[Indexed as: (Clark case), Flint, Timothy, “The Lost Child,” The Western Magazine and Review (Cincinnati, Oh.), May 1827]
PUBLIC feeling in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, has been prodigiously excited, during the past winter, by a mysterious and inexplicable catastrophe, which has excited in us a more harrowing interest, than any tale of fictitious distress. The following circumstances were gleaned from the journals, the accounts of different persons, who conversed with the parties, and are corrected from a long conversation with the sheriff at Natchez, who was obliged by his official duties to see much of the father and mother of the lost child, and to attend the trial of the person, arrested on suspicion of being concerned in stealing the child, and under whose care and inspection he fell, while in prison. That gentleman was obliging enough to communicate to the writer many details of great interest, which are necessarily precluded in the brevity of this narration.
Something more than a year ago, the only child of a Mr. Clark, of Hempsted county, territory of Arkansas, a fine boy of four years, disappeared from the scene of his morning play, near the house of his parents, and could no where be found. A little negro boy had been playing with him, and related, that two men on horseback came upon them, and that one of them alighted, took up the child, and carried him off. The parents were sober, respectable, and comparatively affluent. It is a country of dark forests, and immense prairies; and wolves, bears, and panthers, are common in the woods, and different tribes of Indians hunt in the vicinity. The affection of these parents for their only child was such, as would be naturally expected, and no effort of the imagination is necessary to conceive the anxiety and agony of their suspense. The honest hearted people about them, though not given to eloquent descriptions of their feelings in such cases, expressed a more unquestionable sympathy by turning out, en mass, and scouring the forests, prairies, and bayous, in every direction. The agonizing father followed a man, who preceded him a day or two, as was reported, carrying a child with him on horseback. After a pursuit of three hundred miles, he ascertained, in the bitterness of disappointment, that the child was not his. Every exertion, made to find the child, was to no purpose. The father rode in different directions thousands of miles. Advertisements, promises of ample reward, the sustained search of hundreds of people, were alike unavailing, to furnish a vestige of the child, or the slightest clue to stimulate to hope, and further exertion. After a search of months, the feelings of the parents, from the natural effect of time and disappointment, settled down to the calm of resignation and despair, and they mourned for their child, as dead. It will be easy to conceive, that it was not the tranquil mourning of parents, who have seen their child in its sinless innocence buried under the clods of the valley. The agony of suspense, the feverish efforts of imagination, excited to activity, by the indescribable tenderness of parental affection, and still fashioning new and more horrible catastrophies, especially at particular periods of the day, or the evening—from this they could only be delivered, by finding their child, or becoming acquainted with his doom. They had not even the sad satisfaction of the patriarch, finding the bloody clothes of their lost child, by which, suspense might be terminated in the conviction, that an ‘evil beast had devoured him.’
Some time last winter, the father received a letter, mailed at the Natchez post office, informing him, that if he would enclose fifty dollars in a letter to the writer, and would send the mother of the child, unaccompanied by any other person, to a certain house in Arkansas, which he designated, with two hundred dollars more, the writer engaged, that a certain woman in the designated house should deliver up the child to its mother. This letter was written in a gentlemanly hand, and signed ‘Thomas Tutty.’
The plan of the distracted parents was settled by advice of many respectable people in Louisiana, who entered warmly into their feelings. A letter stating all the circumstances of the case, was written to the post master at Natchez. Another, agreeable to all the ‘requirements of Tutty, and enclosing a bank note of fifty dollars, was addressed to him. In the letter to the post master, he was directed to watch for the man, who should call for the other letter, and have him apprehended. At the proper time, a man of gentlemanly appearance and manners, with the dialect of an Irishman, enquired for the letter. The post master by design made difficulty and delay in making, change, and detained the man, until an officer was procured, and he was then apprehended. He was found to be a man, who had kept a school for some time in the vicinity of Natchez, whose singular and cautious habits had already excited suspicion. He proved himself shrewd, sulky, and pertinaciously obstinate in his purpose, to confess nothing, and to throw: the whole burden of proof on the magistrate, before whom he was tried. He would not admit the identity of the hand writing of the letter with his own, and he denied, that his name was Thomas Tutty. He was charged with having fabricated the story, that he knew where the child was, and would cause it to be delivered to its parents, merely with the base purpose of extorting money from the affection of the parents. He continued to affirm, that he knew where the child was, and proved, that he was acquainted with the long way between Natchez and the residence of Mr. Clark, by answering with the utmost promptness and intelligence, questions about the numerous bayous, swamps, and passes, in the distance, put with a particularity, intended purposely to perplex him. On the suspicious fact of his having enquired for the letter, directed to Thomas Tutty, he was committed to prison. The parents, who repaired to Natchez, and various people, who took a deep interest in this strange, and terrible affair, exhausted their ingenuity to no purpose in efforts, to get something out of the prisoner, that might furnish a clue, by which to find the child. He told the father, that in a certain place, where it was supposed he would pass in search of the child, he would find the clothes, which the child wore when it disappeared, and bones having the appearance of those of a child of his years, that had been devoured by beasts. But he assured him, that the bones were not those of his child, but of an animal, placed there to produce that impression. Such an investigation was found to be the fact. Yet strange to tell, nothing could extort from the man the slightest information, that had any other tendency, than still more to excite the imagination, and harrow up the feelings of the parents.
