Sam Bass
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-12-05

Day 262 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Sandburg writes: “If a man knows any secrets he should die and go to hell with them in him,” said Sam Bass as he lay bleeding from bullet wounds, and Texas Rangers and officers of the law asked him who were his partners. He and three of his boys, all handy with their six-shooters, on July 20, 1878, were in Round Rock, Texas, loafing sort of careless in a cigar store next to a bank they had their eye on to rob."

"Officers of the law, who had been tipped off by the squealer Murphy, spoke to Sam and his boys asking who they were, where they came from, how they made their living, and other questions often asked of strangers by men wearing stars and badges. Shooting began. One officer dropped dead. So did Seaborn Barnes, “right bower to Sam Bass.” Sam got away, was found in woods near by next day, and died of his wounds on the day after that; it was his 27th birthday anniversary. In the woods, knowing he couldn’t live, he gave Frank Jackson his horse and told him to make a get-away, though Jackson lagged to stay and fight.

"Like other bandits of legend and fame Sam Bass was good to the poor. “He would give a poor woman a twenty-dollar gold piece for a dinner and take no change, ” wrote W. P. Webb in No. 8 of the Texas Folk Lore Society publications. “He paid farmers well for the horses he took from them, though sometimes he did not have time to see the farmer."

"Sam Bass relics are scattered over the country, everywhere. His belt with some cartridges in it is in the library of the University of Texas. A carpenter at Snyder has a horseshoe from Bass’s best race horse nailed to the top of his tool chest. Near Belton are some live oak trees that Bass is said to have shot his initials in while riding at full speed. Horns of steers supposed to have been killed by Bass sell over the country at fancy prices.

"In Montague County, there is a legend of $30,000 of loot buried by Sam Bass. Again, he is supposed to have left treasure in the Llano country. At McNeill, near Austin, there is a cave in which Sam Bass hid when he was in retirement. There he kept his horses and from there made his forays”.

"Legend wrote an epitaph on his monument which is not there: Would That He Were Good as He was Brave. Near Sam’s pretentious monument, mutilated by souvenir collectors, is a rough sandstone memorial to Seaborn Barnes, with the inscription: He Was Right Bower to Sam Bass. Of this, Webb, a Texan, commented, “It is written in language Bass would have loved; it has a certain impertinence to law abiding people in the nearby graves, a certain pride in the leader at whose heels Barnes died. The spirit of the person who wrote the seven words of that epitaph is the spirit that has created the legend of Sam Bass in Texas. ” 

"And, of course, some such spirit has kept the biographic Sam Bass ballad alive and going these many years since he met his doom at Round Rock."