Second-Rate Badman

SAM BASS--Wayne Gard--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Since the publication of Walter Burns's The Saga of Billy the Kid in 1926, romanticized accounts of the lives of Western desperadoes have become as commonplace in the U. S. literary scene as gangster films in the cinema. Last week the appearance of a routine volume dealing with a minor Texas badman not only revealed how thoroughly this particular field of Americana had been combed but suggested that a work of definite historical value might be produced if Western biographers would turn their eyes away from the gunsmoke of legend that surrounds their heroes and concentrate on the environments in which they flourished. As in Thomas Ripley's life of Wesley Hardin, They Died with Their Boots On (TIME, July 29, 1935), Wayne Card's life of Sam Bass is least interesting in those sections where the central figure is built up as a bold and exceptional individual, most vivid in its account of political and social struggles on the frontier.

As a gunman, Bass did not amount to much. His great claim to fame lay in his having taken a minor part in a train robbery at Big Springs, Neb. in 1877, and getting one-sixth of the $60,000 loot. He then led a gang, operating out of Denton, Tex. that held up four trains in a few weeks. The biggest haul, however, was only $1,280, to be divided among four men. Bass dodged Rangers and posses for a year, was betrayed by a spy in his gang, pinked while preparing to rob a bank at Round Rock. In his lawless career, the only man for whose death he was responsible was a deputy who fell in the general melee when Bass received his mortal wound.

Since Wayne Gard writes in what critics have called the Little-Did-He-Think school of biography, his labors to enhance Bass's reputation as a bad man are largely in vain. Instead of a portrait of a bold gunman defying the law, readers are likely to think of Bass as a poor illiterate devil who was constantly falling into traps, robbing empty trains, making friends with spies. A tall Indiana boy, an orphan at 13, Bass was caught up in the social chaos that followed the Civil War, drifted South in Reconstruction days, worked in a Mississippi sawmill, before he became involved in crooked horse racing in Texas. In his early career the unpopularity of the State Government, supported by Federal troops, made the concealment of outlaws relatively easy, since few citizens would cooperate with officers.

Most ironic development in Bass's career came with his spectacular, profitless raids on the dinky little Texas trains that ran from Dallas to Houston. They occurred at the height of the Granger agitation for lower freight rates, when railroads were denounced throughout the West, consequently aroused excitement out of all proportion to their importance as robberies. Afterwards Bass apparently could count on enough support among the farmers to feel sure of hiding places when pursuit grew hot, although his attacks on the railroads had not helped the farmers and scarcely hurt the carriers.

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