Stars Fell on Alabama by Carl Carmer

Author:Carl Carmer
Format: epub

3. RUBE BURROW: ALABAMA ROBIN HOOD

Rube Burrow could lift a seven-hundred-pound sack and walk off with it, no sign of buckling in his six feet of straight man. One day he went hunting with only his pistol. With twenty shots he killed nineteen quail—and broke the wing of the twentieth. He was the outlaw king of Alabama—some say he was a bolder train robber than Jesse James—and he never robbed a poor man. All the songs about him and the old paper-covered dime novels will tell you that.

And over west in Lamar County (old-timers still call it Rube Burrow’s County) the first story they always tell about the fearless bandit is of the time when, pursued by deputies, he stopped at the home of a widow-woman and asked for a meal. While she prepared it, Rube saw tears on her cheeks and asked her why she was sad. She said her landlord was that very day foreclosing the mortgage on her little home.

“How much will clear the mortgage?” said Rube.

“Seven hundred dollars.”

“Here’s the money,” said Rube; “what time will he come?”

“Around two.”

“Be sure to get a receipt,” said Rube.

That afternoon as the landlord walked smiling back toward town—seven hundred dollars in his pocket, he suddenly looked into the muzzles of two pistols.

“Hand it over,” said Rube.

At eighteen Rube Burrow was finding the forests and farms of Lamar County pretty tame. That was in 1872. So he was off to be a cowboy in Texas. Four years later his brother Jim joined him and for ten years after that it was a wise rancher who could recognize his own cows after the Burrow boys had done a fancy job of superimposing their own brand.

After a decade of it, cattle rustling seemed neither exciting nor lucrative enough. And so in 1886 the passengers and crew of a train that had just pulled out of Bellevue, Texas, looked down the muzzles of rifles in the hands of four determined men and gave up what valuables they had—which were few enough. A scared soldier surrendered a brace of pistols, however, that were to become famous throughout all the Southeastern states. Two months later a train, boarded at Gordon, gave up $2500 from the express and a thousand from the registered mail. And an express car, looted at Benbrook in September of the same year, added another $2450 to the swelling hoard of the bandits.

Then the brothers went back to their Alabama home in Lamar County for a visit. They had money and they spent it. There was swaggering and boasting—and the people of Lamar, many of them kinfolks, looked upon them fondly.

Their visit at an end, their funds low, the Burrow boys invaded Arkansas and there at Genoa they took $200 from Express Train No. 2 of the Arkansas & Texas Railway. The Southern Express Company, proud of its record of seventeen years without a robbery, set detectives to work to apprehend those responsible for its humiliation and the brothers were at last given the notoriety they had so richly deserved.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.