee around 1799 before they entered into Kentucky that same year. Once they arrived in Kentucky, their murderous rampage escalated. Somewhere between thirty and forty murders across Kentucky and Southern Illinois were attributed to the pair.

Their brutality apparently knew no bounds and spared neither man, woman, or baby. Contemporary reports stated that they killed just for the sake of killing. One of their last murders would prove to be their undoing. In the summer of 1799, they murdered the wife and baby of a man named Stegall in a cabin a few miles from present-day Dixon, Kentucky. A posse, which included the husband of the victim, soon gave chase to the two outlaws. After days of evading their pursuers, Big Harpe was shot and captured in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky.

Mr. Stegall exacted “frontier justice” by using a knife to decapitate the dying outlaw. Big Harpe’s head was placed in a sack and carried to a crossroads a few miles north of present-day Dixon. There it was placed on display as a warning to other outlaws. The place became known as Harpe’s Head and today an historical marker marks the location.

Historical Marker
HWY 41-A
Approximately 3 Miles North of Dixon, Kentucky

In the park, we looked through the opening at the top of the cave and could imagine the many innocent victims that had been pushed from it to a painful death from the fall. We followed the steps down to the cave’s entrance at the river’s edge. The interior of the cave was only illuminated by the daylight which entered through its two openings. We ventured into the main chamber of the cave, but we stopped before reaching the inner chamber. The footing was getting too precarious in the dim light and we turned back out of safety concerns. And perhaps, we chose not to enter the chamber which had served as a barbaric killing floor some two centuries before.

View of Cave-In-Rock, Illinois Shore
From the Ferry

We ate lunch at Kaylor’s, the park’s small restaurant. The food was good and the staff was very nice. A small display of photographs included a couple of Fess Parker and Darby Hinton in costume for the Daniel Boone TV Series. The photographs were signed by Hinton, who played Boone’s son, Israel. He apparently attended Cave-In-Rock’s Founder’s Day in 2017. 

We recommend a trip to Cave-In-Rock. You will enjoy the ferry ride and the views of the river from the picnic shelters in the park. And, if you are surefooted and up for some serious exertion, follow the stairs down to the cave entrance and enter a portal that will transport you to a time when Kentucky was the frontier and justice was handed out with a knife.

Two books about Cave-In-Rock that we recommend are: Satan’s Ferryman and The Outlaws of Cave-In-Rock. The first book is out of print, but the second one is available in print or Kindle version.