This Day in History: The Reno brothers carried out the first train robbery in U.S. history on this day in 1866. With the economy in the West booming, trains often carried large amounts of cash and precious minerals. The wide-open spaces of the Western frontier also provided train robbers with plenty of isolated areas ideal for stopping trains, as well as plenty of areas where they could hide from the law. Some criminal gangs, like Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, found that robbing trains was so easy and lucrative that railroad owners had to make changes. One of those changes was adding massive safes protected by heavily armed guards. Special boxcars designed to carry guards and their horses were eventually added (the horses were there in case of pursuit). By the late 1800s train robbery was becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous.
The last major train robbery in the US occurred in 1937 by Henry Loftus and Harry Donaldson on the Southern Pacific Railroad's Apache Limited. The two young men were so inept that 20 passengers ganged up on them "punching and kicking them in a frenzy".
See also: Buffalo Bill & the American Wild West, 200 Books on DVDrom
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2015/09/buffalo-bill-american-wild-west-200.html
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