Back when robbing trains was a real thing, not just a Bugs Bunny trope, an attempted train heist took place on the night of June 9th, 1898, in Coleman County. Four robbers, loaded up with dynamite and guns, enacted a plan to stop the train when the fireman disembarked to throw the track switch. They hid in a ditch, emerging to fire shots into the air when the train came to a halt.Their plan did not go smoothly, and the robbers were forced to flee without any loot.

“The engineer, Jim Stanton, leaped from the cab and crawled under the engine, but the poor fireman, Lee Johnson, was forced by the robbers to attempt to open the express car and was caught in the line of fire between Buchanan [a railroad official who was traveling on the trains] and the gang. A good many shots were fired, and one from Buchanan broke the leg of one robber; this was too much for the bandits and they left, placing the wounded man on a horse and taking him along with them,” Leona Banister Bruce records in her book, Banister Was There. The wounded fireman was taken to Santa Anna, where he died the following day.

Then Brownwood resident, Texas Ranger and all around tough guy John Banister was called onto the case. Banister was inspecting cattle at the Brownwood shipping pens when he was alerted about the incident and summoned to take part in the search for the robbers.

The thieves were located in Sutton County several days later by San Angelo Sheriff Gerome Shield. One of the robbers, a man called Bill Taylor, was placed in the Brownwood jail, from which he escaped in 1901. Banister went out to get him again, this time finding him near Loma Alta, where he had shot another member of his gang for turning traitor. That bandit in turn shot Taylor before dying himself. A wounded Taylor was taken back to town in the same wagon with his dead cohort. When asked if he wanted to be hauled in the same conveyance, Taylor is reported to have said, ‘Hell, yes! I was not afraid of that so-and-so when he was alive, and I’m damn sure not afraid of him now!”

Taylor recovered from his wound and it appears, almost unbelievably, that he escaped jail in Brownwood again soon after being recaptured. Taylor finally got away completely, never to be heard from again. Although the documentation on how many times he was in jail and escaped is a bit hazy, it’s hard to imagine it’s all true. As many times as he’d get out, I would think that Banister, who was tough as old shoe leather and always got his man, would have just gone out and brought him in again.

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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns and articles appear periodically on BrownwoodNews.com