RUBE LEAVES LAMAR COUNTY, ALABAMA--HIS EARLY LIFE IN THE LONE STAR
STATE--HIS BROTHER JIM JOINS HIM--THE BELLEVUE, GORDON AND BEN
BROOK, TEXAS, TRAIN ROBBERIES.
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.
ERATH COUNTY, TEX., March 10, 1887.
_Dear Brother and family_:
All is well. No nuse too rite. the weather is good for work and
wee ar puting in the time. Wee will plant corn too morrow. Mee and
james Will plant 35 acreys in corn. Wee wont plant Eny Cotton Wee
hav a feW Ooats sode and millet. i am going too Stephens Vill too
day and i Will male this Letr. J. T. when you rite Direct your letr
too Stephens Vill Erath county and tell all of the Rest too direct
there letrs too the same place. i want you and pah too keep that
money john you keep $30.00 and pah $20.00. the Reason i want you to
hav $30 is because you have the largest family. john i don’t blame
pah and mother for not coming out here for they ortoo no there
Buisness. john i want you too rite too me. i did think i would Come
Back in march. i cant come now. Rite.
R. H. BURROW
too J. T. BURROW.
ERATH COUNTY, TEXAS, March 10, 1887.
_Dear father & mother_:
Eye will Rite you a few Lines. all is well. Elizabeth[A] has a boy.
it was bornd on the 28 of february. She has done well. Mother i
want you too pick mee out one of the prityest widows in ala. i will
come home this fawl. pah i want john thomas too hav 30 dollars of
that money eye want you too Buy analyzer a gold Ring. it wont cost
more than $4. i told her i would send her a present. pah that will
take a rite smart of your part of the money but it will come all
right some day for I am going to sell out some time and come and
see all of you. Rite.
R H BURROW
too A H BURROW.
[A] Elizabeth was the wife of his brother Jim.
“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.