Green - The Kentucky Cannibal: The True Story of an Outlaw, Murderer and Man-Eater

THE KENTUCKY CANNIBAL

The True Story of AN OUTLAW, MURDERER AND MAN-EATER

RYAN GREEN

Copyright Ryan Green 2020. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews.

Disclaimer

This book is about real people committing real crimes. The story has been constructed by facts but some of the scenes, dialogue and characters have been fictionalised.

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This book is written in British English except where fidelity to other languages or accents are appropriate. Some words and phrases may differ from US English.

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Dutch Fred was a curiosity of a man, containing within himself all of the things that usually marked a villain and a hero out in the Old West. By day, he was a minerwell-respected and honest to a fault. The other men who worked alongside him in the hills around Florence deferred to him, trusting his keen mind and his reliable gut to see them through all the troubles that gold mining dug up. Theyd called him Chief as a joke, at first, but before long, the irony trickled away, and the name stuck. Whilst even the best of miners could get rowdy when they came down into town to spend their dust, he kept his composure well enough that he was the one the sheriff called on to help settle brawling partners down. Yet, he was not all saint and no sinner. He drank just as much as any other man to come fresh from the mines, and he gambled a good deal more than most. Worse yet, for his reputation among the townsfolk, he won far more often than he lost, no matter how much whiskey he was plied with.

A man like that, standing taller than those around him, was sure to attract attention. With attention, came the petty rivalries and fury of less successful men who couldn't hold their whiskey or their faro cards as well as Dutch Fred.

Oregon of the 1860s was a place for hard menmen of ego, who couldnt be put off with a clap on the shoulder or a smile. Every loss was an affront to those proud men, and that affront needed to be answered with blood. Many a night, Dutch found himself out in the street with his fists raised up against someone whod pushed hard enough against his good temperament that even he felt the need to respond in kind, which was when his detractors ran directly into their next problem. The man fought like a modern Hercules. Most brawls ended with his opponent in the horses trough and him without a hair out of place on his head. He could box and wrestle like hed been born in the canvas ring, and a lifetime of hard labour in the Gold Rush had made him as strong as an ox. The men who hated him couldnt find their vengeance through straightforward means. In the eyes of the community, might made right, so Dutch Fred was surely the righteous one in every one of his many arguments. Violence was the law of the land, and violence had found every one of Freds enemies to be wanting.

Good church-going folk might have turned their eyes away when he passed them in the street, but the law of man was thin on the ground out here, and the law of God demanded that any man that turned the other cheek to be struck again was even thinner. The fact of the matter was, he was as personable as anyone could have hoped for in a miner, and there were a great many places in the West where a man like that could bully a whole town into submission instead of just stepping in and out of the saloon for a late-night brawl with folks that were already entirely undesirable. He wasnt quite a folk hero, but he wasnt the kind of vagabond bandit that he could so easily have been if his worse nature had ruled him.

In the dark of night, when they were trying to justify their failure to themselves, they told themselves that he kept his hold over the hearts and minds of Florence by virtue of his softness. A real man would fight to kill. A real man would assert his will instead of letting life roll on without interruption. Dutch Fred was soft. His back might have been straight, his fists might have been bloody, but on the inside where it mattered, the man lacked the iron that they felt sure they all possessed, however rusted it might be.

Boone Helm wasnt so soft. He didnt let his worse nature rule him by choice; he simply didnt have a better nature to appeal to. By the time he came riding into Florence, he already had a reputation so foul that grown men flinched at his name, and his time in town wasnt going to be making him smell any sweeter. He hadnt made it as far as the saloon when he was set upon by the worst men of Florence and hauled off into seclusion in one of the outlying ranches, where he could be plied with whiskey and lies far from the sight of anyone who might have noticed who he was associating with.

Violence is the law of the land. Might makes right. All these unspoken rules of the frontier made a man like Boone into a valuable commodity. It wasnt the first time his penchant for killing had found him work, and hed even been tempted many a time to go and sign up with the Confederate Army and make his hobby into an honest living. But even the Grey Coats had a limit to the extravagances theyd accept in their troops, and he was so far over that horizon it was a wonder he hadnt come all the way around to it again. A bit of looting and rape in the line of duty was tolerable, but they had no love for career criminals, bandits, and outlaws, treating them like the plague on the land that they were. As outlaws were to normal men, so was Boone Helm to the outlaws.

Honour and camaraderie still meant something to men living outside the law, probably more than they meant to civilised men living safely within the confines of society, but whatever limits they might have placed on themselves to remain human and whole, Boone had breezed right by them in pursuit of his goals. It made him the perfect tool for what the wicked men of Florence had planned, but it also made him volatilea double-edged sword as likely to come back and cut the one trying to swing him at a foe.

As it turned out, those angry men whod lost face to Dutch one time too many were in luck. Boone took kindly to being feted by the worst degenerates of the town, knocking back whiskey and chattering away about his adventures through the years to a somewhat more sober and horrified crowd. He spoke of things too horrible to even contemplate with the kind of levity another man might use to talk about a haircut. Other people in his stories were little more than gristle that hed chewed up and spat out. The fake smiles never slipped, but when his back was turned, there were a few panicked looks between the conspirators. In the abstract, this had sounded like a great plan, but now that they were trapped in a confined space with the man and the smell of the man, he seemed less and less like a good bet.

When Dutch Fred came into the conversation, it was just as Boone had finished rattling through a list of complaints about the few folks who'd crossed him yet were still walking the Earth more or less intact. They mentioned their gripes with him, playing them down, and talked at length about the kind of man that he wassoft-bellied but big enough to have the run of a little town like this. They planted the seed of murder in Boones ear. If a man were to kill Dutch Fred, hed likely have the run of the town until the law came through not just some nowhere on the frontier, but a rich mining town worth more than its weight in gold dust, with whores and liquor to match. Boone mulled this over as he chewed his tobacco and sipped his whiskey, buying none of their stories but considering his options all the same. 'Man like that could prove to be a whole mess of trouble. Seems like if this town is as rich as y'all are telling me, thered be at least one right-minded man putting up money to see that Dutchman put to dirt.