Rube Burrow, king of outlaws, and his band of train robbers

Rube Burrow’s old companions in Alabama recall distinctly the day he left Lamar County for Texas in the autumn of 1872. He left the old and familiar scenes of his boyhood, full of hope and eager to test the possibilities that Texas, then the Eldorado of the southern emigrant, opened up to him. He was but eighteen years of age when he took up his abode with his uncle, Joel Burrow, a very worthy and upright man, who owned and tilled a small farm in Erath County, that State. In 1876 Rube was joined by Jim Burrow, his younger brother, who remained in Texas until 1880, when, returning to Lamar County, Alabama, he married and resided there until 1884, when he rejoined his brother Rube in Texas, taking his wife thither. Jim Burrow was a “burly, roaring, roistering blade,” six feet tall, as straight as an Indian, which race of people he very closely resembled, with his beardless face, his high cheek bones and coal-black hair. He was in every way fitted for following the fortunes of Rube, and had he not succumbed to the unhappy fate of imprisonment and early death he would have been a formidable rival of his brother Rube in the events that marked his subsequent career.

Rube worked awhile on his uncle’s farm, but soon drifted into that nondescript character known as a Texas cowboy. Meantime, in 1876, he married Miss Virginia Alvison, in Wise County, Texas, and from this marriage two children were born, who are now with their grandparents in Alabama, the elder being a boy of twelve years. This wife died in 1880, and he again married in 1884 a Miss Adeline Hoover, of Erath County, Texas. These events served to restrain his natural inclinations for excitement and adventure, and it may be truthfully said that from 1872 to 1886 Rube Burrow transgressed the law only to the extent of herding unbranded cattle and marking them as his own. In this pursuit he traversed the plains of Texas, enjoying with an excess of keen delight a companionship of kindred spirits, whose homes were in the saddle, and who found their only shelter by day and by night under the same kindly skies. As he grew to manhood he had given full bent to his love for the athletic pursuits incident to life upon the then sparsely settled plains of the Lone Star State. Taming the unbridled broncho, shooting the antelope, and lassoing the wild steer, under whip and spur, he soon gained fame as an equestrian, and was reckoned as the most unerring marksman in all the adjacent country. With a reputation for all these accomplishments, strengthened by an innate capacity for leadership, Rube ere long gathered about him a band of trusty comrades, of which he was easily the leader.

A short time prior to this period, at varying intervals, all Texas had been startled by the bold and desperate adventures of Sam Bass and his band of train robbers, with which Rube was erroneously supposed to have been associated. Possibly inspired, however, by the fame which Sam Bass had achieved, and the exaggerated reports of the profits of his adventures, contrasted with the sparse returns from his more plodding occupation, Rube was seized with a desire to emulate his deeds of daring, and achieve at once fame and fortune.

At this time, December 1, 1886, his party, consisting of Jim Burrow, Nep Thornton and Henderson Bromley, returning from a bootless excursion into the Indian Territory, rode in the direction of Bellevue, a station on the Fort Worth and Denver Railway. Here Rube proposed to rob the train, which they knew to be due at Bellevue at eleven o’clock A. M. Hitching their horses in the woods a few hundred yards away they stealthily approached a water-tank three hundred yards west of the station, and where the train usually stopped for water. Thornton held up the engineer and fireman, while Rube, Bromley and Jim Burrow went through the train and robbed the passengers, leaving the Pacific Express unmolested. They secured some three hundred dollars in currency and a dozen or more watches. On the train was Sergeant Connors (white), with a squad of U. S. colored soldiers, in charge of some prisoners. From these soldiers were taken their forty-five caliber Colt’s revolvers, a brace of which pistols were used by Rube Burrow throughout his subsequent career. Rube insisted on the prisoners being liberated, but they disdained the offer of liberty at the hands of the highwaymen and remained in charge of the crest-fallen soldiers, who were afterwards dismissed from the service for cowardice. Regaining their horses the party rode forth from the scene of their initial train robbery, out into the plains, making a distance of some seventy-five miles from the scene of the robbery in twenty-four hours.

The ill-gotten gains thus obtained did not suffice to satisfy the greed of the newly fledged train robbers, and early in the following January another raid was planned. At Alexander, Texas, about seventy-five miles from Gordon, all the robbers met, and going thence by horseback to Gordon, Texas, a station on the Texas and Pacific Railway, they reached their destination about one o’clock A. M., on January 23, 1887. As the train pulled out of Gordon at two o’clock A. M., Rube and Bromley mounted the engine, covered the engineer and fireman, and ordered them to pull ahead and stop at a distance of five hundred yards east of the station. The murderous looking Colt’s revolvers brought the engineer to terms, and the commands of the highwaymen were obeyed to the letter. At the point where the train was stopped, Jim Burrow, Thornton, and Harrison Askew, a recruit who had but recently joined the robber band, were in waiting. As the train pulled up, Askew’s nerve failed him, and he cried out, “For heaven’s sake, boys, let me out of this; I can’t stand it.” Askew’s powers of locomotion, however, had not forsaken him, and he made precipitate flight from the scene of the robbery. Rube and Bromley marched the engineer and fireman to the express car and demanded admittance, while the rest of the robbers held the conductor and other trainmen at bay. The messenger of the Pacific Express Company refused at first to obey the command to open the door, but put out the lights in his car. A regular fusilade ensued, the robbers using a couple of Winchester rifles, and after firing fifty or more shots the messenger surrendered. About $2,275 was secured from the Pacific Express car. The U. S. Mail car was also robbed, and the highwaymen secured from the registered mail about two thousand dollars.