Meanwhile a number of the respectable people of Natchez, stimulated by their intense interest, the warm blood of the south,, and their impatient fondness for summary justice, and thinking probably, that a little ‘hideing’ could do the Irishman no possible harm, and might operate upon his imperturbable closeness the benefit of a course of gymnastics, took him by night from the prison, and gave him a pretty severe drubbing, intimating between the intervals of discipline, that whenever he found the application transcending the bounds of health and pleasant feeling, any useful information, touching the child, would save them the trouble of carrying the operation any farther. The Irishman shrugged, and seemed for a long time disposed to persevere in his customary closeness, and receive all the benefits of the prescription. But at a point, where the thing was becoming evidently very unpleasant, he seemed to relent, and said, that if they would send to a certain house between forty and fifty miles from Natchez, in Mississippi, the people there would tell them, where they might find the child. The sheriff, who stated, that he had disapproved of these proceedings, and was, moreover, ill at the time, was no sooner apprized of this information, than he started at midnight for the designated house. When he arrived there, he found that the people were of good character, and perceived in a moment, that he was on a false scent, and that the prisoner had given this information only to get rid of correction.
The parents and the people, having exhausted every effort upon the pertinacious silence, and unshrinking obstinacy of the prisoner to no purpose, became fully impressed, that he had, indeed, been concerned in the stealing of the child, but that he no longer knew any thing about its present condition, and had been induced to what. he had done, merely to obtain money, by trifling with parental anxiety and affection. They consented to the enlargement of the prisoner on a nolle prossequi, on condition, that he should return with the parents, in the hope, that threats, or promised rewards, or a returning sense of justice and humanity, when he should arrive where the clothes of the child were laid, might yet induce him, to put them on a clue to finding him.
He was accordingly enlarged, and crossed the Mississippi in the same ferry boat with the parents, on their route towards home. It had been purposely intimated to him, that unless he would frankly communicate to Mr. Clark on the journey, all that he knew about (he child, as soon, as they should have travelled beyond the settlements, he would be put to death. Having advanced beyond the settlement of Concordia, he asked Mr. Clark, how long he intended to allow him to live? The reply was, if he persisted in withholding information about the child, perhaps thirty six hours. Mr. Clark carried a pistol in his belt. The Irishman rushed upon him, seized the pistol, and snapped it at his breast. Although he had primed arid loaded it himself. It fortunately missed fire. Failing in his purposes, the Irishman broke away and made for a bayou, to which they were approaching. He plunged in, disappeared, and was drowned, and thus extinguished the only visible hope of a clue to unravel this mysterious and tragical affair. This crime of fiends, child stealing, has been often threatened in that region, which furnishes -such facilities for perpetrating it, as a mean of diabolical revenge. An indescribable interest yet exists there in regard to the elucidation of this mystery. Parents, watch your children. Be careful of the presence of suspicious villains, who might in this way sting you to death. The happiest feeling, which a good mother can have on the earth, is, when she sees her children safely and sweetly sleeping in their own beds, under the united protection of innocence and parents, good angels and God.
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NOTE
This story of the Clark kidnapping published here was expanded by the author and published as a book for juvenile readers: The Lost Child, 1830, reprinted in 1846 as Little Henry: The Lost Child: A Narrative of Fact.
Timothy Flint, was the editor of the Western Journal, Cincinnati. The May 1827 issue was its first. It ceased publication three years later. “The Lost Child,” was unsigned in its first (periodical) appearance.
A Review Of The 1830 Book, The Lost Child:
