Wells-Fargo presented a gold watch, suitably inscribed, to Messenger Trousdale; and passengers contributed to purchase a gold watch fob 'with a diamond set in a Texas star' for the brave man.  Twenty-three years afterward, thanks to the unremitting labor of the Rev. A. N. Eshman, minister of a church in Trousdale's old home town of Columbia, Tennessee, Congress considered the matter and awarded one thousand dollars to the messenger who had safeguarded registered mail valued at $66,000.  In February of 1946, according to an interview with him in the 'Erie Railroad Magazine', Trousdale, still hale and rugged, had just retired after 43 years on the rails, all spent in the service of Railway Express and predecessor concerns. 
    I could wish that some ballad maker of the hillbilly school, which has celebrated in song nearly all of the thugs and parasites of the South and Southwest, would be inspired by the cold courage displayed by Dave Trousdale to give us a dozen or so strophes entitled 'The Brave Wells Fargo Man', dedicated to him who so deftly exterminated two roaches at Dryden, Texas, in 1912."