West Gone Wild

It's 1875: Gold Run, a small town in California, is the local collection point for gold dust and nuggets, placer mined by enterprising citizens.

After crushing the rocks, prospectors melt the extracted gold into rough bars, which are then sealed in boxes ready for transportation. Four times a year, the Gold Train makes its journey, taking the gold to the Mint at Carson City, Nevada.

My name is Frederick West.

I have been wandering around the so-called "Wild West" for years. I moved out here to get away from the stunted civilization of the East Coast. Too bound up and full of itself for me. I prefer the looseness, some say lawlessness, of the Wild West. That said, I still hang onto wearing Eastern-styled clothing. It gives me a sense of being more civilized than the riffraff of the lawless Westerners.

My friend Montague Powell and I have made a fair bit of money over the years robbing banks, ranchers, and other wealthy people. The Washington politicians say wealth will only create more wealth if it circulates. We see liberating those gold bars and dollars from the hoarders as our civic duty. Both of us enjoy lightening their burden.

It's our plan to rob the summer Gold Train. The schedule is random and only gets confirmed a few days before the run, so no-one has time to talk. I have a contact at the Mint who keeps me updated on the runs and can give us up to one week's notice. This is to be our fifteenth and biggest robbery.

No-one has ever caught us. Montague and I have spent months planning this train robbery. The hardest part is stopping the train. The local track runs for 43 miles in a dead straight line from Gold Run California to Truckee. No turns, hills, siding, or place to hide. Nothing but wide-open spaces, sun, dust, and railroad track.

It then continues for another forty-three miles, twisting and turning, crossing the border to Carson City. At Truckee, just before the Nevada border, the train picks up another car full of guards to counter the increased risk of a robbery in the slower terrain. That's why we need to ambush it before it gets there.

Last night, after another day of planning, we were sitting in the saloon when a drunken old geezer weaved his way towards us. He nodded and asked if we would buy him a drink. "Sure buddy," said I. After inhaling the drink, looking at us he mumbled, "yer only got four days to do your thing".

This was the message we were waiting for. The train was leaving on July 1st.

Both of us had already worked on our tasks. Montague found a suitable horse to train. He'd figured out an efficient way of loading the cart. My job? Perfecting our disappearing act, so the train driver remained unaware of our hiding place.

After devising the plan for the guards, my focus shifted to gathering the materials required to execute our disappearing act. Photographing with a Bubroni daguerreotype camera, I had taken ten shots of the scenery around the ambush site. This camera has been on the market for eleven years and is a piece of cake to use. It's perfect because it developed the plates in the camera. No one else was involved. The #6 bellows model is ideal for the task because of its capacity to capture large photos, measuring 7.2 by 9.6 inches.

I captured images from various angles. Then took them to an artist in Reno and told him what needed done. I felt comfortable using him, as he ran a big underground business of pornographic paintings and photographs and would not want to be exposed.

Montague came up with a fresh plan to unload the gold, and I found the ideal equipment.

After buying the Reno material and completing two practice runs, we found an old hidden rail track at an abandoned mine near Gold Run. We used it to refine our plan.

The challenge was to consider all the possible setbacks and devise solutions to overcome them.

In the beginning stages of planning, we used a lone heavy horse. The horse struggled during our practice, so we opted for a two-horse team instead. The catch is that with just one horse it will struggle to manage the job. With two, what you got was triple the power. We wanted to make sure we had enough horsepower to transport the bars and, if we had time, take more.

We conducted a trial run at the chosen site, testing duration, assessing horse endurance, and evaluating the cart's ability.

Montague and I had chosen the right clothes for the job, and a change for our getaway. Disguises were unnecessary. The outfit we wore for robberies gave us a substantial upper hand in combat. We had added several mechanical features to the clothing.

The hats, gray felt toppers, used unusual accessories. The crowns altered by adding a pouch in which there was a sheathed throwing knife. A set of custom goggles adorn the brims. We added a coating to darken the lenses in bright sunlight. The goggle straps are wide banded to hold extra cartridges for our custom-designed handguns.

The brown leather vests come with multiple pockets for compasses, knives, matches, and spare bullets for our derringers. We wore vambraces on each arm. These concealed sleeve-guns offering quick-draw capabilities.

Around our necks were bolo neckties with small pocket watches attached. Our waistcoats had pockets to store useful items for escaping trouble.

Our gun belts were altered to fit our eight-guns. We had improved a six-gun to an eight-gun, allowing it to accommodate more bullets. Sash styled across our waistcoats were two bandoliers filled with more cartridges for our handguns and 1873 Winchester rifles. Each Bandolier also held four hand-grenades.

The long pants tucked into our boots completed our work clothes. Prepared and ready to roll, a pretty sight we made.

Our getaway clothes were everyday cowboy attire. No fancy accouterments. We will wear the classic California woolen pants with a tight waist and loose bottoms, along with suspenders. Our shirts were long-sleeved woolen button-ups, no collar. Vests had pockets to store miscellaneous items for long rides.

The hats were mundane felt, deep crowned, wide-brimmed to protect us from the sun. They served various purposes, such as a water bucket, feedbag, or fan for the campfire.

The only real fancy duds worn were the newfangled 'cowboy boots' – high topped to protect our legs from brush, thorns, and snake bites. Big heels stopped our feet from sliding out of the stirrups. Slick soles prevented stirrups from catching when dismounting – these were the up-to-date work boots for cowboys.

Of course, we also had our gun belts, with the 'Fast Draw' style holsters, and the ubiquitous 1873 Colt single-action Army revolvers (adjusted to be eight-guns) on each hip. Our appearance resembled that of any typical Western layabout.

