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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the autumn of 1870, the transcontinental railroad was barely a year old, its golden spike driven in 1869. For the first time, a traveler could cross the continent by rail, and with the passengers and mail came something else the great trunk lines carried: strongboxes of cash moving through remote country far from any sheriff. The Central Pacific ran east from California over the Sierra Nevada and down through the Truckee Meadows, and the little settlement of Verdi sat right along that line.
This was the Reconstruction-era West—raw, thinly policed, and newly stitched together by iron rails. The technology that promised to civilize the frontier also created a brand-new kind of vulnerability. A moving train was a self-propelled bank, predictable in its schedule and isolated between stations.
Into that gap stepped a gang with a plan more clever than brute-force robbery. What unfolded near Verdi on a November night would show just how quickly people grasped that the modern conveniences of the age—telegraphs, timetables, express cars—could be turned into the tools of the crime.
People & events
The scheme was, by the standards of the frontier, remarkably methodical. John Chapman traveled all the way to Oakland, California, simply to learn exactly when the train would leave for Verdi. He then telegraphed a coded message to a confederate known as 'Sal' Jones in Reno, who in turn alerted five men waiting near Verdi. Two of them rode out and laid rocks across the tracks just south of present-day Mogul.
When the train stopped in Verdi for the night, the robbers boarded, quietly uncoupled the passenger coaches, and commandeered the engine, the mail car, and the express car. They forced the engineer, Henry Small, to drive the shortened train down to the blockade they had prepared. There, they tricked the guard into opening the locked express car door.
Inside, they broke open the strongboxes and divided up $41,600—a staggering sum for the day. Then the gang scattered, each man riding off in a different direction to muddy the trail. It didn't work for long. All of them were eventually caught, and all but about $3,000 of the money was recovered.
Its place in the American story
This robbery near Verdi on the night of November 4, 1870, is remembered as the West's first train robbery—the opening act of a genre of crime that would come to define the popular image of the frontier. In the decades that followed, holdups of railroad expresses became legend, attached to names that still echo through American folklore.
What makes the Verdi job so telling is how thoroughly it depended on the newest technology of the age. The robbers used the telegraph to coordinate, timetables to plan, and the railroad's own express system as the target. Crime evolved in lockstep with progress, exploiting the very networks that were knitting the country together.
That, in turn, helped drive the rise of railroad detectives, express-company guards, and a more organized approach to law enforcement across jurisdictions. The train robbery forced a still-young nation to reckon with crimes that moved faster than any local posse could ride.
If you visit
Stand near this site along the old Central Pacific line and picture a November night in 1870: a stopped train at Verdi, men slipping aboard in the dark, coaches quietly uncoupled, and an engineer forced to drive toward a pile of rocks on the rails. The landscape of the Truckee River canyon still carries that sense of isolation between the mountains.
The marker sits in the Verdi–Mogul area west of Reno, close to the California line, where the railroad threads a narrow, scenic corridor. It's an easy and rewarding detour if you're traveling the historic route over the Sierra, and it rewards a slow look at how the terrain itself made the robbery possible.
This is a fine stop for anyone drawn to Old West legend, especially paired with the region's railroad heritage. Remember as you go that this wasn't outlaw myth-making after the fact—it was the very first of its kind, the moment the great American train robbery began.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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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
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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.