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The Notorious Men of the Wild West

Khalid Elhassan December 4, 2019 32 min

28. The End of the Road at the End of a Rope

New Albany jail. Indiana Genealogy Trail

Pinkerton Agency detectives were tipped that Frank and his gang planned to rob another train, and staged an ambush. Soon as the gang boarded the train on July 9^th, 1868, the Pinkertons opened fire. Most of the gang escaped, but a captured member fingered two comrades, and they were arrested. The train taking them to jail in Seymour, Indiana, was stopped by masked vigilantes, who lynched the three prisoners. Another three gang members were captured soon thereafter, and the train taking them to the Seymour jail was again stopped by masked vigilantes, who hung the prisoners from the same tree.

Frank fled to Canada, but was captured and extradited to the US, where he was held with three other Reno Gang members in the Floyd County, Indiana, jail. On the night of December 11^th, 1868, scores of masked vigilantes marched on the jail and forced the jailer to surrender the keys. Frank Reno was then dragged from his cell in the early hours and lynched, along with the remaining gang members.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.