Sam Bass and the Round Rock Shootout

The case

On the evening of 18 September 1877 six men stopped an eastbound Union Pacific passenger train at Big Springs, Nebraska. In the express car they found a haul far larger than anything their stagecoach robberies had produced: about $60,000 in newly minted twenty-dollar gold pieces, shipped from the San Francisco mint. They took that, and $1,300 and four gold watches from the passengers, divided the coins and rode off in pairs. One of the pairs was a former Texas cowhand and racehorse man of twenty-six named Sam Bass.

Bass was born on a farm near Mitchell, Indiana, on 21 July 1851. Orphaned before he was thirteen, he spent several years in an uncle's house, left at eighteen, worked for most of a year in a Mississippi sawmill, and reached Denton, Texas, in 1870. He tried cowboy work, then tended horses at a hotel and worked for the county sheriff, William Egan, hauling freight and mending fences. In 1874 he acquired a fast mare that became known as the Denton Mare and left Egan's employ to race her. When the racing dried up in 1876 he and Joel Collins agreed to drive a small herd of longhorns north for their owners.

They sold the herd, paid the hands and found themselves holding $8,000 that belonged to ranchers back in Texas. Instead of returning it they gambled it away in Ogallala and in Deadwood, the gold town in the Black Hills. Freighting did not pay, so in 1877 they and a few hard companions began robbing stagecoaches on the Deadwood roads. Seven holdups brought in little. Big Springs, led by Collins, was their attempt at something bigger. Within weeks of it Collins and two others were dead, killed resisting arrest.

Bass made it back to Texas disguised as a farmer and gathered a new band around Denton. In the spring of 1878 they held up two stagecoaches and four trains within about twenty-five miles of Dallas. The takings were small, but the robberies stirred north Texas, and posses, Pinkerton men and a special company of Texas Rangers under Captain Junius Peak spent weeks chasing the gang across north Texas. Bass, who knew the country, kept slipping away.

What caught him was betrayal. Jim Murphy, a member of the gang, had come to an arrangement with the authorities and rode with Bass as their informer. As the gang rode south in July to rob a small bank at Round Rock, north of Austin, Murphy got word to Major John B. Jones, commander of the Rangers' Frontier Battalion, who moved men quietly into the town.

On Friday 19 July 1878 Bass, Seaborn Barnes and Frank Jackson rode into Round Rock to look the town over before the robbery. They went into Koppel's store to buy tobacco. Williamson County deputy A. W. Grimes, who did not know who they were, followed them in to ask if they were carrying pistols, and was shot dead. In the gunfight that spread into the street Barnes was killed and Bass was badly wounded. Jackson got him onto a horse and out of town.

The next morning a posse found Bass lying helpless in a pasture outside town and brought him back to Round Rock. He died on 21 July 1878, his twenty-seventh birthday, and was buried in the town cemetery. Frank Jackson was never caught.