The Last Ride of Sam Bass

In July 1878 the most-sung outlaw in Texas rode into Round Rock to rob its bank and left the town in a pine box. Sam Bass had already made his name holding up stagecoaches and a Union Pacific train in Nebraska, and the ballads were being written about him while he was still alive — but a betrayal by one of his own gang put the Texas Rangers a step ahead. This drive follows his story across the town that killed him: the table-shaped stone ford in Brushy Creek that gave Round Rock its name and carried the old Chisholm Trail, the Old Town commercial row where the gunfight erupted, and the cemetery where Bass was buried after refusing to the last breath to name the friends who rode with him. It is a short drive with a walkable Old Town stretch — legend and hard fact, side by side, on the ground where a folk hero met the law.