THE PRATHERS AT GALEY’S LANDING
(Perry County, Indiana)

by Michael F. Rutherford
21 May 1989

In the United States the importance of the horse as the principal source of power for agriculture and personal transportation reached its highest level in the 19th century. In an age when the capital penalty for stealing a horse was often administered without the formality of trial by jury, Perry County, Indiana, also experienced this stage of the progress of civilization.
Weston A. Goodspeed in History of Perry County, Indiana, page 590, in 1885 wrote:
“At a very early day horse thieves were the plague of the settlement [around Poison Creek]. . . . There was an organized band in the vicinity of Rome, which was connected with others elsewhere, and all formed a system that was difficult either to discover or break. Finally a squad of incensed settlers visited a man living three or four miles above Rome, called him to the door and shot him dead, having become satisfied that he was prominently connected with the thieves. This act, together with threats to continue such course, broke up the gang in this vicinity.”
Here Goodspeed appears to be recording the local version of some tradition and oral history which is reinforced by parallels elsewhere. Summary: An organized ring of horse thieves moved horses stolen in Kentucky along the Rome-Vincennes Trail disposition in Missouri. Several regularly used holding corrals along the route have been speculatively identified: A gully near the juncture of the Rome-Vincennes and Yellow Banks Trails at present Selvin in Warrick County; the so-called Troxel’s Fort, a stone horseshoe-shaped enclosure located a short distance northeast of Huffman Mill, the Vincennes Trail crossing Anderson River just south of the mill; the so-called Penitentiary Rocks near Mt. Pleasant in Perry County. The 13-plus miles distance of the last-named from the Rome-Vincennes Trail raises some doubt as to its being a part of this network at the time.
Even approximate years for the operation of this early business venture cannot here by documented. However, Goodspeed’s connection of “a very early day” with the “vicinity of Rome” suggests that it was after October 1819 when the name of Rome first appeared. Since inland settlement in Perry County was rather sparse until after the late 1830s, that period would be a logical time for the ending of this large-scale traffic in stolen horses. It might have come into being between the end of the War of 1812 in 1815 and the establishment of Rome because the “Sinking Creek-Vincennes Trace” was in use from around 1800. (Sinking Creek in Kentucky is across the Ohio River from Rome.)