Colonel Plug

Colonel Plug (1700s? – 1820?), also known as Colonel Fluger and "The Last of the Boat-Wreckers", who existed sometime between the 1790s and 1820, was the legendary river pirate who ran a criminal gang on the Ohio River in a cypress swamp near the mouth of the Cache River. The outlaw camp of Colonel Plug was supposedly below the river pirate hideout of Cave-In-Rock and the U.S. Army post at Fort Massac, which monitored and policed frontier river traffic just above the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

French-Canadien voyageurs gave the Cache River its name, which meant "secret or hidden place". The first European settlers came into this swampy river country in 1803. The waterlogged river soil was too wet for farming, and the cypress swamps were populated with mosquitoes and venomous snakes. Many of the settlers along the Cache became sick and died of malaria. Because the Cache River was such an undesirable and nearly uninhabitable place, the poor living conditions in the region were ideal for concealing the illicit activities of river piracy.

Tales of Colonel Plug may have been based on the real life, Cave-In-Rock river pirate, Samuel Mason or by his alias, "Bully Wilson". the Colonel's usual tactics were to sneak aboard or have one of his river pirates, secretly, go into the hull of a boat, dig out the caulking between the floor planks and drill holes, with an auger, causing the boat to sink and be easily attacked. The boat and the cargo would later, be sold, down the Mississippi River, in New Orleans and other river settlements. He eventually drowned, from being unable to escape and trapped inside a rapidly sinking boat.

Little is known about Colonel Plug, if he was actually a real person or a just a fictional river pirate character, except, from the folklorish descriptions provided in 1830 by Timothy Flint's "Col. Plug, the last of the Boat-wreckers," in the Cincinnati, Ohio newspaper, The Western Monthly Review and "The Boat-Wreckers—Or Banditti of the West," in the Rochester, New York newspaper, Daily Advertiser, January 29, 1830.

According to Timothy Flint, Colonel Plug was described as:

"But being a youth of broad red cheeks, muscle and impudence, and withal, abundantly stored with small talk, from eighteen to twenty-one he was a decided favorite with the fair, and had had various love affairs, being reputed remarkably slippery in regard to the grace of perseverance. At twenty four he had mounted epaulettes, was a militia colonel, had a portentous red nose, and was in bad odour with all honest people."

Colonel Plug had a wife, known as "Pluggy", who always cheated on him. He had a partner and co-leader, of the river pirate gang, named "Nine-Eyes", who may have been an escaped slave, manumitted former slave, or free-born negro.

Colonel Plug claimed to have been a Yankee, native from Rockingham County, New Hampshire and was a former colonel in the New Hampshire Militia. Colonel Fluger may have been of German ancestry, as Fluger is a German surname. No historical evidence exists to justify this military claim, as no Fluger, Flueger, or Pflueger surnames, as many spelling variations exist, can be found in the New Hampshire U.S. census records or the Rockingham County military muster rolls.

After the arrival of the first steamboat, The New Orleans, on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, in 1811, the year of the cataclysmic New Madrid earthquake, river piracy, began to decline as a criminal activity, primarily because these new boats were faster and harder to ambush and would not have had to stop for rest, supplies, or shelter, from a storm. Also, keelboat crews, eventually, would travel together, like naval flotillas, with large groups, of heavily armed men, in affect small armies, and exterminate the criminal element, they found on the rivers.