The First Train Robbery - Hardcover

The nation-ripping American Civil War was historically significant enough in its own right. And perhaps one of the most unique, and least known, example of the war’s divisiveness impact was on, of all places, southern Indiana. That state was north of the Mason-Dixon Line and should have been a pure Union adherent, but the southern portion of the state had been settled by migrants from below the Mason-Dixon Line, and when the war began those migrants’ (known during and after the war as ‘Copperheads’) sympathies lay with the South. Those sympathies were so firmly held a legislative fight to secede from the Union was only narrowly averted when the staunchly Unionist governor, Oliver P. Morton, locked the legislature out and prevented their assemblage. While the state stayed in the Union, Lee’s 1865 surrender at Appomattox only fanned the flames in the Copperhead heart. The result was a state of near anarchy in southern Indiana.
It was in this anarchical environment of persistent division and growing violence that the Reno clan saw, not fear and deprivation, but raw opportunity.
When the eldest son, John, returned from a questionable stint in the war he quickly gathered his brothers, Frank, William and Simeon, and operating from the nearby rail center town of Seymour, they quickly began assembling a resume of robbery, extortion and murder – adding a host of gang cohorts in the process. But John had been brewing an audacious plan …
The Renos would stop, board and rob trains! And in October, 1866, they did just that - the Renos pulled off the first ‘stop and rob’ train heist in history.
The robbery would generate inordinate attention, and bring three pockets of interest into brutal conflict. In one corner, the rapacious Reno gang. In another was a suddenly-growing-some-spine vigilante group, led by a hate-filled doctor. In the third corner was the Pinkerton Protective (later Detective) Agency, headed by the ultra ambitious Scot, Alan Pinkerton, the man who had headed up Lincoln’s Civil War spy apparatus
When the three interests went head to head to head the encounter was bloody, violent and lethal. The gang became the quarry, the healer the hangman and the poisonously tainted Pinkerton playing the manipulator.
From a modern perspective it would be difficult-to-impossible to discern the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. It was indeed a compelling epoch in 19th century America.
A Review
Using the techniques of fiction and considerable skill in dialect, Wilgus Wade Hogg tells the story of the Reno Gang of Jackson County, Ind., who executed the first successful train robbery in America.
On the night of Oct. 6, 1866, they sprang aboard an Ohio & Mississippi train at Seymour and took $15,000 from the Adams Express Agency man. Two years later, by capturing a one-car train, they got $96,000nmin gold and government bonds at Marshfield in Scott County, Ind. Between times and before the first heist, as practice for their larger endeavors, they terrorized the Jackson County countryside by arson, theft, extortion and murder.
John Reno was the organizer and leader of the gang after he returned from a dubious military career in the Civil War. But his brothers, William, Frank and Sim, were as mean as he was. It was John’s brains, however that pulled the other ruffians of the area into organized crime by threat and blackmail and set up the larger jobs.
Their story from then on becomes a contest between themselves and men of the Pinkerton Detective Agency with ramifications as far away from Seymour, Ind., as Canada and England. The story ends in lynching, hanging and a few more murders on the side when the criminals are finally caught and imprisoned …
Certainly Mr. Hogg is a good story-teller.
Louisville Courier-Journal & Times World of Books review by Dr. William E. Wilson, Indiana University Professor of Fiction & Literature, and an historian and novelist.