Baxter's Curve

Baxter's Curve is a bend in the railway roughly midway between Dryden and Sanderson, and it is where one of the last major train robberies in West Texas went wrong for the men attempting it. Just after midnight on 13 March 1912, Ben Kilpatrick and Ole Hobek boarded Southern Pacific train number nine at Dryden, put on masks once the town was behind them, and took the engineer and crew hostage. Kilpatrick had ridden with Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch and had been out of federal prison nine months, having served ten years of a fifteen year sentence for passing banknotes taken in an earlier robbery. He was, by the standards of 1912, a professional. Ordered into the express car, the Wells Fargo messenger David Trousdale walked past a consignment of oysters packed in ice, picked up the ice mallet, and put it inside his coat. The safe held almost nothing, two packages worth thirty nine dollars between them, so Kilpatrick cut open a mail pouch instead. Then Trousdale offered him a package he said was worth more than everything already taken. Kilpatrick rested his rifle against his leg and reached for it, and Trousdale hit him in the head with the mallet and killed him. He took the rifle, put out the lights and waited. When Hobek came looking for his partner, Trousdale shot him. Both bodies were taken to Sanderson, propped upright for photographs, and buried in one grave.