The Great Train Robbery

The West's first train robbery happened just east of here on the night of November 4, 1870. A gang led by Virginia City's "Big Jack" Davis, tipped off by John Chapman about a gold shipment, boarded the Central Pacific's eastbound express at Verdi, uncoupled the passenger cars, and forced the crew to halt at a barricade down the line. They broke open the express boxes, seized $41,600 in gold coin—the Comstock payroll—and scattered on horseback. It was short-lived: after a two-state chase every robber was caught, and about ninety percent of the gold recovered. The marker stands at Verdi.

What the plaque says

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.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 9.3 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Sand Harbor — 22 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers
• Virginia City — 23 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 23 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark

More markers nearby

• Verdi — 0.3 mi
• Truckee River West — 2.8 mi
• Governor Emmet Derby Boyle — 7.7 mi
• Historic Transportation — 8.4 mi