EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2013.
(WARNING: This chapter seeks to take our local legend from off of the Horror/Adventure shelf and move it to History/Non-Fiction by attempting to place Horse Thief Jack into an actual time and location in Richland County. If you have an affectionate place in your memory where you would like Jack to remain inviolately mythical, you should probably just skip this part.)
Summer Camp
If the Legend of Horse Thief Jack is one you remember from childhood, cultural anthropologists and American folklorists would, most likely, pinpoint you in the time and space of Richland County, Ohio, any time after 1933, and in the environs of a Friendly House summer camp.
I heard the story at Hidden Hollow in the 1960s sitting around a campfire with 100 other kids, all of us fascinated, and in no small bit unnerved. A corroboration of the facts of the tale took place the following evening when we were led through the woods, in the dark, past a cemetery, to a small stony grotto. A stream flowed over a mossy, sandstone waterfall that was, allegedly, all that remained of the cave where Jack died.
To a 9-year-old, the cold rock alone was indisputable evidence. No one asked, Where is the cave? We had all heard the story and knew that it was missing because it had been blown to smithereens. Of course none of us were particularly versed in the arts of geology enough to wonder where the pieces went.
Revisiting the scene 10 years later as a teenager, the proof was considerably less convincing. Instead, what it seemed to me at that time was that, as gullible kids, we had been duped. The “cave,” which purported to be Jack’s dynamited tomb, is a simple crack in the bedrock, creased with enough overhang and deep enough to make a splash when the creek falls.
I therefore dismissed the entire tale as a fabrication. Good campfire story, but poor history, and clearly not substantiated in fact.
The intervening years brought opportunities now and then to revisit the tale as I came across accounts of horse thieves and robbers and highwaymen documented in our county histories; all of the stories intriguing, and evoking that nostalgic wonder of reasonable doubt, but never enough to override the powerful fact of the missing cave.
The Stuff of Legends
County histories bear out that in the 1820s and 30s there actually was a band of ‘bringands, counterfeiters and horse thieves’ at large in our county and wreaking havoc in surrounding counties. They operated out of the area in the forks of the Mohican back when Perrysville was still part of Richland County, and their depredations are recorded throughout a 100-mile radius from that epicenter.
As a point of fact, however, their story actually began far east of here — decades earlier — and came to its dramatic conclusion several states west of here — a couple of decades afterward. In the annals of Western lore they are referenced as the Driscoll-Brody Gang, though when they were making their mark here in our neighborhood their names are found in township records spelled Driskill and Brodie.
The families were noted troublemakers clear back through Revolutionary War times when they were chased out of the eastern colonies into the wilds of Western Pennsylvania for treasonous crimes against the struggling young United States. After the war, their crimes resumed in eastern Ohio — and a Driskill turns up in the court dockets of 1802 in Columbiana County for stealing horses.
During the War of 1812, two of them were caught ripping off oxen from the U.S. militia army that passed through Mansfield on its way to hunt Tecumseh. By 1816, Richland County ledgers document several Driskill brothers in residence. Years later, when one of them was captured in Illinois, he spilled a lot of details about the gang in order to bargain for his life, and his testimony laid out a fairly organized system of crime where horses stolen from our area were taken to Indiana and Missouri to be sold.
County histories from here to Iowa have stories about their own encounters with this same band of horse thieves, and many local museums have a local hero who stood up to them, or a noose as evidence that one of the gang stopped in their town. Of all the stories my favorite is the judge in Winnebago County, Illinois, who knew that civil authorities were powerless against the wily and ruthless border villains, so he advised local vigilantes to capture individual gang members at home, strip them to the waist and lash them with a blacksnake. (Local protocol dictated 36 lashes for the first offense, 60 for the second.)
A Long Trail of Legends
Different batches of the gang wound up their careers in various places of the Midwest through any number of dramatic, violent, or vigilante-justice storybook endings. The best of them all, the one that sounds like the perfect ending for a black-and-white Western movie, happened in Ogle County, Illinois when a band of Regulators broke into the jail and dragged John Driscoll from his cell with a rope around his neck.
A crowd of more than 500 sentenced him and his son William to hang, but granted them mercy when the Driscolls politely asked to be shot instead. The 111 men with rifles divided into two groups, and shot Will with 55 bullets, and John with 56.
The rest of the justice dispensed in Ogle County happened a couple days later when the 111 men were tried for murder … but the judge, jury and accused were all the same people so everyone went home unreprimanded. A granite boulder still marks the spot today along the banks of Grove Creek that says “John and Will Driskill executed here, June 29, 1841.”
While the Driskill branch of the gang ended up in Illinois, the Brody clan found their way to Iowa to pursue their lives of crime. Benton County, Iowa, in its 1878 History was quick to credit Richland County, Ohio as the source and origin of their scourge. But they were only one of many accounts, and a lot of the stories sound very much like ours.
The Local Vigilantes
Like many other communities, we had a coalition of irate farmers who were fed up with being powerless to act against clearly identified thieves who were openly defiant of the law. In Richland County, a vigilance committee called the Black Cane Company was formed to protect common folk.
This secret network of spies were identified to each other by the canes that they carried through town made of black haw limbs charred to black. In time, of course, as the battle waged throughout the county year after year between the rocks versus the hard places, the common folk came to wonder who was going to protect them from the Black Cane Company.
Years later when they were all old men, there wasn’t a landowner around who didn’t want to be identified in the county history as a member of that secret society.
In the old books there are names, modestly named, and many of them are still to be found today on the signs of township roads that lead past the sites where these farmers had their homesteads. One of the names was Coulter, and among his descendants was a Mansfield author named Louis Bromfield, who knew enough of these legends to write them into a couple of his novels in the 1930s and 40s.
None of Bromfield’s stories were specifically about Horse Thief Jack, however, so we are still left wondering where the legend originated. Or, perhaps, the better question might be: At what point does history and memory become legend and folklore?
TO CONTINUED IN PART IV
This is Part 3 of a 4-part series about the Legend of Horse Thief Jack—A Richland County ghost story.
Parts 1 & 2 tell the story itself, and Parts 3 & 4 are an exploration to determine how the story originated, and what possible basis the legend may have in documented local history.
