October 6, 1866
On this day the entrepreneurial Reno family perfected civilian train robbery, a crime genre that would plague the frontier for decades.
Unlike the daring daylight horseback heists portrayed by Hollywood, three members of the Reno gang simply boarded the Ohio and Mississippi Railway train before it left the Seymour, Indiana, station just down the road from the Reno farm in Rockford.
Contemporary depiction of the robbery
Forcing their way into the express car, they tied up the guard, cracked the safe containing $16,000, more that $230,000 today, and pushed a larger safe out the door of the train to waiting accomplices. The larger safe was too much for the outlaws and they fled with a posse hot on their tail.
A passenger, George Kinney, came forward to identify several of the robbers; John Reno, Sim Reno and Frank Sparks. The three were arrested and released on bail. The courageous Mr. Kinney, however, was shot dead just days later. Needless to say his fellow passengers developed poor memories and bad eyesight and refused to testify at trial. All the charges were dropped but the crime would eventually prove to be their undoing.
The four criminal Reno brothers
The nation’s first “brotherhood of bandits” was led by an entire brace of Renos; Franklin, John, Simeon and William, all raised in rural Indiana by strict Methodist parents, J. Wilkerson, and Julia Ann Freyhafer Reno. They were joined by additional bad guys and together they terrorized Indiana, Missouri and Iowa.
The Renos went wrong early, suspected of setting fires and stealing horses in Jackson County, Indiana as teenagers. Just two of the Reno children, Clint, and a sister, Laura, were not involved in criminal activities.
During the Civil War, the four brothers took up “bounty jumping.” Enlisting in the Union Army, they would each collect an enlistment bonus and fail to appear for duty. William, AWOL for a time, did manage to receive an honorable discharge, the only one to do so.
That unfortunate Mr. Kinney was not the last witness to meet his maker at the hands of the Renos. In 1864, the brothers along with two other gang members, robbed the Post Office and a general store in nearby Jonesville, Indiana. When one of the bandits, Grant Wilson, decided to testify against them on the promise of leniency, he was murdered, leading to acquittals.
Following Jonesville, the gang diversified, raiding merchants and murdering travelers in three states.
That very first robbery back in Seymour, however, upset the Adams Express Company, insurers of the contents of the safe. Smarting from the loss of their client’s money, the company hired the Pinkerton Agency, detectives with the longest memory in the known universe.
John Reno, (left) brother number one, was identified in a robbery of the Daviess County Courthouse in Gallatin, Missouri, tracked down by Pinkertons and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Frank Reno, (below) and a pair of gang members had pulled off a quick succession of robberies in Iowa. William Pinkerton, the son of the agency’s founder, ran the three to ground. They managed to break out of jail and two more train robberies followed in less than a year. Just one actually involved the Renos 
but gang member, Volney Elliott, was captured. He in turn sold out two more members, Charles Roseberry and Theodore Clifton.
The remainder of the gang fled to Iowa, robbing a series of county courthouses and yet another train. After uncoupling the train’s engine, they broke into the express car and pushed the express messenger out the door, causing fatal injuries.The murder of the messenger and the enormous amount of money taken, $96,000, amounting to more than a half million today, garnered national attention.
Pinkerton agents , post-Civil war era
Still hot on the trail, the Pinkertons uncovered plans for another train heist in the offing for July. Ten agents were dispatched to wait for the bandits. Three were captured. On their way to jail, however, the train was boarded by a party of fed-up vigilantes from Seymour. The captives were hung without benefit of a trial within minutes. Three other gang members arrested just days later met the same fate, in fact, lynched on the same tree, now known as Hangman’s Crossing.
Reno brothers two and three, Sim and William, (William, right) were captured in Indianapolis. Gang leader Frank Reno, brother number four, and Charlie Anderson were tracked down in the border town of Windsor, Ontario and extradited back to the United States.
Fearing vigilantism, following their trial, the prisoners were moved to the Floyd County Jail in New Albany, Indiana, considered to be more secure. Sometime after midnight on December 12, however, 65 hooded men broke in. Frank was the first to go, followed by William and Sim. All were hanged. Charlie Anderson survived a bit longer, until about 4:30 a.m.
Frank Reno and Charlie Anderson were technically Federal prisoners due to their extradition. Their lynchings marked the first and only time Federal prisoners were lynched by vigilantes. All the Renos are buried in their home town of Seymour.
John Reno, the only brother to have had his criminal career cut short, served 10 years and one month in prison. He was released and married brother Frank’s widow, Sarah V. Ford Reno, daughter of an Indiana legislator. Once again sent to prison for counterfeiting, Sarah divorced him. But she remarried him upon his release three years later. John died in 1895 of an unknown paralysis at the age of 56.
Good brother Clint and sister, Laura, mostly escaped history’s notice until 1956 when Clint received the Hollywood star treatment, portrayed by Elvis Presley in his first film, “Love Me Tender.” The rest of the family got far less sympathetic portrayal in the 1955 Randolph Scott film, “Rage at Dawn.”
Sister, Laura Amanda Reno Gaudy, married, was mother to one daughter and was buried in 1919 just one half mile from her infamous outlaw brothers.
Old City Cemetery, North Ewing Street, Seymour, Indiana, is the resting place of the Reno gang members, Frank, John, Simeon and William Reno. Laura Amanda Reno Gaudy is buried in Semour’s Riverview Cemetery, northwest of City Cemetery.
While Seymour had the misfortune to be connected to the infamous outlaws, it’s also the hometown of a number well-known citizens, including two college coaches, the 2008 Miss America, Katie Stam, and song writer and musician John Mellencamp.
The Southern Indiana Center for the Arts exhibits the private collection of paintings by Mellencamp. The Freeman Airfield Museum features the history WWII service member who served there and it was once a training site for the famed Tuskegee Airmen. For more information, go to seymourcity.com.
© Text Only – 2018 – Headin’ West LLC – All photos – public domain or fair use.
*Head On West strives for historic accuracy and uses a number of sources considered reliable. When research differs on significant facts, the various points of view will be cited.