The Great Train Robbery
Washoe County, Washoe County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
The Great Train Robbery. The West’s first train robbery occurred near this site on the night of November 4, 1870. A gang of men concocted an elaborate scheme to rob the Central Pacific Railroad as the train passed through Verdi. John Chapman traveled to Oakland, California to learn when the train left for Verdi. He telegraphed a coded message to “Sal” Jones in Reno, who alerted five men waiting near Verdi. Two men rode to an area just south of Mogul today, and they placed rocks across the train tracks.When the train stopped in Verdi for the night, the soon-to-be-robbers boarded the train, decoupled the passenger coaches and commandeered the engine, mail and express cars. The gang forced Engineer Henry Small to drive to the blockage, there they tricked the guard to opening the locked express car door. The robbers broke open the strong boxes and divided the $41,600. The men rode off in different directions. All were eventually caught and all but about $3,000 was recovered.
Erected by Snowshoe Thompson Chapter 1827, E. Clampus Vitus
The Story
On the night of November 4, 1870, a gang pulled off the West's first train robbery near Verdi. After John Chapman scouted the schedule in Oakland and wired a coded tip to a confederate in Reno, the robbers boarded the Central Pacific train, uncoupled the passenger cars, and forced the engineer to drive the express car to a rock blockade on the tracks. They broke open the strongboxes for $41,600 and scattered—though all were eventually caught and most of the money recovered.
Why it matters
The Verdi robbery inaugurated the era of the great American train heist, a genre of frontier crime that would echo through the legends of the West and the birth of railroad-era law enforcement.
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Related people
- · John Chapman
- · Henry Small
Related events
- · First train robbery in the West, 1870
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Verdi
Washoe County, NV
Modern Verdi grew up with the Central Pacific Railroad that pushed through here between 1867 and 1869, becoming a major mill town and shipping terminal for railroad ties and timbers, fed by logging railways reaching into the surrounding forests. Its roots ran deeper still: an 1860 log bridge over the Truckee, O'Nell's Crossing, had served stagecoaches on the busy Henness Pass and Dutch Flat toll roads. Lumbermen like Oliver Lonkey kept Verdi active into the twentieth century until a 1926 fire and dwindling timber brought its decline.
Truckee River
Washoe County, NV
The flats along the Truckee River were home to Native peoples for thousands of years, who fished with blinds and left petroglyphs on the surrounding boulders. After John C. Frémont recorded the river in 1844, it became a lifeline and a hazard for California-bound emigrants—among them the Stephens-Murphy-Townsend party that crossed Donner Pass and the ill-fated Donner party, trapped by Sierra snows in 1846. The Central Pacific followed the river's course in 1868, and its route later matured through the Lincoln and Victory highways into U.S. 40 and Interstate 80.
Historic Transportation
Washoe County, NV
The corridor from the Truckee Meadows toward Honey Lake is a palimpsest of American travel, layering emigrant-trail cutoffs, toll roads, county roads, and finally U.S. 395 and the interstate over the same ground. In 1851 the famed frontiersman James Beckwourth cut a wagon road here toward Marysville; toll operators like Myron Lake later profited from the constant flow of freight and stages between the Comstock mines and the Sierra ranches. The Peavine Ranch, where this marker stands, once offered travelers a bed and a well-stocked bar.
Reno
Reno, NV
Long before Europeans arrived, the Washoe and Paiute lived in the Truckee Meadows; the Stevens-Murphy party passed through in 1844 and settlement began in the early 1850s. Charles Fuller launched a river ferry in 1859 and built a bridge and hotel, holdings soon acquired by Myron Lake, whose "Lake's Crossing" became the town's nucleus when the Central Pacific laid out a depot in 1868. Named for Civil War General Jesse Lee Reno, the town grew on railroads, lumber, and ranching — and later on its reputations for quick divorces, beginning in 1906, and legalized gambling in 1931.