Author’s Note

It’s the hope of the historian to dig into a legend and find facts. It’s the hope of the novelist to take facts and mould them into some personal version of truth. For the facts, I’ve depended heavily on four writers—an anonymous author (presumably T. E. Hogg) who published Life and Adventures of Sam Bass, the Notorious Union Pacific and Texas Train Robber in 1878; Charles L. Martin, whose A Sketch of Sam Bass, the Bandit appeared in 1880; Walter Prescott Webb’s classic The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, first published in 1935; and Wayne Gard’s equally classic biography, Sam Bass, first published in 1936. Because of their efforts, more facts are known about Sam Bass than most of the notorious Western outlaws, and my debt to them is great.

Although I’ve taken care not to contradict historical testimony, I haven’t hesitated to bend the facts and invent situations and personal histories and descriptions when the needs of my story required it. That’s why this book is a novel.

Dallas       Bryan Woolley

February 1983