Late Beginners
Rube and Jim Burrow
Rueben Burrow (sometimes Burrows) started his criminal career later than the average outlaw. Most of the punks who set out to rob and kill people for fun and profit were youngsters, but Rube was thirty-two when he went bad in 1886, a comparative Methuselah for his time.
He had started out on the right side of the law when he ranched in Arkansas and later when he moved to a property near Stephenville, Texas. He married, had two children, and was a well-respected citizen, a Mason in the local lodge.
His wife died after just four years of marriage, but Rube raised the little ones alone until he married again four years later. About that time he bought a farm near the hamlet of Alexander, Texas, and set out to peacefully farm. His luck was not in, however, and after his crops failed, he looked around for a more reliable way of making his way in the world.
The solution was, he concluded, train robbery. After all, the iron horse regularly carried lots of desirable things, real money and sometimes gold bullion in the express car, registered letters in the mail car, and passengers with pockets that jingled. And trains regularly ran to the same places at the same times; they could not escape you by turning aside and dashing for some safe place.
So Rube raised his own little gang, with his younger brother Jim as the nucleus. He added a couple of no-goods named Brock—also brothers—and on the first of December, 1886, they stopped a Fort Worth and Denver train, robbing the passengers of their valuables but skipping the mail car, which for some reason they thought was heavily guarded. Part of their loot included the weapons of a squad of soldiers the gang found sound asleep in the last car.
The take was only a few hundred dollars, and so, when they stopped their next train—a Texas and Pacific passenger train—on January 23, 1887, they took on the mail car as well. It proved to be a piece of cake. Herding the engine crew before him, Rube commanded the mail messenger to open up, and when that courageous man refused, Rube fired several times in the air and loudly announced that he had dispatched the engineer and fireman. Open the door, he commanded, or I’ll start on the passengers.
At this the car door opened, and the gang got more than two thousand dollars. That was a lot of money in 1887, and it whetted the gang’s appetite for more . . . much more. And so, in June, Rube and Jim and their henchmen hit another Texas and Pacific train and did even better: three thousand dollars this time.
That holdup had worked so well that in September they stuck up another Texas and Pacific train. In fact, it was the same train, with the same crew, at the same place. The take was about the same as the last time, and then they got another thirty-five hundred dollars from robbing the St. Louis, Arkansas and Texas train up in Arkansas. This time, however, they narrowly missed being captured by the local sheriff.
But they kept it up, until the railroads began to wonder if the gang was getting inside information from somebody with knowledge of the railroad network. For the gang got another three thousand dollars or so from a Fort Worth and Denver train in early 1888, and they hit the poor old Texas and Pacific again for another couple of thousand.
But this time the railroad detectives had something to go on, for one of the Brock brothers had left behind a new raincoat. It was traced back to him, and on his confession he was sent away to think about his sins for the next twenty years. He didn’t begin to make it, preferring to hurl himself from a four-story cell tier.
Pinkerton detectives were by now hot on the trail of the gang, entering the front door of Burrow’s family home in Alabama as Jim ran out the back door. The railroads now took the intelligent step of providing all conductors with sketches and descriptions of the gang, a tactic that soon bore fruit.
Jim and Rube barely escaped capture when a conductor recognized them and called police; fleeing down a street from the railroad station, they were spotted by a reporter, who also shouted for police until Jim shot him down. Their bad luck was just beginning, for a short time later they were spotted at a Nashville station. Rube shot his way clear, but Jim was captured. He was a nasty prisoner, bragging about all the crimes he and Rube had committed and delivering this arrogant message: “My name is Jim Burrow, and the other man on the train is my brother Rube, and if you give us two pistols apiece, we are not afraid of any two men living.”
Maybe so, but there was something he should have feared. For before the year was out, Jim Burrow was dead of tuberculosis.
Rube, now alone, became increasingly vicious. During the holdup of a train in December of 1888 he murdered an Illinois Central passenger who didn’t want to give up his wallet.
And the following June, it got even worse. Rube asked a relative to pick up a package for him at the local post office, and the postmaster refused to let the relative sign for the mail. Rube went to town and shot the postmaster down in front of his wife. Tipping his hat, the story goes, he rode out of town.
In spite of his vicious nature, Rube was pretty well protected on his run-down farm in Lamar County, Alabama, where he had built a secret room in his house, complete with concealed firing ports. Kinfolk and friends would warn him if there were lawmen about. Rube wasn’t bright enough to stop robbing, however, and with a new henchman, one Jackson, he hit a train at Buckatunna, Alabama, getting away with a real bonanza for the time, around eleven thousand dollars.
A plague of other train holdups followed, although Rube probably didn’t commit all that were attributed to him. At least one man ended up dead after being mistaken for Rube, a cousin who was shot down for the seventy-five-hundred-dollar reward on Rube’s head. Jackson was captured by the authorities, but Rube managed at least one more train robbery before his time came. This time it was the Louisville and Nashville, poorer by some four thousand dollars, in mid-1890.
It was Rube’s last hurrah. He went shopping in Linden, Alabama, perusing the local hardware store for rifles. Carter, the clerk, alertly went into the back room, checked some wanted posters, and emerged with his own rifle. He locked Rube in the storeroom and went off to find some law, but while he was away, Rube broke out.
Now, most men would, in the language of the day, have “taken it on the heel and toe”; not Rube. He was, the story goes, humiliated by being captured by a lowly store clerk; the cure for his unhappiness was to seek out the clerk to kill him. It was a big mistake, a terminal one.
For when he caught up with Carter and opened up on him, Carter pulled his own pistol and returned fire; both men fought it out in the street. Rube drew first blood, hitting Carter in the arm. But Carter’s aim was better, and his retort ripped open Burrow’s stomach. He died in the street, but Carter would survive to receive the reward.
What remained of Rube was shipped home, where he was met by an assortment of people, including his mother and father. One last humiliation awaited: When he was unloaded from the baggage car, he came flying out of his coffin, thrown, one tale says, by detectives accompanying the remains. The outlaw’s corpse was allegedly covered with an assortment of terrible scars, the products of some postmortem kicking around by lawmen.
Maybe so, maybe not, but it’s hard to get too excited over the indignity when you remember the postmaster who was spitefully murdered in front of his wife.