The Notorious Reno Gang: The Wild Story of the West’s First Brotherhood of Thieves, Assassins, and Train Robbers - Rachel Dickinson Audiobook

Written by Rachel Dickinson
Read by Arthur Flavell
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Tantor Audio
Released: Jul 30, 2019
Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins

The true story of the world’s first robbery of a moving train, and the real origins of the Wild West.

They were the first outlaws to rob a moving train. But from 1864 to 1868, the Reno brothers and their gang of counterfeiters, robbers, burglars, and safecrackers also held the town of Seymour, Indiana, hostage, making a large hotel near the train station their headquarters. When the gang robbed the Adams Express car of the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad on the outskirts of Seymour on October 6, 1866, it shocked the world—and made other burgeoning outlaws like Jesse James sit up and take notice.

The extraordinary—and extra-legal—efforts to take them out defined the term “frontier justice.” In the end, ten members of the Reno Gang were hanged, including three of the Reno brothers. The Notorious Reno Gang tells the complete story for the first time, revealing how these gangsters, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, and the little city of Seymour ushered in the Wild West.

An understatement…..”The Reno family was not a very nice family.” Towspeople even moved graves of family members into other cemetaries…

Publishers Weekly…Starred review from March 27, 2017
Evocative prose and rich historical context add depth and broad appeal to this captivating account of the men behind the first-ever robbery of a moving train, their wave of crimes in the 1860s, and their deaths at the hands of vigilantes. Many readers will be unfamiliar with the Reno brothers, but the mark they made on the small community of Seymour, Ind., is significant, Dickinson writes: “Like a boa constrictor, in the mid-19th century the Reno Gang encircled the town and squeezed tighter and tighter for several years until the gang’s activities seemed to threaten the very future of the community.” Dickinson (Falconer on the Edge) opens the story ominously, with a flash-forward as a gang of vigilantes breaks into the jail in a neighboring town in search of the Renos. She then recreates the lives of the Reno brothers, whose criminal careers were shaped by the traumas of the Civil War, which transformed them from “annoying petty thieves” into “the spiders at the center of a five-hundred-mile web of crime.” She thickens the stories with historical context about the changes that railroads brought to the country and the state of American currency at the time.