Somewhere along the way, Mainers have mostly forgotten an ancient scourge of travel: the dangerous criminals who once lurked along the way.

These days, they are remembered only dimly as highwaymen, bandits or brigands who serve as stock characters in old movies, bad television and shoddy novels.

It wasn’t always that way.

During the 1800s, hitting the road in the Pine Tree State posed at least a little risk of encounters with men intent on theft – or worse.

A magazine named Forest and Stream, concerned mostly with hunting and fishing, griped in 1887 that “certain portions of the state of Maine are cursed by a lot of most unmitigated ruffians, who do not hesitate to set at defiance the law and the officers of the law.”

“These men are prepared to commit murder and arson and a hundred minor crimes in the furtherance of their illegal pursuits,” the magazine said. “They seem to think that the community exists for them alone.”

Forest and Stream said Maine had more than its share of “ruffians and scoundrels, murderers and incendiaries,” in part because officials had done too little to make the state safe.

JUST ONE DAY

Consider, for instance, Monday, Oct. 5, 1896.

That evening, Henry Bowley, a Union Street resident in Auburn, was plodding home at dusk with his cart from a business trip to Greene when suddenly, while passing through a stretch of woods, his horse “threw up his head” and began running, as The Portland Daily Press reported.

“Then a man grabbed the horse by the bit while a second man got hold” of the carriage, the paper said.

Bowley, no slouch, struck the second man with his whip.

“Upon this, the highwayman discharged a revolver,” the account said. Bowley told a reporter that “he heard the bullet as it went by him.”

Then he struck his horse with two or three sharp cuts with the whip, it said, and the animal broke away.

That same evening, Dr. W.S. Norcross of Lewiston, who ran a sanitorium in Poland, was traveling along a remote road from Farmington to New Portland to visit a cancer patient.

As Norcross approached Pratt Corner in New Vineyard, the Press reported, he noticed a buggy in the road ahead.

“As he came along, driving smartly, two men stepped out, called for him to stop and attempted to seize the horse by the bridle,” the paper said.

The doctor struck his horse with a whip and sprang away from the strangers.

“The highwaymen fired three shots at him as he left, some of which whistled dangerously near the doctor’s head,” the paper reported.

The Lewiston Daily Sun said authorities had “no clue” who the highwaymen were.

ACTUAL HIGHWAY ROBBERY

At least Norcross and Bowley got off with only a fright.

In Patten in 1884, a peddler named William Hunt was attacked along the road by four highwaymen, the Kennebec Journal reported. They robbed him of at least $400, it said, and they also shot and killed his horse.

In 1885, not far from Fryeburg, “several masked men sprang from an ambush” in a patch of woods to stop a carriage coming from nearby Glen Station in New Hampshire. One grabbed the horses while another pointed a revolver at a family, the Lewiston Evening Journal reported.

The bandits collected $300 in cash, gold watches and some jewelry before slipping away.

They tried to rob the regular stagecoach, too, but its driver remained “cool as a cucumber” and “putting on the lash” to his horses, managed to flee the scene.

In the fall of 1880, Moses French of Norway was moseying along in his carriage in Waterford when highwaymen waylaid him.

News accounts said the men threw him from his carriage. One plunged a bag over French’s head while another rifled his pockets.

The bandits made off with $80, the reports said.

ROBBED OF HIS SAVINGS

In 1882, the Boston Weekly Globe told the story of Fred Ange of Milo, robbed of $480 while traveling the Levant road to Bangor. He’d only recently returned from a foray to the West and was taking home his savings from the journey.

Just above Six-Mile Falls in Glenburn, the Globe reported, Ange observed “a tall dark man with a moustache in the road just ahead” in a stretch surrounded by trees.

Approaching Ange, the man asked, “Say, captain, can you give us change for a $10 bill?”

Ange told him he couldn’t help.

Then another man, “red-faced and thickset,” emerged from the woods with a revolver in his hand.

“Give us what you have then,” the robber said.

“I shan’t do that,” Ange responded.

At that moment, the tall man grabbed the horse by its bit rein while his armed companion took aim and fired two shots at Ange.

One shattered his left jaw. The other hit his left pinkie finger.

