Asked to name Indiana's most infamous criminal, most people would say
  John Dillinger, hands down.  Asked who is Mitchell ,  Indiana's favorite son,
   respondents wouldn't hesitate to remember astronaut Virgil "Gus" Grissom. 

    Samuel Bass never reached the notoriety of a Dillinger, and will never
  be venerated as Grissom is, but he was both a criminal and a native son
  of near Mitchell, Indiana.  He too entered the domain of the legendary.

    Bass was born July 2l, l85l.  That day didn't turn out to be his lucky day.
  Part of a large farm family, at least partially descended from sturdy, salt-of-the
  earth German stock,  he was orphaned by l3.  He and some of his siblings,
  children of Daniel Bass and Elizabeth Sheeks Bass, were taken in by an
  uncle, Daniel Sheeks.  As  the "Ballad of Sam Bass," with its ten verses, goes:

     Sam Bass was born in Indiana/it was his native home/ and at the age of
  seventeen/ young Sam began to roam/ He first went out to Texas, a cowboy
  for to be..."

     There is considerable literature to be found on Sam's short but dramatic
  life.  It appears he inherited the industriousness and work ethic of his family
  line, but began to spend his youth in drinking, gambling and other vices.  His
  two-year crime spree of stagecoach, US mail and train robberies made him
  the stuff of legend and myth.  He has been called generous, fun-loving,
  gregarious and likeable.  His career has also been downplayed in comparison
  to the Reno and James brothers' gangs, and some writers have called him
  inept.  (The Reno brothers were from Seymour, Indiana and the earliest
  train robbers.)

     After the September l9, l877 robbery of a Union Pacific train and the theft
  of a reported Sixty Thousand in gold, Sam's gang gained celebrity  status and
  spawned a long-lived story about hidden treasure and buried gold.

    Those of us who grew up with Saturday cowboy matinees remember Randolph 
  Scott in the role of  Sam Bass in the movie "Belle Starr."  But Sam Bass was
  dead before Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed married her second husband Sam Starr
  in l880 and began her climb into the history of the old West.  Unlike Hollywood's
  writers who don't bother with facts and truth, researchers into the life and times
  of this Indiana "badman" find it difficult to separate fact and fiction. A photo of
  Sam shows a man with mean eyes, but is this part of the act of a desperado
  wannabe?  Was he a good boy led astray by the company he kept?
  
     As a Hollywood screenwriter might have it--just like the finale of the Saturday
  westerns--Sam Bass comes to an ignominious end.  One of his cohorts becomes an informant.  Sam is shot by those legendary figures, the Texas Rangers and cashed in his chips on his 27th birthday, July 2l, l878.
 
 

     While Sam isn't much of a Wild West persona in Indiana he lies with or without his
  boots on, beneath an impressive gravestone in Round Rock, Texas, where
  each year the bringing down of a Hoosier-born  outlaw is re-enacted during
  annual community festival.

                                                          END

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