Sam Bass Train Robbery

Mesquite was one stop in a string of holdups. The Handbook of Texas says Bass and his band robbed four trains within twenty-five miles of Dallas in the spring of 1878 and did not get much money. The robberies still stirred citizens, and a special company of Texas Rangers under Junius Peak joined the posses chasing the gang across North Texas. Bass eluded them until one of his own party, Jim Murphy, turned informer. Bass lived only a few more months. He died at Round Rock on July 21, 1878, his twenty-seventh birthday.

What the plaque says

Sam Bass Train Robbery Sam Bass -- with Seab Barnes, Hank Underwood, "Arkansas" Johnson, and Frank Jackson -- held up a Texas & Pacific train here, April 10, 1878. They took $152, but missed hidden shipment of $30,000. In planning a bank robbery 3 months later, Bass was fatally shot by rangers. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 9.3 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 9.5 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 11 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 12 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.

More markers nearby

• City of Mesquite — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Mesquite — steps away
• Site of Galloway Farmstead — 2.9 mi
• Site of Scyene Meeting Place — 3.3 mi