Only a Few Bones A True Account of the Rolling Fork Tragedy & Its Aftermath

Only a Few Bones is an amazing mystery story, & true. It happened in 1873, the nadir of the violent Reconstruction era, deep in the swamps of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Joe Ring, a carpetbag merchant from New York, two male clerks, a woman & child were sleeping in the Ring & Co. store at Rolling Fork Landing when the building & its five inhabitants were consumed by fire. Locals said it was murder, robbery & arson. The white population - outnumbered by 50 to 1 by ex-slaves - blamed it on marauding blacks. Others claimed it was insurance fraud by the firm's surviving partner, Joe's brother George. Suspects both white & black were arrested & questioned, twice. Yet the mystery was never solved. Until now. The author of Bones has spent 30 years investigating the story he first heard as a boy, because Joe Ring was his great great grandfather. Colletta reconstructs the saga of the German immigrant brothers from their arrival in Buffalo in 1853, through the Civil War - Joe up North, George down South - to their fateful business dealings with the freed slaves, wealthy planters, poor whites & fellow foreign-born mrechants of the post-war Delta. Maps, charts, illustrations & 87 pages of notes bring the author's surprising conclusion vividly to life.Colletta, John Philip is the author of 'Only a Few Bones A True Account of the Rolling Fork Tragedy & Its Aftermath' with ISBN 9780970132703 and ISBN 0970132700.