Sam Bass
This page is still under construction. Please check back.
Sam Bass and his gang, circa 1876. Sam is standing on the left, and Joel Collins holds the revolver. / Close-up of Sam Bass, circa 1875. He was not a menacing figure.
As Sam lay dying, a tired Negro snapped the strings of a guitar and sang:
Sam Bass was born in Indiana,
It was his native home.
When at the age of seventeen
Young Sam Bass began to roam.
Sam Bass at age 16
By all accounts, Sam Bass had a fairly normal childhood. Born near Mitchell,
Indiana, on 21 July 1851 to Elizabeth and Daniel Bass, the family was poor, but
not wanting, and as one of ten children, Sam had a relatively happy life on the
175-acre Bass farm. Two of his sibling died in infancy, and another brother was
killed fighting as a member of the Sixteenth Indiana Regiment during the Civil
War. When his mother died on 3 June 1861 at the age of thirty-nine, Sam was not
yet ten years old. His father quickly remarried to a woman with two children,
and shortly after she gave birth to Sam's stepbrother, his father died of
pneumonia on 20 February 1864 at the age of forty-two years. Now orphaned, Sam
was shuffled from his Uncle Solomon Bass to another uncle, David Sheeks, who
promptly used the youngster as free slave labor.
He first came down to Texas,
A teamseter for to be,
A kinder-hearted fellow
You hardly ever see.
When Sam could stand the situation no longer, he headed south. He drifted down the Mississippi River, picking up the card shark racket and becoming proficient with a pistol. By the time he arrived in Denton, Texas, in the latter part of 1870, he was as frugal as he was smart. For a time, he worked as a farmhand and teamster for Sheriff W. F. Eagan, who would later spend so much time hunting for him. It was also while working for Eagan that he became fast friends with Frank Jackson, Henry Underwood, and Jim Murphy.
Sam used to deal in race stock
One called the Denton mare.
He matched her in scrub races
And took her to the fair.
Sam Bass at age 24.
In 1874, Sam bought a horse that he named Jenny. He was in partnership with Armstrong Eagan, W. F. Eagan's brother, and the two of them raced the sorrel every Sunday. She was fast enough to win Sam some money, and he quickly took to gambling as a business venture. This activity didn't set well with Sheriff Eagan, and he insisted his brother sell out to Sam. The Sheriff later gave Sam an ultimatum: sell the horse or quit his job. Sam's love for the horse won, and from that point onward, there is no record that Sam ever worked an "honest" job again.
Sam's horse was known as the Denton Mare, and the more she raced and won, the more Sam's character changed. He grew increasingly reckless and wild. By the Spring of 1875, he was into playing the horses, gambling at cards, drinking heavily, and keeping company with the town's rougher element. When he took Jenny into the Indian Territory of Oklahoma in April, winning a herd of Indian ponies which their Indian owners refused to yield, Sam quietly stole the ponies under cover of darkness with his cronies, Henry Underwood and John Hudson, Sam's rider in the Indian Territory races. The men quickly drove the herd back to Texas, selling them for a tidy profit in San Antonio. Included in the herd were about a dozen not won in the races.
In late August of 1876, Sam hooked up with Joel Collins, a sometimes cowboy who had been tried and acquitted of murder in 1870. and the gang promptly shipped a herd of stolen cattle to Sydney, Nebraska, from the railhead in Kansas before too many questions could be asked. Sam's rustling days had begun.
Jim Murphy
To be continued...please come back.