Texas outlaw
Sam Bass was born in
Indiana, it was his native home
And at the age of
seventeen, young Sam began to roam
Sam first came out to
Texas, a cowboy for to be
A kinder-hearted
fellow you seldom ever see
The legend
of Sam Bass is pretty well known. Bass and John Wesley Hardin were the most
famous outlaws of 1870s Texas. When Sam appeared on screen, such as in Calamity Jane and Sam Bass, when Howard
Duff played him, it was preposterous twaddle historically and not very well
done even from the point of view of Hollywood Westerns. So who was the real Sam
Bass?
What did he look like?
There
are many photographs said to be a likeness of Sam Bass but none is 100%
reliable. If the pictures are indeed Bass, he was a respectable-looking,
mustachioed, gentlemanly figure, reasonably handsome and the type who would
look you straight in the eye.
Straight in the eye
He was reported to be about five foot eight,
about 140 pounds with black hair and a sallow skin. He apparently walked with a
stoop and spoke with a nasal twang. We know he was born in Mitchell, Indiana on
July 21, 1851.
Youth
His
parents died young and Sam left Indiana in about 1869 (if the Shakespearean
verse quoted above is to be believed).
A young Sam. Possibly.
But there are precious few details of his youth.
The Denton Mare
Like
many a sporting Westerner, Bass liked racehorses and we first meet him properly
in Denton, Texas, where he was a teamster but then acquired “the Denton Mare”,
Jenny. Ridden by the slight black jockey Charlie Tucker, Jenny made Sam money,
and in San Antonio he went into business with a shady saloon man named Joel
Collins. They drove some cattle up into Kansas, then headed for Deadwood.
Deadwood
Deadwood
was of course famous in the 1870s as a wide-open mining town, where Wild Bill Hickok was shot to death in a saloon in 1876. Bass and Collins were even
worse gamblers than Wild Bill and soon lost their cash. Robbing stages seemed
an easy alternative to the gaming tables.
Stagecoach robbery
Unfortunately,
they turned out not to be too good at that either. They teamed up with a fellow
named Reddy, the Canadian Tom Nixon, a Missouri family man named Jim Berry, and
Bill Heffridge, a Pennsylvanian with two wives (neither of whom was in
Deadwood). The stage they chose pulled up but the team shied into Reddy’s (stolen) saddle
horse and Reddy angrily blasted the driver, John Slaughter, off the box with
his shotgun. The team bolted at this, and the stage hurtled into Deadwood with
no driver, but passengers and strongbox intact. Company executives nailed
Slaughter’s bloody vest to the stage depot door in a gruesome incentive to
vigilantes.
Reddy’s partners in the gang,
furious, debated killing him but they limited themselves to firing him. The reprieve didn’t do Reddy much good: he drifted back to Texas, to Fort
Griffin, and there vigilantes lynched him for horse stealing.
Trains
Sam Bass
and his gang continued stage robbing. They got $11 from one, a bag of peaches
from another. They decided to have a go at trains.
Despite what
Hollywood Westerns show, there was in fact a tiny number of actual train
robberies in the late nineteenth century West. The Reno brothers carried out
the first, in Seymour, Indiana, just after the Civil War, and famously the James
gang and Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch robbed trains (usually the express car and
not the passengers). And by the way, no one actually leaped from a horse onto a
moving train so stuntmen would have been out of work if history were followed more
scrupulously.
A staple of the Hollywood Western but actually quite rare
Anyway, Sam Bass and his crew had a go, at Big Spring, Nebraska
on the night of September 18, 1875. They stopped the Union Pacific and this
time they struck it rich. From the passengers (only the men; gallantly, they
did not search the women) they got $13,000, four gold watches and a ticket to Chicago.
But in the express car they found $60,000 dollars’ worth of new-minted double
eagle twenty-dollar gold pieces.
Two of
the gang, Heffridge and Sam’s erstwhile saloon partner Collins, were caught and
shot to pieces by a sheriff’s posse and a group of soldiers, and one, Berry, was
caught later in Missouri when the twenty-dollar pieces he was spending freely aroused suspicion
and a posse shot him in the leg with a shotgun - he died of shock. But Sam
Bass went back to Denton and lived it up.
Back in Denton
He
formed a new gang and started in on stages again, but with equal lack of
success, so he decided to have another go at a train. The gang got $20,000 from
the Houston and Texas Central at Allen in 1878. There was much shooting when
they held up the Hutchins train and later the Texas Central at Eagle Ford but
fortunately no one was killed.
Distinguished gentleman
Bass became famous. The railroads were far from
popular and many ordinary Texans were on Bass’s side, providing no help at all to
the Pinkertons and the Texas Rangers chasing him. The Pinks and the Rangers
were complemented by bounty hunters and unofficial posses out for the reward
and centered on Dallas.
