THE HORRIBLE EFFECTS OF INTEMPERANCE    (Cabarrus)
Fayetteville Observer, Wednesday, July 25, 1838

Myrtle Bridges   November 21, 2009

The horrible effects of intemperance were never portrayed in more appalling colors than in the subjoined 
account of a recent murder in Pope County, Arkansas:

Brown, according to the testimony of his children, had been threatening his wife on the morning of the murder 
(the 15th instant) and pointing his rifle at her; but she evaded him, by sheltering herself behind a tree. He 
finally told her not to make a fool of herself that he did not intend to injure her. She, confiding in his word, 
left her shelter and set down under the shade of a tree about 30 feet in the rear of the house and proceeded with 
her sewing. In a few minutes she heard a noise in the house, and looked in that direction just in time to see the 
muzzle of a rifle aimed at her through the logs, and before she could rise, she received the contents of it (two 
balls) between her breasts. She ran fifteen or twenty feet, when she fell and died. The children immediately fled, 
the eldest taking the youngest on his back, and alarmed the neighbors at Dardanelle, about three miles from the 
house, who repaired to the scene of this dreadful tragedy. When they arrived there, the brutal murderer had laid 
his victim on the bed, and washed the blood from her hands and face, and then drank himself stupidly drunk, and 
laid down at her feet, with two loaded rifles at his side, and fallen into a senseless slumber.

His weapons were secured and him self seized and bound. An inquest was then held on the body of the unfortunate 
woman, and a verdict of willful murder returned by the coroner's jury. The body of the deceased was buried in the 
grave yard at Dardanelle, attended by a large concourse of the inhabitants of the surrounding country. The murderer 
himself followed the corpse, manacled and guarded; and so hardened did her appear that when the coffin was opened at 
the grave, and he took a last look at the work of his hands, amid the screams of his bereaved children, he did not 
even shed a tear in testimony of remorse for his villainy.

Our correspondents do not state any probable cause of offence given by the wife to provoke her murder. It was probably 
caused by a too liberal use of whiskey, the curse of the country.

Brown and his wife were both from the neighborhood of Concord, North Carolina, and were the father and mother of five 
children, the eldest 14 and the youngest 2 years old, and she was pregnant at the time of the murder.

Back to Recent Additions to Richmond
Return to Index to Newspapers
Return to Richmond Conty Home Page


©Copyright 2009 by Myrtle N. Bridges