The highwayman kept firing.

But it turned out that Ange, too, was armed and began shooting back. Several shots rang out on each side, but no other bullets hit home.

Ange, though, decided to give up the fight. He jumped down from his buggy and handed over his pocketbook, which contained $480.

The highwaymen snatched it and disappeared into the trees.

Ange raced on to Bangor to find a surgeon to dress his wounds.

‘BUB BEAN KILLED’

In July 1885, the Lewiston Evening Journal carried a headline noting “The End of Maine’s Most Notorious Highwayman,” a fellow named Bub Bean who typically lurked in the lawless woods near the Canadian border.

The paper said that French Canadians traveling to Maine along the Moose River ran into ruffians that robbed them after throwing stones and firing shots.

The story said Bean told one group to hand over any liquor in their possession. They told him they had none. Bean then ordered them to hand over their belongings.

A Frenchman named Roderick reached down in his cart and grabbed an axe they typically used to make kindling and quickly hurled it at Bean, the Journal said.

“It struck the desperado in the head,” the paper said, splitting his skull and killing him instantly.

“The French Canadians of Farmington rejoice exceedingly in the death of Bean,” it continued, “and think the disreputable gang of which he was the head is forever broken up.”

The Journal, though, got the story wrong.

The Portland Advertiser said it suspected “more rum than blood was spilled in the recent alleged tragedy at the Forks of the Kennebec.”

“There is no report of a funeral and nobody seems to be anxious to claim a corpse,” the Rockland Gazette noted.

A writer for the Somerset Reporter soon caught up with Bean in Bingham, where the colorful character insisted the press had been “particularly severe” toward him. Bean said he was on good terms with the whole world.

The writer said the 25-year-old appeared to be “as quiet and civil as one would wish to behold.”

A year after his supposed death, though, Bean made it obvious he wasn’t quite reformed.

The Portland Daily Press said “the bad man in the bad family” had attacked someone at John Turner’s camp at Carrying Place and left his victim badly injured.

“It was a terrible row,” the paper said, and Bean and his family followers would likely face prosecution.

Three years later, the Portland paper revived the story of Bean’s supposed death to dismiss it as “largely a Kanuck fable” from which Bean “got a wild reputation.”

It said the editor of the Fairfield Journal had recently met Bean, “a quiet-looking man with piercing black eyes” and learned the man was working steadily and “enjoying life far better than when he was the terror of all the townships on the Moose River line.”

Maybe it was true, too, since Bean appears to have stayed out of the news forever after.

HISTORY OF HIGHWAYMEN

Anyone who’s heard the story of Robin Hood knows that highway robbers have been around a long time. Many were happy to take from the rich. Few ever handed over the loot to the poor.

The heyday of banditry was probably from about 1600 to 1800 in England, where the practice was so common that the robbers’ catchphrase — “your money or your life” — secured a foothold in our language.

Sometimes known as “knights of the road,” they became such a scourge as “road agents” among pioneers in the American West that some became celebrities.

Though data is scarce, there’s a common belief among editorialists of the day that the decades following the Civil War saw a rise in highway banditry in the United States, perhaps related to the trauma of the war. It’s hard to know for sure.

But the problem facing travelers in thinly populated areas was real.

California historians, for instance, have documented at least 450 times in the 1800s when highwaymen held up a stagecoach on the state’s roads. That’s likely only a fraction of the crimes committed in an era when police were scarce and reports even more unusual.

As trains and automobiles began to replace the carriages and coaches of old, highway banditry ceased to be a useful endeavor for the criminally minded.

THE DEMISE OF HIGHWAYMEN

Before the 19th century was out, people realized the days of holding up stagecoaches and travelers had passed.

The Portland Daily Press in 1893 noted that highwaymen had mostly moved on to trying to hold up trains out West instead. There was more money in it.

Even so, they figured that one way or another, preying on travelers would continue to find a place in the future.

“No doubt in the coming days when our descendants will have mastered the art of flying,” it editorialized, “there will be airy highwaymen who will make them stand and deliver en route, as the fish hawk robs the gull.”

So far anyway, we’ve avoided that fate.

But you never know.

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