help build Fort Fisher, near Wilmington. Henry Berry Lowrie and several of his relatives took to the swamps where Indians resorted to "lying out" to avoid being rounded up by the Home Guard and forced to work as impressed laborers. The Lowrie gang, as it became known, resorted to crime and conducting personal feuds, committing robberies and murders against white Robeson County residents and skirmishing with the Confederate Home Guard. They grew bolder as the war turned against the Confederacy. In December 1864, the Lowrie gang killed James P. Barnes after he had drafted workers, including the Lowries, for work on local defenses. Barnes had earlier accused Henry's father, Allen Lowrie, of stealing hogs. Next, the gang killed James Brantley Harris, a Confederate conscription officer who had killed a Lowrie relative. A surprise search by the Home Guard of Allen Lowrie's home in March 1865 uncovered a stash of forbidden firearms. The Home Guard convened a summary court-martial, convicted Allen Lowrie and his son William of illegally possessing firearms as men of color, and executed them. After the Civil War, the Lowrie gang continued their insurgency, committing robberies and murders. The authorities' raids and attempts to capture gang members became known as the Lowry War. The gang consisted of Henry Lowrie, his brothers Stephen and Thomas, cousins Calvin and Henderson Oxendine, two of Lowrie's brothers-in-law, two escaped slaves who had joined the Lowries, a white man of unknown identity who was likely a Confederate deserter, and two other men of unknown relation and identity. On December 7, 1865, Henry Lowrie married Rhoda Strong. Arrested at his wedding, Lowrie escaped from jail by filing his way through the jail's bars. Lowrie's gang continued its activities into the Reconstruction Era. Republican governor William Woods Holden declared Lowrie and his men outlaws in 1869, and offered a $12,000 reward for their capture: dead or alive. Lowrie responded with more revenge killings. Eluding capture, the Lowrie gang persisted after Reconstruction ended and conservative white Democrats gained control of North Carolina government, imposing segregation and white supremacy. The Lowrie gang gained the sympathy of local Indian families and even some poor whites, who refused to cooperate with efforts to stop them. Records of the pursuit of the Lowrie gang provide the first documentation of the local people's claims on mixed Indian ancestry. These early accounts refer to the Lowries and the other local Indian families