…took place in Seymour, Indiana just after the Civil War. The evening of October 6, 1866. Three men--Simeon Reno, John Reno and Frank Sparks (latter...
The First Train Robbery
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train robberies
Renegades of the Rails
Railroads were open season for Oklahoma and Indian Territory outlaw gangs. Glenn Shirley, the late historian of Oklahoma’s frontier history of...
The Big Payday
The Reno Gang struck it rich in train robbery. May 22, 1868. Outlaw Frank Reno leads a group of men to rob an Ohio & Mississippi train at...
The Train Business
Ketchum catches the railroad bug. May 14, 1897. Tom Ketchum--already, mistakenly, being referred to as "Black Jack"--goes into the railroad...
Evans and Sontag: Finis
The final shootout in central California. June 11-12, 1893. A posse takes on train robbers John Sontag and Chris Evans at Stone Corral, an abandoned...
They Went Thataway
One of the Old West’s zaniest train robberies occurred near the Arizona town Willcox on the evening of September 9th, 1899 when constable Burt...
Stagecoach and Train Robbers
How common were train robberies & holding up passengers & stagecoach holdups? They were pretty common, especially in remote places. Between...
Robbing Trains Ain’t Rocket Science
Not everyone was cut out to be a train robber as it did require a certain amount of talent. A couple of Cochise County cowboys-turned-train robbers...
The Heyday of Train Robberies
The 1890s saw an epidemic of train robberies with 261 in that decade alone. Eighty-eight people were killed and eighty-six wounded. According...