It started with a crooked card game. What it turned into, however, was a first in American history.

~TRANSCRIPT~ (Note: A list of sources used follows this transcript.)

It started with a crooked card game. Many crooked card games, on the side of the farm road. They had stolen things, and stolen horses. But then they did more. In 7 years, they had set fire to almost all the homes and businesses in Rockford, Indiana, near today’s Seymour City. That was when the oldest Reno kid, Frank, was only 14. The brothers Reno were not kind as boys. And as men, they were much worse.

When the Civil War happened, they would sign up for military service, and pocket the cash bounty that was given to them for signing up. And then they would desert. A while later, they would appear elsewhere, at a different recruiting office, and repeat the process.

They formed a gang. And they counterfeited money, and they robbed, and they robbed. They robbed post offices. They robbed stores. They robbed homes. They robbed travelers and murdered them. They robbed merchants. They robbed whole communities. The murders became more frequent. A guest at the Rader House hotel was found headless, his body floating in the White River. That was in January of 1866. In February and July, they murdered again.

But then they did something no one had done before. They robbed a train. Before I go any further down these train tracks, I should note that there is another contender for the title of first peacetime train robbery: the Great Train Robbery of North Bend, Ohio, in 1865. But more on that in the footnotes.

On the evening of October 6, 1866, a train of the Ohio & Mississippi line left its station at Seymour, Indiana. Among its passengers were three men: John Reno, Sim Reno, and Frank Sparks.

When the train was sufficiently far from town, they slipped on masks, and went through the train's coach car, and managed to get across the platform to the Adams Express Company car. This car contained one man, who was a messenger, and a safe, which contained package upon package of items all loaded on the train at different stations. They pointed their guns at the messenger, and demanded his keys. He gave them the keys. They unlocked the safe.

According to Jackson County court records, they found, "one safe the value of Thirty Dollars, Three Canvas Bags of the value of One Dollar Each, Ten Thousand Dollars in Gold Coin and Thirty Three Dollars in Bank Notes."

There was another safe, though. A bigger safe, full of valuable things from St. Louis, Missouri. After knocking the messenger unconscious, they rolled the large safe to the door of the car. One of the men pulled the bell rope, and the engineer put the brakes on the train, which began to slow. They rolled the large safe out the door, and then jumped out themselves. One of the men purportedly yelled, "All right!" to the engineer, who started the train again.

They could not open the safe. Men were coming for them; they met William Reno and his men who gave them getaway horses. They got away.

The rest of the Reno Gang's lurid history is available in the sources listed for this show. But suffice it to say that for all their troubles, they were hanged at the end.

Footnote:

According to storyteller Tom Rizzo:

On the night of May 5, 1865, at North Bend, Ohio, a train went off its tracks. It was no accident. A band of men had put up a barricade on the tracks, which the train hit. The train skidded across the roadbed, and then derailed, with around 100 passengers onboard.

Men flooded the cars, brandishing Navy revolvers, and saying into the doorways of the compartments that resisters would be shot. They filled their grain sacks with valuables.

Other men had entered the Adams Express car, and dragged out 3 strongboxes, and coerced the conductor into opening them. It isn't known how much money the robbers got away with.

The men who did this were never brought to justice. The crime remains unsolved.

SOURCES

Tom Rizzo: HISTORIC RAID AT NORTH BEND: THE FIRST TRAIN ROBBERY

HistoryNet - Reno Gang’s Reign Of Terror

Wikipedia article on the Reno Gang

OLD WEST LEGENDS - Reno Gang & the 1st Big Train Robbery