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Robbed By Rube
or
Standing and Delivering
West of the Colorado

by Mike Cox
Mike Cox

“West of the Pecos” are four words that used to be synonymous with “wild and wooly.”

But from the 1820s to the mid-1870s, “West of the Colorado” would have been an equally suitable phrase for describing unsettled Texas.

The Colorado and its tributaries constituted the line of demarcation between settled and wild Texas for at least a decade after the Civil War. Even into 1880-81, before the Texas and Pacific Railroad finally made it across West Texas, “West of the Colorado” meant way out there.

Crime proved a particular problem, especially state coach robbing.

Alex Sweet, a Texas newspaper writer with a fine sense of humor, once described a stage coach holdup west of the Colorado where “we had just come to the San Saba [River] bottom.”

Telling the story in the third person to a doctor he never named, Sweet referred to himself as “the reporter.”

The reporter was one of four passengers in a stage coach traveling on a day so cold that the side curtains of the coach were all buttoned. When the stage came to a sudden halt, one of the passengers, not being able to see out, asked the driver if they had come to a stage stand.

“No,” the driver reported, “this is a six-shooter post office.”

Two pistol-packing robbers then relieved the passengers of all valuables they had not been able to hurriedly hide, but no one got harmed other than financially.

“The reporter,” Sweet went on, “concluded by saying that this was the only stage-robbing experience he had ever had. The driver looked earnestly at the doctor, and winked at all that part of the state west of the Colorado river.”

Stage robbery occurred so often “West of the Colorado,” Sweet continued, that “the traveling public became so accustomed to going through the usual ceremonies that they complained to the stage company if they came through unmolested. Being robbed came to be regarded as a vested right.”

Fifty-eight years after the fact, Austin resident Sam Moore still liked talking about the time he faced highwaymen in 1879.

Just back from a trail drive, Moore had boarded the west-bound stage in Austin. The Capital City had rail service to points north and east, but stagecoaches remained the only form of public transportation “West of the Colorado.”

“When we reached the Peg Leg Crossing, on the San Saba River, a fellow wearing a mask rode out and unhitched the horses and ordered everyone from the coach,” Moore recalled in an interview in the long-defunct Austin Dispatch in 1937.

Four traveling salesman – then called “drummers” – and a young woman shared the stage with Moore. Drummers usually conducted their business in cash and road agents considered them “rich pickings.”

The outlaws searched the salesmen and relieved them of cash and coin. After examining the lady’s purse and jewelry, the lead robber handed it back, courteously saying he didn’t rob women.

Then the gunman turned his attention to Moore.

“He…punched me in the ribs with his gun, and said, ‘Keep your stuff, there ain’t no cowboy got a damn thing.’”

Noticing the masked man’s eyes looked somewhat familiar, Moore figured the robber knew him. The young cowboy may or may not have known the robber, but he later maintained the man was Rube Burrow, “a rather notorious character with whom Uncle Sam was acquainted.”

Eventually arrested for murder in Tucson, Ariz., “Burrow” was extradited to Texas and booked into the Travis county jail, a castle-like stone structure built in 1875 across from the Capitol.

“After a time,” Moore continued his tale, “a woman, representing herself to be ‘Burrow’s’ wife, appeared at the jail to visit her husband, with food and clean clothing.”

The visits continued with regularity for several months.

“Then one afternoon, when time came to let her out the ‘wife’ pushed a Colt into the jailers’ ribs and demanded the keys. Wearing a Mother Hubbard, ‘Rube Burrow’ clattered down the steps and made his escape. The woman dressed in her husband’s garb, remained in jail.”

“Burrow,” whoever he really was, never again appeared in Texas.

That was Moore’s story, anyway. An Alabama-born character by the name of Rube Burrow with a Robin Hood-like reputation did spend some time in Texas during the 1870s and 1880s, but his first crime is not believed to have occurred until 1886, well after the robbery Moore remembered.

The Texas Rangers eventually rounded up the Peg Leg stage robbers, but the only thing that truly put an end to stage coach robbing was the expansion of rail service in Texas. And then bandits took to robbing trains.


© Mike Cox - May 21, 2014 column
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