Back in October, the Arizona Republic reported on what may be the first train robbery in over 100 years. The incident hardly had the makings of a Hollywood Western — the perpetrators were caught and arrested after a low-speed chase.
But, back in what you might call the glory days of train robberies, the Southwest, and Cochise County in particular, was home to roving bands of notorious railroad thieves. Around the turn of the 20th century, outlaws began to see the railroad as a fast-track to big score.
Doug Hocking, author of "Southwest Train Robberies," estimates that there were 16 major rail heists between the laying of the tracks in the 1880s and the end of the train-robbing era in the 1920s. Hocking joined The Show to talk about how, back then, trains were vulnerable because of the way they were laid out.
Full conversation
DOUG HOCKING: Which was locomotive and then the baggage express mail car, which were often the same car. Behind that, the smoking car, if any, followed by passenger cars and finally by the plumbing cars. And why did they organize that way? Well, to keep the smoke away from the passengers.
SAM DINGMAN: Right. So you wanted to have as much distance as possible between the cars where there were going to be passengers riding and the locomotive. But of course, that means that you're filling that distance with the cars containing all the valuable stuff.
HOCKING: Right. Now, the express car would have two kinds of wealth.
DINGMAN: Express here refers to like the mail, right?
HOCKING: Yeah, express refers to the mail, but it also refers to what they call express matter, which is typically high value items. Money was in the through safe, which the express agent did not have the key.
DINGMAN: So if in this safe there, there was nobody on board with a key, how did the burglars get into it?
HOCKING: You blew the safe.
DINGMAN: I was, I was guessing that might be the answer.
HOCKING: In the Wilcox playa in 1895, a couple of the boys took the express car and they blew the safe open and they blew express car and pesos all over the player. We're still finding the pesos.
DINGMAN: Sounds like that would be a good road trip for me to take, go down there and see if I can find some pesos.
HOCKING: Yeah, why not! [LAUGHS]
DINGMAN: So from the way you're describing it, this seems like an incredibly high stakes, high risk type of burglary to try to pull off, to try to presumably what, ride up alongside this train on a horse, jump on to this particular car where the valuables are kept. You're carrying, what dynamite, some, some type of explosive. And you have to get in, subdue the folks who are in there, and then pull off this explosion and get out again before the, before the train goes off the rails. I mean, it sounds like a very intense crime.
HOCKING: Well, let's consider something that was done three times. Stein's Pass, which you may have noticed on I-10, it's 3 miles inside New Mexico. And three times the train was robbed there.
And basically they, the guys would walk up to the locomotive, tell the engineer, “disconnect the passenger cars,” take this train to Cochise County. Three miles later, you're over the line into Cochise County. The nearest law is in Tombstone, 100 miles away. And who have you got to deal with? The express agent, the engineer and the fireman. You know, in that sense, it's fairly safe. A lot of times they were after payrolls.
DINGMAN: Yeah, this is fascinating. You know, I, I it's just occurring to me in this moment that we're talking about a time before direct deposit. So for the money to pay workers to make it to those workers, they had to send them the literal cash on a train.
HOCKING: Exactly. And there were tricks, you never knew which day it was coming on. They'd send it early and then pack it in with groceries just to fool outlaw attempts.
DINGMAN: That's so interesting to think about that being a time when, if you're the worker who is expecting that payout, you, if I'm hearing you, right, probably had to adjust to the fact that payday was sort of a moving target because of the clear and present danger of train robberies.
HOCKING: You know, one, once they had it on site, they'd lock it in, somebody's safe and nobody knew it was there.
DINGMAN: Hearing you tell these stories, I'm struck by the time in which all of this was happening. Because here we have these, I have to say, very innovative criminals who are taking advantage of the fact that the American West was kind of being invented at the same time as they were inventing these ways of profiting off of the development of the American West.
And the railroad was such a potent symbol of that invention because it's so supercharged our ability to move people and cash and assets over these, these long distances. It makes me think of one of my favorite quotes from your book, which is, “there is something about this corner of Arizona that attracts and inspires bad men.”
So would you say that trains were just more fodder for pre-existing bad men or, or did the trains help create the bad men?
HOCKING: We had an extremely rough element down here already. It's a population that came up from Texas. A lot of them already in trouble down there. They got to Cochise County, which is where they split up the herds that were going to the military and the reservations. And once the guys were paid off, they’d spend their money on wine, women, song, gambling. Completely waste the rest of it. And now destitute, they had no way to get back to Texas.
So they went on to doing what they had always done best, herding other people's cows, this time without permission. And when that became less profitable, there were stagecoaches. And then railroads.
DINGMAN: So really it was just that the prospective target of what they were already doing, just got more and more valuable.
HOCKING: More valuable. Yeah, and a bit more sophisticated. In the book, I covered primarily armed robberies. I didn't cover breaking and entering. I had an argument with the people of Benson who sincerely wanted to have a train robbery. They said 1942, they had the last one. There was a box car parked on a siding and somebody broke in and stole three cases of spam. You know, Benson, that's not a train robbery.
I got one for you. Maricopa County sheriff, 1910. … He's got a building at, at ASU named after him, Hayden, Carl Hayden, 1910. He was sheriff of Maricopa County. Carl had train robbers, the Beardless bBoys. He pursued them in a Stoddard-Dayton Touring car, value at the time about $3,500, which is like saying he borrowed a Maserati and went crashing across trackless desert, stopping every few miles to fix flats and repair the car in pursuit of outlaws.
It's the first automotive pursuit. And the big change here is we've got telegraph all along the rail line. We're starting to get roads. We've got automobiles, and pursuing the armed robbers becomes much easier at the same time that shipments of specie are diminishing on the rail line.
DINGMAN: I see. So that's, that's the other factor behind the, the reduction in, in train robberies. It's not just that they started finding other ways of, of shipping valuable things. It's that the ability of the folks who owned the rail lines to do more than just pick random days to send the payroll got a little bit more sophisticated, too.
HOCKING: Exactly.
