Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

11. SAM BASS WAS BORN IN INDIANA

+11+ SAM BASS WAS BORN IN INDIANA AN O LD TEXA S folksong says, Sam met his fate at Round Rock, July the twenty-first I They filled poor Sam with rifle balls and emptied out his purse. This past July 21 marked the 131st anniversary of the death of the outlaw Sam Bass after being mortally wounded in a failed bank robbery in 1878 at the little town of Round Rock, just a few miles from Austin. The song about him was written a few years late r, supposedly by John Denton of Gainesville. My grandmother Taylor was born in Round Rock ten months before the events it des.cribes. Her older sister, my Aunt Carrie, who was eight at the time, always claimed that she could remember the gunfire and the men racing down the main street on horseback. Because of this, Sam Bass has always been my personal favorite Texas outlaw, and I think that the song about his career and death is one of the best of all cowboy songs. Sam first came Ollt to Texas, a cowboy {or to be I A kinder-hearted fellow YOll seldom ever see. Bass was an Indiana farm boy, but like a lot of young m en at that time, he was attracted to cowboy life, and when he was seventeen he left home and headed west. He ended up in Denton, Texas, about 1872. He briefly tried cowboying and then went to work doing odd jobs for a farmer called Dad Egan, who happened to be sheriff of Denton County. Sam seemed to have a talent for friendship, but most of his friends turned out to be bad sorts. Sam used to deal in race stock, one called the Denton mare I He ran her in scrub races, and at the collnty fair. Scrub races, informal races between two horses down a quar- ter-mile track, were a popular form of entertainment in rural Texas. In the fall of 1874, Bass and Dad Egan's little brother Armstrong bought a fast horse named Jennie and took her on the scrub race circuit, traveling as far as San Antonio with her. Away from home she was known as "the Denton mare." She won a lot of races. Sam left the Collins ranch in the merry month ofMay I With a herd ofTexas cattle, the Black Hills {or to see. In San Antonio, Bass met a saloon owner, gambler, and parttime rancher named Joel Collins. They decided to buy a herd of cattle on credit and drive them to Dakota Territory. They sold them there, but instead of returning to Texas to payoff their debt, they squandered their profits in the wide-open town of Deadwood and took to robbing stagecoaches to recoup their losses. Bass later said that they were spectacularly unsuccessful, netting only a dozen peaches in one holdup. On their way back to Texas they robbed the U. P. train I And then split up in couples and started out again. Collins and Bass finally hit the jackpot when, with four other men, they robbed a Union Pacific train at Big Springs, Nebraska. They got $60,000 in newly-minted twenty-dollar gold pieces. They split up into pairs to elude pursuers. Collins and his partner were killed, but Bass made it back to Texas, where he hid out in the woods west of Denton and formed a new gang. Sam's life was short in Texas, three robberies did he do I He robbed all the passenger, mail, and express cars, too. Bass and his new gang actually held up at least two stagecoaches and four trains around Fort Worth and Dallas in the spring of 1878. There was a great public outcry. Sheriffs posses, including one led by Bass's former employer, proved ineffective, sometimes chasing each other. Governor R. B. Hubbard finally ordered the Texas Rangers to bring Sam and his boys in. Jim had borrowed Sam's good gold and didn't want to pay I The only shot he saw was to give poor Sam away. Major John B. Jones of the Ranger's Frontier Battalion resorted to a time-honored strategy to trap Bass. He negotiated a plea bargain with Jim Murphy, a Denton friend of Bass's who had been arrested as an accomplice in one of the train robberies and was out on bail. In spite of...