folo

Saturday, I posted a guessing game about a photo of Mississippi outlaw Kinnie Wagner; in a later post, I provided some history of Wagner, and Researcher and others supplemented the history in comments.  It was interesting enough to folks I thought I’d dig around a bit for more information.

You might want to read the prior Kinnie Wagner post just noted before diving into this one.

Online, I encountered two interesting points-of-view about Kinnie Wagner.  The first was from the old WPA guide to Mississippi. In the entry for Leakesville, it says that Leakesville was a town of 662 people, “the center of a lumbering, farming, and stock raising area. It was here that Kinnie Wagner, the sawmill worker who became Mississippi’s last notorious outlaw, first ‘broke the law, and threw his life away,’ as the old ballad says. Kinnie killed Sheriff MacIntosh at Leakesville on May 2, 1925…”  p. 492.

Folks who are interested in the WPA guide can see it in Google books at the link. It is very much worth exploring for folks fascinated with local Mississippi history.

The second is two online accounts of Wagner from what appears to be one of Wagner’s sister’s children. Recall that Wagner was going to meet his younger sister (about 11 years younger) near Kingsport, TN, when he was ambushed. This nephew or niece remembered the uncle and describes that ambush in Tennessee, along with some other information (not exactly expected).

One of the accounts was on a circus geneology site. The other was on ancestry.com.

On both sites, the story is that Wagner left home at 14 to join the Richard Brothers Circus after his father remarried when Kinnie was six (it’s implied that his mother had died), blending two families, in which Kinnie was an awkward fit:

“He was a 14 year old child, who adored his mother…he was born in 1903, and, left home to keep from wetting bed. …he joined circus, to help keep peace and harmony, from there, it went to a life, which killed him.”

The post on the circus site describes Wagner learning trick riding and rope tricks in the circus. About his life after leaving the circus, the relative wrote “he learned to be a man at 16″ after leaving the circus:

He had been running moonshine, at a very early age. for his food,he rarely drank himself. starting the first thunder road, which became stock car, then now is the nascar cicuit.  he was a very handsome young man, and, the girls loved him.

On the circus site, the post refers to “the trouble with the sheriff who was running moonshine.” It says:

the sheriff, arrested him, for a watch he did not steal, he was never charged, so, one day, he told the sheriff, who he had been running moonshine for, if you do not charge, I am leaving, the door was opened, he went to a friend. The sheriff had Kinnie hold for him, amazingly enough, my uncle, became wanted dead or alive. the sheriff, knew he knew too much on what the sheriff was doing. so, they shot the door off, Kinnie had no shoes on.

Whoever wrote these posts (they are signed BJ Cunningham) remembers Wagner, and talks about his love for the dogs he cared for at the prison. The posts also describe the ambush in Kingsport, where Kinnie pushed his sister to the ground as the posse began firing at him; bullets passed through his sister’s hair as she pushed him to the ground.