Pursuing Outlaw Sam Bass

The trail of the Union Pacific train robbers leads from South Dakota to Texas.

- Johnny D. Boggs

There wasn’t much to Big Springs, Nebraska, in 1877. As Al Sorenson noted in his 1877 book, Hands Up! The History of a Crime, Big Springs was “a small and isolated station, consisting only of the depot, the agent’s house, the water tank, and the section house—361 miles west of Omaha.”

But on the night of September 18, 1877, tiny Big Springs earned its place in Western history when Sam Bass, ringleader Joel Collins and four other “ruffians” pulled off, the Council Bluffs (Iowa) Nonpareil reported, “One of the most daring and successful railroad robberies that have ever been recorded.”

Big Springs is a little bigger today, and there’s a historical marker near the railroad tracks where the heist netted the robbers $10,000 in $20 gold pieces— freshly minted from the San Francisco Mint—$458 from the “the way safe,” which stored passengers’ valuables, and lifted from the passengers, $1,300, four gold watches and a train ticket to Chicago.

“The ladies were unmolested,” the Nonpareil reported.

The bandits could have gotten more.

“When I saw them comin’ I just pitched my wallit [sic] into the coal scuttle and dropped my watch into my bootleg,” one passenger told a reporter, “and when the sharpers came along I told them I were a granger and they passed me by.”

Plus, the outlaws left behind 535 bars of silver worth $682,476 because they were too heavy to carry.

The robbery set off one of the West’s great manhunts. It would cover five present-day states and end,10 months later, almost 1,000 miles south in Texas.

Before Robbing Trains