Mounting their horses, which they had left hidden in the forest hard by, they rode off in a northerly direction, in order to mislead their pursuers. Making a circuit to the south they came upon the open plains, which stretched far away towards the home of the robber band. The trackless plain gave no vestige of the flight of the swift-footed horses as they carried their riders faster and still faster on to their haven of safety, which they reached soon after daylight on the second morning after the robbery.

The better to allay suspicion the robber comrades now agreed to separate, and all made a show of work, some tilling the soil, while others engaged in the occupation of herding cattle for the neighboring ranch owners.

Rube and Jim Burrow, about this time, purchased a small tract of land, paying six hundred dollars for it. They also bought a few head of stock and made a fair showing for a few months at making an honest living. The restless and daring spirit of Rube Burrow, however, could not brook honest toil. As he followed the plowshare over his newly purchased land, and turned the wild flowers of the teeming prairie beneath the soil, he nurtured within his soul nothing of the pride of the peaceful husbandman, but, fretting over such tame pursuits, built robber castles anew.

While planting a crop in the spring of 1887 he had for a fellow workman one William Brock, and finding in him a dare-devil and restless spirit he recounted to him his successful ventures at Bellevue and at Gordon. Thus another recruit was added to his forces, and one, too, who was destined to play an important role, as subsequent events will show. Time grew apace, and Rube wrote, in his quaint, unscholarly way, affectionate epistles to his relatives in Lamar County, Ala., sending them some of his ill-gotten gains. Two of these letters, written on the same sheet of paper, the one to his brother, John T. Burrow, the other to his father and mother, at Vernon, Ala., are here given verbatim et literatim, and show that a collegiate education is not a necessary adjunct to the pursuit of train robbing.

“We have sowed a few oats,” wrote Rube. Whether this was meant as a double-entendre, and referred not only to a strictly domesticated brand of that useful cereal, but also to the “wild oats” which Rube and Jim had been sowing, and which bore ample fruitage in after years, it is useless to speculate.

In the midst of seed-time Rube tired of his bucolic pursuits, and concluded to try his fortunes at Gordon again, and on the tenth of May the chief gathered his little band at his farm in Erath County and, under cover of a moonless night, rode northward to the Brazos River, about fifty miles distant. They found to their disappointment that the river was very high and was overflowing its banks, rendering it impossible to cross it by ferry or otherwise, and spending the day in the adjacent woodland, they rode back to Alexander the following night, to await the subsidence of the floods, which, however, kept the Brazos River high for some weeks.

Again, on the night of June 3d, by appointment, Henderson Bromley and Bill Brock met Rube and Jim Burrow at their home near Stephensville, in Erath County, and, after consultation, Ben Brook, Texas, a station on the Texas and Pacific Railway, seventy-five miles south of Fort Worth, was selected as the scene of their third train robbery.

After a hard night’s ride they were at daylight, on June 4th, within a few miles of Ben Brook. Having ascertained that the north-bound train would pass the station about 7 P. M. they secreted themselves in the woods near by until dark, at which time they rode quietly to within a few hundred yards of the station. Rube Burrow and Henderson Bromley had blackened their faces with burnt cork, while Jim Burrow and Brock used their pocket handkerchiefs for masks. Rube and Bromley boarded the engine as it pulled out of the station and, with drawn revolvers, covered the engineer and fireman, and ordered the former to stop at a trestle a few hundred yards beyond the station. Here Jim Burrow and Brock were in waiting, and the two latter held the conductor and passengers at bay, while the two former ordered the engineer to break into the express car with the coal pick taken from the engine, and again the Pacific Express Company was robbed, the highwaymen securing $2,450. The passengers and mail were unmolested.

Regaining their horses within thirty minutes after the train first stopped at the station, the robbers rode hard and fast until noon of the following day. Through woodland and over plain, ere dawn of day they had fled far from the scene of the robbery of the previous night, and a drenching rain, which commenced to fall at midnight, left not a trace of the course of their flight. Here the robbers remained in quiet seclusion, disguising their identity as train robbers by a seeming diligence in agricultural pursuits, until September 20, 1887, when they made a second raid on the Texas Pacific Road, robbing the train at Ben Brook station again.

When Rube and Bromley mounted the engine, wonderful to relate, it was in charge of the same engineer whom the robbers had “held up” in the robbery of June 4th, and the engineer, recognizing Rube and Bromley, said, as he looked down the barrels of their Colt’s revolvers, “Well, Captain, where do you want me to stop this time?” Rube laconically replied “Same place,” and so it was that the train was stopped and robbed, the same crew being in charge, on the identical spot where it had been robbed before. The messenger of the Pacific Express Company made some resistance, but finally the robbers succeeded in entering his car and secured $2,725, or about $680 each.

The highwaymen reached their rendezvous in Erath County, having successfully committed four train robberies.

About the middle of November following, Rube and Jim paid a visit to their parents in Lamar County, Ala., Jim taking his wife there and Rube his two children. They remained in Lamar County some weeks, visiting their relatives and walking the streets of Vernon, the county seat, unmolested, as neither of the two men had at that time ever been suspected of train robbing.