1886: From their base at Cottonwood Springs, Erath County (near Alexander), Rube Burrow, his brother Jim, and a friend, Nep Thorton, rode north to Bellevue, Clay County, and held up the Fort Worth and Denver train. Thorton held the engineer and fireman at bay , while Rube and Jim went through the coaches, robbing the passengers. Rube Burrow stopped at a farm house in northern Tarrant County as his recent robbery was being discussed. Someone said: “If I’d been a man I’d a-shot some of them plagued varmints that was agoin’ through that train a slappin’ women in the face and skeerin’ the children.” Then Rube “he flared up, kinder mad, like, and said something about a man named Jay Gould [a Robber Barron who said he could pay half of Texas to kill the other half] who owned the train and had all that money piled up adoin’ nobody no good, and it was about half right to sorter scatter it around ” After Burrow left, the farm family agreed that he sounded “mighty like one of those anarchy fellows that they hung up in Chicago.”

Dan Young, Town and Country Bank, A Calendar of Erath County History, 1987. (December)