By Justin Lamb
Contributing writer
“Downright mean” is how the Daily Arkansas Gazette described Ruffus Alexandrow Cates who had become infamous throughout the South for his marauding and plundering of the countryside.
“We aim to hang him” was the consensus among the lawmen of the towns Cates had victimized. Cates escaped an appointment with the gallows and eventually settled in Marshall County, where he changed his name and his lifestyle to avoid an outlaw’s death.
Very little is known about the early days of Ruffus Cates. He was born in North Carolina around 1830 to a wealthy planter family and it is believed the War Between the States first called
him away from his father’s Carolina home. It is has been told through family oral history that Cates served as a Confederate guerrilla and was eventually shot in the leg which earned him the nickname “Hoppy” for the limp he had acquired from the wound.
After the end of the war, Cates settled with a wife and had a few children, but soon took to the life of an outlaw. Gambling, drinking, robbing, and thievery became Cates’ way of life, and in order to escape capture, Cates drifted throughout the states of Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri always one step ahead of the law. However, Cates’ luck
finally caught up with him when he was captured in Mississippi County, Arkansas in April 1879 for robbing a small general store. Cates was eventually set free because no one could positively identify him as the robber. Sheriff W.B. Hoskins gave Cates a stern warning that if he ever returned to Arkansas, he would indeed be hanging from a tall oak tree.
Cates soon left Arkansas and eventually settled in Marshall County with his small children. He changed his last name to “Thompson” and left his outlaw days behind. He later remarried and became a farmer in the Olive community before his death in March 1911.
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