b'And so he sold out Sam and Barnes and left their friends to mourn would swallow a bottle of poison and die).A town deputy Oh, what a scorching Jim will get when Gabriel blows his horn! approached the men as they were buying tobacco at a nearby Perhaps he\'s got to heaven, there\'s none of us can say, general store and asked them to surrender their sidearms But if I\'m right in my surmise he\'s gone the other way. - they refused, opened fire, and killed the deputy, which From John Lomax\'s 1910 edition of Cowboy Songs andat that point the Rangers sprung from ambush and began Other Frontier Ballads opening fire on the outlaws before they even got close to the bank. A young teenage boy watched as Rangers Sergeants Sam Bass was a very likable young man who had been bornGeorge Herold and Richard Ware took careful aim, and shot in Indiana on July 21, 1851. Orphaned at age 13, Bass hadBass at least twice, Herold wounding Bass\'s hand, but Ware been raised by an uncle till he was 19, then he left homemortally wounding the outlaw chief with a shot to the gut, and eventually drifted down to Texas working on ranches,the teen crying out, "I think you got him!"occasionally racing horses where he was renowned as a capable horseman, and enjoying his drink or two, but neverThe name of that particular 17-year-old Round Rock a heavy drinker. He was very well-mannered it seems, andteen was Jefferson Randolph Smith, soon-to-be-known very well-liked by those who knew him, and certainly didas Soapy, and it is quite obvious the future murderous not look like the Chuck Connors who portrayed him manyscoundrel and con-man never learned a thing when years later in an episode of Tales of Wells-Fargo. witnessing the bloody demise of Sam Bass.It was in Texas where at one point he had worked as aBass and one of the gang, Frank Jackson, managed to clear "wagon boss" for Teddy Blue Abbott\'s father. AccordingRound Rock, but Bass, realizing he was done for, told a to Abbott, Bass: "wasn\'t an outlaw then, just a nice, quiet,reluctant Jackson to keep on riding (it is said that Jackson, young fellow. He was with us most of the winter, but inchanging his name, many years later had an encounter of a March \'72 (1872), after the winter broke, he rode intoviolent kind with an ex-Ranger by the name of Jeff Milton, Lincoln (Nebraska), where he bought a new rope, havingwhom we shall shortly encounter on these pages). Bass broke his pulling bogged cattle. In order to stretch it, hepainfully slipped from his horse, laid down in a pasture was roping posts and having his horse pull it so as to get thejust outside of town, and waited for the inevitable. When kinks out. About that time a man walked down the boardthe Posse came up, Bass weakly called out, "Don\'t shoot, I sidewalk, which was about three feet above the street. Samam unarmed. I am the man you are looking for. I am Sam roped him for a joke and pulled the rope too hard, and theBass." Sam Bass lingered on for a day or so, finally giving up old fellow stumbled and kind of cut his face in the gravel.the ghost on July 21, 1878, his 27th birthday, liked for his He got up hopping mad and went for the sheriff - and Samhonesty and courage (if not by his banditry) even by those lit out for the ranch and got his money and pulled out forSam Bass who sought to capture and kill him.Texas. The sheriff was one hour too late.To quote Mike Cox in his history of the Rangers -None of us ever saw Sam Bass again. He was a nice littleto get the son they got the father. Jim Murphy loved his"John Wesley Hardin, the man (then) behind bars at the fellow, always very kind to me and different from mostfather, and promptly turned himself in, offering to assiststate prison in Huntsville for the murder of a former Ranger, of the wild devils who came up the trail in the seventies.the Rangers in the apprehending of Bass if all chargeshad earned his outlaw status, but (Sam) Bass, not (John He did not get to drinking and raising hell. He wouldagainst his father were dropped. Major Jones and CaptainWesley) Hardin, soon became a Texas Folk Figure" (Cox, never have become an outlaw, only through loyalty to hisPeak agreed, and Murphy told them all he knew of Bass,Mike, The Texas Rangers Tom Doherty/FORGE Books, New (subsequent) boss, Joel Collins, who had blowed in hishis men, and their hideouts. In the very short time of halfYork, 2008, p. 298).whole herd (gambling) in Deadwood and had to haveof a year, by their daring robberies of stagecoaches and money to face and pay his friends in Texas, so Sam helpedtrains the Sam Bass gang had struck fear and apprehensionTo many a Texas folk hero, and this leads us to Johnhim rob that U.P. (Union Pacific) train" (Abbott, E.C.into the heart of Texas, but due to Jim Murphy\'s loyalty toWesley Hardin."Teddy Blue" and Smith, Helena Huntington, We Pointedhis own family, this was about to change.Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher, University ofJOHN WESLEY HARDINOklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1955, p. 9). By then the Bass gang had grown cocky, having successfullyMuch has already been written about John Wesley Hardin, robbed two stagecoaches and four trains throughoutand most of it is not in a positive vein. Unlike the likable The young Bass admired Joel Collins, who was said to havethe Dallas area, perhaps too cocky for their own good.Bass, John Wesley Hardin already had a chip on his shoulder been either an honest trail boss turned bad or an outlawUnaware of Jim Murphy\'s betrayal, the gang was ambushedas a preadolescent. His resentment of both the Texas State from the start. When Collins went broke and decided,by a troop of Rangers on the morning of June 12, 1878,Police, the Union Cavalry that occupied his Texas town, desperately or maliciously to rob the train, Bass dutifullyat Salt Creek, Texas. Bass and most of the gang were ableand most particularly Black Union soldiers, some of them went along. Having successfully hit up the train, Bass andto get clear, but one of them, "Arkansas" Johnson turnedformer slaves of his family quickly came to a boil of both Collins split up the proceeds and agreed to meet back into fire at the Rangers and was promptly shot through theracist and Yankee hatred, but even before he murdered a Texas. Bass and a couple of others hightailed out of theheart. The Bass gang began to fall apart, with several of theformer slave of his uncles who had joined the occupying area and eventually got back to Texas, but Collins and anoutlaws deserting their chief until the gang was down toUnion Army, Hardin, at the age of 14 had almost knifed to associate unwisely chose to stop in a nearby town for aBass and two associates. Well, make that three associatesdeath a fellow student in his school.couple of drinks, not realizing the wanted posters wereas one Jim Murphy rejoined the gang at that point - as an already up. The town sheriff recognized Collins, and notinformer. Bass was undeterred by the ambush of his gang,The death of the ex-slave began a chain reaction that wanting to confront him on his own, telegraphed foregged on by Murphy he made plans to rob the Williamsonultimately resulted in the shooting deaths of 21 men, help from a nearby army post. A troop of cavalry joinedCounty Bank in Round Rock, a suburb of the Texas capitalincluding not a few Black soldiers and innocent Mexican the sheriff, and they found Collins and his associateat Austin. With the plan set in stone for the morning ofcattle drovers, murdered for simply being Mexican. When nonchalantly riding south and quickly surrounded the twoJuly 19, Murphy slipped out of camp and managed to alertHardin became involved on the side of the Taylor clan in men. Realizing that the jig was up, Collins and his associateMajor Jones and Captain Peak. They summoned all thethe Sutton-Taylor Cattle Feud, he murdered the unarmed went for their guns and were quickly turned into SwissRangers available (the Rangers had been decimated - notDeWitt County Sheriff Jack Helm, who had been an open cheese - full of holes. by outlaws but by budget cuts) - little more than a dozenally of the Sutton family. The beginning of Hardin\'s downfall and just less than 15 including a Ranger by the name ofcame on his 21st birthday when he chose to gun down Bass, back in Texas, might have been able to steer clearJohn B. Armstrong (who, soon on the trail of anotherBrown County Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb who had been of the outlaw life, but he had gotten too much a tastenotorious desperado, would figure prominently in theon the lookout for Hardin for his complicity in the Sutton-of it, so he proceeded to form a small gang around theannals of Ranger history) driving out of San Saba hell-bentTaylor feud, in a barroom gunfight. In fact, not only did Dallas area where they proceeded, for much of the firstfor leather all night - passing a storekeeper who heardthe murder of the popular Webb arouse the Texas State half of 1878, to rob stagecoaches and trains. The wave ofone of them say "that hell was going to pay somewhere"authorities, but it also resulted in three more deaths - those robberies attracted the attention of both the Pinkertons,(Robinson, Charles M., III, The Men Who Wore the Star,of his brother Joe and his cousins, Bud and Tom Dixon, who already hot and heavy on the trail of Jesse James and theRandom House, New York,2000, p. 239). They slipped intowere dragged out of jail and lynched by a vengeful mob, commander of the Rangers\' Frontier Battalion the fearedRound Rock and proceeded to set up a deadly ambush. who, unable to get the murderous culprit Hardin, chose to and famed Major John B. Jones.Jones immediately turnedtake out their vigilante justice on Hardin\'s brother Joe and to Captain Junius June Peak to form a special companyOn the morning of July 19, 1878, Bass and his men rodetwo innocent boys.to specifically go out and apprehend - or kill - the Bassinto town - Murphy managing to slip away without gang. They struck pay dirt in the first week of May 1878arousing the suspicion of Bass, who by now was supposedlySeeing that Texas was becoming too hot for him andwhen they arrested one Henderson Murphy. Murphy, aof an opinion that the gang would be better off with theirhis family, Hardin, after a brief visit to Abilene and a prominent North Texas citizen was an innocent man, butnewest member dead (just a few years later, tormented byfamous confrontation with Wild Bill Hickok where Hardin his son Jim was an associate of Bass and his gang, andthe guilt of his betrayal of the trusting Bass, Jim Murphycontinued on page 21ArizonaRealCountry.com January 2022 19'