On 27 October 1863, less than three months after escaping from the prison on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour, Fred Ward and a companion named Fred Britten lay in wait at Split Rock for the mail to Uralla. Bushranging had grown common enough that a police escort now rode with the post, and the two men were surprised by Sergeant Stephen Gardiner and Senior Constable Reynolds. In the shootout that followed, Ward and Britten fled through the boggy ground of Church Gully to the south. Ward took a bullet through the back of his left knee but escaped, treated later by a team of saw-pit men. It was a clumsy, nearly fatal debut, and it taught him a lesson he never forgot.

That bullet in the knee did more than slow him down. It shaped how he worked for the rest of his life. After Split Rock, Thunderbolt preferred to run rather than fight, relying on fast horses and the country he knew intimately rather than standing his ground against police. Over the next six and a half years he robbed mailmen, inns, stores and travellers across an enormous sweep of northern New South Wales, from the Hunter Valley north toward the Queensland border and from Tamworth nearly as far west as Bourke, becoming the longest-roaming bushranger in Australian history. Much of that survival owed to Mary Ann Bugg, the Worimi woman who was his partner for years and whose deep knowledge of the bush kept the gang fed and ahead of the police. And the scar behind his knee waited quietly to do its final job. When his body was brought in years later, that old wound helped confirm beyond doubt that the dead man and the escaped convict were one and the same.

Seven years after his fumbled first robbery, the rock returned to the story. On the afternoon of 25 May 1870, Thunderbolt met a family named Blanch here at Split Rock, robbed them, and then rode back toward their inn with them, an ordinary day's work that would become his last. Before nightfall he would be dead in the water of nearby Kentucky Creek, shot by a single constable after a pursuit of several miles. The outlaw who had spent years using this granite to see trouble coming never saw his own end approaching from the very spot where it all began.

Nobody recorded exactly when Split Rock became Thunderbolt's Rock, but the renaming says everything about how this man lodged himself in the local imagination. Leading up to Federation in 1901, a young nation hungry for its own folklore softened its bushrangers into romantic figures, and Thunderbolt, with his reputation for courtesy and his refusal to kill where he could simply flee, made an easy hero. Today the rock is a heritage-listed picnic site, scrawled with generations of graffiti, still rising over the road exactly as it did when a wounded escapee first climbed it to watch for the mail.