Fame
Newspapers
loved it and referred to “Sam Bass & Company”. They called it the “Bass War”.
The multifarious hunters and the Bass gang only clashed once, though, and that was by
accident. Sam Bass seemed invisible.
Looks a bit more outlawy
Already
in January 1878 a sensational book appeared, the anonymous Life and Adventures of Sam Bass, The Notorious Union Pacific and Texas
Train Robber: together with A Graphic Account of His Capture and Death--Sketch
of the Members of His Band, With Thrilling Pen Pictures of Their Many Bold and
Desperate Deeds, and the Capture and Death of Collins, Berry, Barnes, and
Arkansas Johnson.
Thrilling Pen Pictures of Their Many Bold and Desperate Deeds
Read it here.
Bank robbery
With
trains now closely guarded, Bass & Co decided to have a crack at a bank. Sam
and two accomplices, Jackson and Barnes, targeted Round Rock, Texas.
Unfortunately for them, though, one Jim Murphy finally ratted on them and the Texas
Rangers were ready. Ranger Dick Ware was there, later to become a well-known deputy
US marshal in El Paso, and Ranger George Herold, also to become an El Paso lawman.
It was Herold who would shoot Sam Bass (though Ware got the credit).
Deputy
Sheriff AW Grimes put a hand on Bass and said, “Say, Mister, are you carrying a
gun?” It was the last thing he ever said. Realizing the game was up, the
three outlaws left Grimes's body and raced for their mounts, but Dick Ware shot Barnes in the head and as for
Bass, a storekeeper hit him with a lucky shot and then Herold shot him in the
back as he mounted. Jackson bravely held up the assault by firing accurately to cover Sam’s
escape and the two managed to get away. But Sam was severely, and, as it turned
out, mortally wounded.
Death of Sam Bass
Jackson
got away but early the next morning Bass staggered out of hiding and the
Rangers found him lying under a tree. When asked for a confession and
information on Jackson, Bass said, “It’s against my profession. If a man knows
anything, it ought to die with him.”
Over the
next few days Bass gradually began to feel better and it seemed he might recover but then his condition suddenly
deteriorated. His last words were, “The world is bobbing around.” He died aged
27 on July 21, 1878, his birthday.
Sam met his fate at
Round Rock, July the twenty-first
They pierced poor Sam
with rifle balls and emptied out his purse
Poor Sam he is a
corpse now and six feet under clay
And Jackson’s in the
brushes, trying to get away.
Inevitably,
Sam Bass appeared many times in books and on radio, TV and the big screen.
Radio
A 1936 episode on the radio drama Death Valley Days concentrated on
Round Rock. In a 1944 radio episode of The
Lone Ranger he died again. Bass's son was supposedly (and improbably, given Bass's age) the sheriff of Round
Rock.
Hollywood
The 1949 Universal movie Calamity Jane and Sam Bass
invented a torrid love affair between Sam and Calamity Jane (Yvonne de Carlo).
Calamity and Sam were in fact in Deadwood at more or less the same time, so I
guess it could have happened, though
there is no evidence they ever even met.
De Carlo and Duff. Oh dear.
In the enjoyable but preposterous 1951 picture The Texas Rangers,
Bass heads an unlikely gang made up of The Sundance Kid, John Wesley Hardin,
Butch Cassidy and Dirty Dave Rudabaugh. Ranger John B Jones brings him to
justice.
William Bishop was Sam Bass in 1951
TV
On TV, Bass was portrayed by Don Haggerty, 40, in a 1954 episode of the Western
television series Stories of the Century,
which was about as accurate as those shows usually were, i.e. more bunkum. The
following year there was an episode titled The
Shooting of Sam Bass in the CBS series Tales of the Texas Rangers.
In 1957, Chuck Connors was 35 when he played Bass in Sam Bass in NBC’s Tales
of Wells Fargo, and in 1959 the excellent Alan Hale Jr. (then 38) played
Sam in the episode entitled The Saga of
Sam Bass in Colt .45. In
1961, Bass was portrayed by Jack Chaplain in an episode of the NBC Western
television series The Outlaws.
What to read
Wayne
Gard wrote Sam Bass in 1969, Bryan
Woolley wrote a biography of the same title in 1983, and in 1999 Sam Bass & His Gang by Rick Miller
was published. Sam Bass’s career also appears in various collections of Western
outlaw books, such as the very good The Shooters
by El Paso author Leon Metz, which I have used for this post and to which I am
indebted. There are various websites with pages devoted to Bass but I don’t
know how reliable they are. Except this one, of course.