The Great Pixley Train Robbery

When former convict John Sontag was employed on a farm in Tulare County (near Visalia) by Chris Evans, a Canadian who had migrated to California, he found his boss had a grievance over the dealings of the Southern Pacific, who were putting undue pressure on landowners to sell their property to the railroad. The two began robbing trains and on February 22, 1889 they put on masks, boarded a locomotive in the Northern California town of Pixley and forced the train to stop. They made off with about $5,000 and escaped on horseback. This story song recorded by Cass McCombs for Tip of the Sphere chronicles the violent robbery.

Asked by Uncut magazine why he decided to document the robbery, McCombs replied: "There's this tradition of writing songs about historic events. Like, people used to write songs about the Titanic or the typhoid outbreak and whatever. I think we do it now, but in a different way. One part of this album that a lot of previous compositions are touching on is my environment, which is growing up in the west, which has a history of genocide and the blood that is under our feet and also the Gold Rush - hence the Great Pixley Train Robbery. It's a symbol of the West, but it's also a real historic event. In the west there was something called the 'doctrine of discovery', which was basically a bait-and-switch way for the settlers to steal the land from the native people. It works with the idea that 'we are superior to you, obviously, so you will disappear and we will dominate.' If you go looking for that in the west, you find it everywhere. A band like The Doors were really expressive of that kind of reality."