The Notorious Reno Brothers
Frank Reno (1837 – 1868) was raised in Jackson County, Indiana, by strictly religious parents who made their children observe all the strictures, attend church regularly, and spend their Sundays in Bible study. It backfired with Frank and his younger brother, John, who rebelled and turned bad. By their early teens, the brothers were notorious delinquents. They drank, brawled, cheated travelers in crooked card games, and were suspected by the community of horse theft and a series of arsons around the county.
To avoid a backlash, their father took Frank and John and two other sons to live in Missouri for a few years. They returned to Indiana in 1860, but they had not been forgotten. To escape angry neighbors, Frank and John enlisted when the Civil War broke out. They became serial bounty jumpers. The brothers would join a regiment to collect enlistment bonuses, which steadily grew as the war progressed, and desert at the earliest opportunity. They then enlisted in another regiment elsewhere with fake names to collect more enlistment bonuses, and repeated the cycle.
