Texas Outlaw (St. James)

$5,000 REWARD. Wanted Dead or Alive. Notorious Badman. SAM BASS, alias Sam Bushon, and Honest Eph. If sighted, immediately call the nearest U. S. Marshall's Office. After a month of moving BeeBop Publishing Group to Georgetown, Texas from Brenham, Texas, I took a ride south on IH-35 from Georgetown to Austin. I couldn't help but notice a large green and white highway sign that said Sam Bass Road. I became interested where this road went, exited, and followed it to a road sign for A. W. Grimes Boulevard. I'm not sure why, but I needed to find out who these people were just like I did when I wrote a story about the Runaway Scrape in Texas and discovered Three-Legged Willie's statue on the town square in Georgetown. As a legend, as is with all folklore, the account of Sam Bass' life is as varied as there are books written about him and his exploits in the late 1800s. Sam Bass and his gang held up two stagecoaches while in Deadwood, South Dakota in 1877. Sam had a fling with Calamity Jane and sat in the same chair Wild Bill Hickok sat before being shot in a poker game holding a Dead Man's Hand, Aces and Eights. Such a hand was said to have been held by Wild Bill Hickok, a lawman, and gunfighter and good friend of Sam Bass. In the fall of 1877, Sam Bass and his Horse Marines robbed the eastbound Union Pacific passenger train and came away with over $60,000 in twenty-dollar gold pieces. After a successful robbery, they split up into pairs and went in all directions. Some were caught. Bass was an excellent transformist and disguised himself as a poor farmer and made his way back to Denton County, Texas, with his share of the gold. In the springtime of 1878, Sam and his gang robbed four trains within twenty miles of Dallas. Word was sent to Governor Hubbard that something needed to be done. The bandits became the object of a spirited chase across North Texas by reward-seeking citizens and a specialized company of Texas Rangers headed by Junius Peak. Follow the life story of Sam Bass from his childhood days to his last days in Round Rock, Texas, on July 21, 1878. Even though this notorious outlaw spent less than a week in this small community, his short visit put the town on world atlases. He also had a major street named after him. It wasn't only a few years ago the community got together and named a boulevard after Deputy A. W. Grimes, the man Sam Bass was accused of killing in 1878. Unlike John Wesley Hardin, Bass had no notches on his gun handle and once joked about selling his revolver for money.

BILL LONGLEY RIDES ALONENo Friends. No Law. Just a Fast Horse.A Legend Forged in Gunfire, Bound by Blood, and Haunted by God. He was a Texas son born of black soil, Sunday sermons, and six-shooters. A preacher's boy raised on Scripture and sweat, taught to fear the Lord and till the land-but who instead learned to speak the gospel of gunpowder. His name? Bill Longley.Not Jesse James. Not Sam Bass. Not Billy the Kid. But to those who truly knew the underbelly of the American frontier, Bill Longley was the name whispered around campfires long after the whiskey ran dry. He was the outlaw you prayed you never saw ride into town. The storm came without warning. The shadow that never lingered but always returned. And this-this is the story of the man who rode alone.They say Bill Longley killed thirty-two men. They say he laughed at the hangman. They say his bullets never missed. But what they don't say-what most can't say-is who he really was underneath the legend. A boy who once memorized the Psalms. A son who watched the war tear his family apart. A man whose soul never stopped boiling, even when his hands finally went cold. They say Bill was a killer. And they're right. But he was more than that. He was a mirror-reflecting the broken heart of Texas in the years after the Civil War. A time when laws changed, but justice didn't. A time when grief festered into a rage and turned boys into outlaws, farmers into fugitives, and riders into ghosts.Bill Longley was a ghost long before he ever died.He rode from Lee County like a man chased by something no bullet could stop. Was it vengeance? Guilt? Or was it just the crushing weight of being born at the wrong time with the wrong fire in his blood? The answers ride with you through every page of Bill Longley Rides Alone, a visceral, emotionally charged novel that doesn't just tell you about an outlaw-it puts you in the saddle beside him.This isn't a hero's journey. And it's not a villain's fall.It's a reckoning.The novel begins not with a gunfight but with silence. The kind of silence that seeps into a boy's bones when he realizes his father's prayers can't stop the storm coming for his family. Bill grew up watching the world around him unravel. Cotton fields became battlefields. Neighbors became enemies. And lawmen? They were just faster killers with shiny badges.When he first pulled a trigger in anger, it wasn't glory he found-it was grief. It followed him like a second shadow. Every time he rode away, blood followed. Every town he entered whispered his name before the saloon doors even swung shut. And yet, Bill Longley didn't ride to make a name-he rode because staying still meant facing the faces of the dead.You'll ride with him to Bell County, where a land dispute turns into a gunshot that echoes through generations. You'll flee with him through the canyons of Blanco, feel the law tightening like a noose behind him, and smell the black powder burning in a narrow alleyway as another man falls. You'll meet the preacher who doesn't give up on him, the woman who loved him long before the killings, and the brother who waited with a porch light burning in case Bill ever came home.This is not a Western dressed in white hats and shootouts at noon. This is Texas after the war, where revenge was quicker than courts and where every man rode with a Bible in his saddlebag and a rifle under his coat. This is the Texas that raised Bill Longley. And it's the one he left bleeding behind him.He had no gang. No posse. No code but his own.Bill Longley rode alone.No friends. No law. Just a fast horse.But even a fast horse can't outrun what's buried in your past. Step into the world of Sidney St. James, a master of the written word whose enthralling tales blend imagination and history into an extraordinary tapestry of creative nonfiction. St. James weaves captivating narratives that transport readers to distant eras, revealing untold stories and breathing life into forgotten characters wi