"I am trapped, shoot the fellows," Gipsy Smith screamed in one account of the moment before an accomplice opened fire on sergeant John McNally.

A bullet ploughed into McNally's chest and dug itself mercilessly into his spine as he stood over the fallen Smith.

Another found the forehead and left arm of McNally's offsider Constable John Moore, who fell, stunned, to the ground.

Smith and his accomplice melted into the night.

Moore came to and dragged McNally into a nearby tent. The sergeant was dead within 15 minutes.

Gipsy Smith was among a slew of bushrangers terrorising isolated travellers around Maryborough in 1856, though that area was not the only one haunted by violent thugs.

Reports filtered in throughout that year of armed hold-ups along roads throughout the colony.

Two merchants travelling near Heathcote were stopped by bushrangers, "leisurely proceeded to strip and gag them, after which they tied them to a tree", according to a Kyneton Examiner story also published in the Bendigo Advertiser.

More news: Bendigo Community Health closes for deep clean after COVID-19 exposure

The merchants lost all of the expensive wares as well as every penny they had made at stops stretching back to Kilmore.

The perpetrators may have been the same ones who led police on high speed horse chases between Carisbrook and Castlemaine that only ended when one was filled with lead and the other escaped, according to now defunct Melbourne paper The Argus.

Many bushrangers' robberies were audacious.

A gang of them spent a day marching people at gunpoint from a road near Dunolly through the bush to a clearing.

One stood guard, two took their victims' valuables and the others waited at the road for more victims.

"Their first victim was tied to the tree, with his arms behind him; and the rest - twelve in number - arm-in-arm with him," a newspaper account related.

"They were in this position for about five hours, when something occurred to scare the villains, they bolted, when Mr Nash and fellow sufferers lost no time in effecting their release."

Bushrangers stalk Australia's popular imagination as 19th century Robin Hoods and are often portrayed as fiercely independent, noble outsiders created by the evils of elites and convict masters.

It is easy to romanticise people when they aren't pointing a gun at you.

One newspaper correspondent relating to Sergeant John McNally's death - the one described at the start of this article - suggested Gipsy Smith and his accomplice were fortunate to escape.

"I feel nearly confident they would have been lynched, because poor McNally was highly esteemed by all, and in the same ratio detested by the ruffians," they said.

If there was one generous thing a colonial journalist could say about Smith, it was that he had a remarkably thick skull.

It was so thick that McNally failed to knock him out in the nighttime raid on Smith's campsite that fatal night, according to one account written in the days following the killing.

Smith - whose real name was the far less exotic William Turner - had arrived in Tasmania as a young convict and spent time at Port Arthur, "where the worst class of criminals were confined", Melbourne paper The Argus would write in 1879 following his death.

He became a bushranger after escaping to Victoria in 1853, right in time to prey on the vast multitudes of people moving between newly established gold rush settlements.

"Smith was often seen in a spirit of bravado passing among the diggers with a red sash round his waist, in which were exhibited a brace of pistols," according to The Argus's obituary.

His cocky attitude caught up with him in the days following the murder of Sergeant McNally when he sauntered into a Maryborough store and was recognised by the owner.

Like this story? Here's another from the series: Police pulled dead councillor from the sea

The store owner alerted plain clothed police officers.

An account in the Mount Alexander Mail depicted Smith reaching for a gun but thinking twice as officers "presented their muskets at him, telling him that if he dared to stir one inch he was a dead man, for they would blow his brains out forthwith".

Smith avoided a murder conviction and potential death penalty.

The charges were downgraded to manslaughter at trial on a technicality. His lawyers had found a problem with his arrest warrant.

Still, he was sentenced to 15 years hard labour.

All those years in the bush did pay off when he gained his freedom, according to an 1879 obituary in the Argus.

Someone trusted him so much they got him to drive mobs of cattle from New South Wales to Melbourne markets and even put him in charge of a farm.

So maybe Smith went to his death thinking that in a funny sort of way, crime had paid after all.

This story is the latest in the Bendigo Weekly's regular history series entitled WHAT HAPPENED?