America's First Train Robbery
On October 6, 1866, the Reno brothers boarded an Ohio & Mississippi train near Seymour, Indiana, and invented a brand-new American crime: robbing a moving train.
On the evening of October 6, 1866, a passenger train pulled out of the depot at Seymour, Indiana — and three masked men walked calmly down its aisles toward the express car. Minutes later they had overpowered the guard, cracked open a safe, and heaved a second, heavier safe off the side of the moving train into the Indiana darkness. It was the first time anyone in America had robbed a train in motion. The men were brothers: John and Simeon Reno, with an accomplice named Frank Sparkes. They had just invented a crime that would haunt the West for decades.
The target was the Adams Express Company car, which carried packages, bank drafts, and currency. The brothers put guns to the express messenger and demanded the safes be opened. He could open only the local safe, so they grabbed about $10,000 in gold coins and bank notes from it — and pushed the larger safe, which they couldn't crack, off the moving train, where the rest of the gang was waiting in the dark. The conductor, incredibly, didn't even know a robbery had happened until the train reached its next stop.
The Renos were no strangers to crime. The family had terrorized Jackson County since the Civil War — robbing travelers, raiding merchants, and, that July, hitting an Adams Express car near Brownstown. But the October robbery was something new: a moving train, previously considered safe by its very motion, was suddenly vulnerable. The idea spread like a contagion. Within a few years, the James–Younger Gang, Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, and the Daltons were all working variations on the Reno brothers' invention.
The gang's luck didn't last. The Adams Express Company, which had insured the stolen cargo, hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and the Pinkertons pursued the Renos relentlessly. In 1868 the brothers pulled off an even bigger job — some $96,000 in cash and bonds from a train near Marshfield, Indiana — but the net was closing. By December 1868, three of the Reno brothers — Frank, William, and Simeon — were in an Indiana jail when a masked vigilante mob dragged them out and hanged them. John Reno, the eldest, was already serving a 25-year prison sentence in Missouri.
The Reno gang's career lasted barely two years, but they changed America. They proved that the iron horse — the symbol of the nation's progress — could be stopped and looted, and they wrote the template for every train robbery in every Western ever filmed. The age of the outlaw gang began on an October night in Indiana, with a safe tumbling off a moving train.
No verified freely-licensed photograph of the Reno gang robbery or its participants could be found at the required size, so this story runs without a main image.
