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In Fort Worth:
Ride the TRE and Fort Worth Transportation Authority (The T)'s Safari Shuttle on Saturday to the Fort Worth Zoo.

In Denton:
Ride DART and the Denton County Transportation Authority (DCTA) A-train to the Denton Community Market on Saturday in Downtown Denton.

Visit http://bit.ly/weekend25jul15 to learn more about these great events!

☞Also on this date, but 137 years ago, July 21, 1878, Sam Bass died from the effects of gunshot wounds on his own birthday at the town of Round Rock, Texas.

☞Bass was orphaned at the age of ten and spent five years at the home of an uncle. He ran away in 1869 to work in a sawmill at Rosedale, Mississippi. Bass left Rosedale on horseback late in the summer of 1870 and arrived in Denton, Texas, in early fall. For the winter he worked at ranching southwest of town, but in the spring he went back to Denton to work as a stable hand caring for horses.

☞Before long Bass became interested in horse racing, and in 1874, after acquiring a fleet mount that became known as the Denton Mare and winning most of the horse races in North Texas, he took his mare to San Antonio, where he had no luck and gave up horse racing. In 1876, he and Joel Collins gathered a herd of longhorn cattle to take up the Chisholm Trail. After selling the herd, they had $8,000 in their pockets, but instead of returning to Texas, where they owed for the cattle, they squandered the money in gambling at Ogallala, Nebraska, and in the Black Hills town of Deadwood, South Dakota.

☞In 1877 Bass and Collins recruited a gang of outlaws to rob stagecoaches, but failing to meet with much success as stage robbers, they rode south to Big Springs, Nebraska, where they held up an eastbound Union Pacific passenger train and made off with over $60,000. After dividing the loot the bandits decided to go in pairs in different directions. Within a few weeks Collins and two others were killed while resisting arrest, but Bass, disguised as a farmer, made it back to Texas, where he formed a new outlaw gang.

☞He and his brigands held up two stagecoaches and, in the spring of 1878, robbed four trains within twenty-five miles of Dallas. They did not get much money, but the robberies aroused citizens, and the bandits were the object of a spirited chase across North Texas by posses and a special company of Texas Rangers headed by Captain Junius W. Peak (1845-1934). Bass eluded his pursuers until one of his party, Jim Murphy, turned informer. As the Bass Gang rode south intending to rob a small bank in Round Rock, Murphy wrote to Major John B. Jones (1834-1881), commander of the Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers. In Round Rock on July 19, Bass and his men became engaged in a gun battle, in which he was wounded. The next morning Bass was found lying helpless propped up against a tree trunk in a pasture north of town and was brought back to Round Rock. He died there on July 21, 1878, his twenty-seventh birthday.

☞In death, Sam’s legend grew, helped along by a song. “The Ballad of Sam Bass,” written by John Denton of Gainesville, Texas, was sung by many cowhands in an attempt to sooth the herd on stormy nights. Sam’s fame spread to Great Britain in the late 1800s, culminating in a wax effigy of Sam being placed in the gallery of Madam Tussaud’s Waxworks in London.