1866: America’s First Train Robbery: the Reno Gang Strikes Near Seymour, Indiana
On the night of October 6, 1866, three members of the Reno Gang boarded an Ohio and Mississippi Railway train as it pulled out of Seymour, Indiana, overpowered the express guard and cracked open a safe holding roughly 16,000 dollars. They then shoved a second, heavier safe off the moving train for the rest of the gang to finish the job, but could not break it open before a posse closed in and they fled. It was, as far as anyone could tell, the first train robbery in American history.
The job, pulled off by brothers Frank, John, Simeon and William Reno, became the blueprint for a wave of copycat train robberies across the Midwest. Within two years the brothers paid for it dearly: dragged from jail cells by masked vigilantes and hanged, most of the gang’s stolen fortune never recovered.