By Wednesday, June 30th., everything was ready. Tested and retested. Thought through and through, and then re-thought. Early in the morning, we loaded the wagon with the gear, including the hay bales.

I estimated it would take 10 hours to arrive at the ambush point. After an hour of rest, we'd go ahead with setting up the ambush. According to our calculations, we expected the Gold Train to pass by at around 4 pm on July 1st. This gave us plenty of time to get ready.

The first thing to do was lay the trap for the guards' railcar. We had two tasks here: take out the guards and stop the train. Our plan for the guards was rudimentary. They will sit on a long bench set in the middle of a half-sized open-deck flatcar. One sat facing north, the next facing south, and so on. Only six guards oversee this part of the journey.

We rode beside the tracks, away from Gold Run, and found a suitable join in the rail to work with. The weakest point of a track is at the joins, making them vulnerable. We planned on packing the fishplates with the newly invented explosive, gelignite. Gelignite is both more stable and easier to shape than dynamite. We filled the joins with 'Jelly' and molded more around the fishplates to make them disintegrate. The idea was, blow the join, the car will derail and throw the guards off. Our Winchester rifles will do the rest. We wanted the guards' car to wreck without damaging the flat-deck loaded with the gold.

"Goldilocks," as we dubbed the train, was an 1872 Baldwin 4-4-0 wood-burning steam engine. 4-4-0 means the train has a set of four bogie wheels (the small ones) at the front end of the engine. Right behind them were four large driving wheels.

This train can reach speeds of 18 to 22 miles per hour, depending on the track's condition and the cargo weight. After the explosion, the golden car and Goldilocks will travel for almost 2000 feet before stopping. We placed explosives down the track to avoid that. Using less here, as we didn't want the train to do more than crunch to a stop. The bomb will ignite just before the bogie wheels are on the rail joins. Even though the train will stop, it won't derail. The point is the gold car had to remain on the line.

We ran the fuses for both explosives in between the rails so they would be invisible. Montague was going to set off the guard car's explosive. I will be further down the track to deal with the engine. One thing we could not control was the speed at which the steam engine continued along the tracks. I placed the second bomb 1,000 ft. upline from Montague's.

We were ready for the next morning's tasks of making ourselves invisible, then putting together the unloading gizmo and re-testing it.

We double checked everything, rode back to our rudimentary camp site, then fed and watered the horses. Both of us unloaded hay bales and stacked them behind us. We had to rest as tomorrow would be a tough workday for us.

To transfer the boxed gold to the wagon involved lifting off and carrying wooden boxes, each weighing a little over 110 lbs. The gold bars are jammed together in a box, with a buffer of straw to prevent them from rubbing against themselves.

Montague and I figured we were up to the task as we had been practicing with weighted boxes for two weeks now. We intended to unload sixty-six or more of those boxes to meet our target of 264 gold bars. We will move about 7,130 lbs in total weight.

Chapter 2

Today is the day. It's July first, and we are about to get wealthy.

After feeding and watering ourselves and the horses, we got on with the next stage of the plan. Still dressed in our regular clothing, we set up the eight-foot-high screens painted to look like the landscape we were working in. As you will remember, I had taken photographs of the scenery and delivered them to an artist to paint the flats from. His challenging job was to minimize the straight edges of the panels, so they were not visible against the sky. The flat terrain and the straight track lend themselves to this illusion.

As the artist explained to me, people see what they expect to see, so the edges will need a little tweaking. He painted the boring landscape and then, using different shades of the red soil color, feathered the three visible outer edges of the flats. Our flats were four by eight foot 'canvases' mounted so any breeze will make them shimmer, as in a heat mirage.

I ordered eight panels to hide the horses and wagon, half for myself and half for Montague. The panels had to be joined in situ with nuts and bolts and then braced to keep them upright and stable. Hay bales were used to ensure their stability.

We put together the unloading mechanism and tested it. Montague's idea was to use a conveyor belt to carry the gold boxes from the railcar to our wagon. His stroke of genius was to have a small, freestanding steam engine to power the belt. Our job involved loading the boxes from the train onto the belt and then unloading them at the other end. I had found the equipment, and Montague adapted it to our purpose. The steam engine would power the conveyor from the wagon, and we have ample fuel and water for it to work like a charm.

Next, we checked and double checked the flats, the small steam engine, explosives, and fuses. Then we rested for a couple of hours. Around three in the afternoon, we dressed in our special clothing and conducted a last check before the train came. Our conveyor belt's engine was building up a head of steam, and what little smoke the burning wood produced dissipated in a slight breeze. Everything was now ready.

Not long after four pm, I heard the train approaching. The plan was progressing very well. Neither the engineer nor the stoker had seen the screens hiding Montague.

He blew the line to derail the guard-car. The result was spectacular. We'd used too much gelignite. The guard-car's front went up, came crashing down, then landed with its left wheels bouncing between the railroad ties. The force of the explosion threw the guards off the car and onto the ground. Three lost their lives in the explosion, while two suffered severe injuries. The last one ran. Montague took him down with the Winchester.

The train was now free of the guard-car but was not slowing down. Both the engineer and stoker were working hard, striving to keep control. I was waiting behind my screens, ready to chase the train if it didn't stop before the line blew. I made a snap decision to halt it, preventing the train from going beyond our intended limit. Once again, the explosion turned out to be more powerful than expected. The force of it tore off the ties and bent the rails at crazy angles. To prevent the train from reaching the break, the driver struggled to slow it down. By now, I was riding fast to deal with the crew. By the time I reached them, both were standing in shock alongside the engine. I got my Winchester out of its scabbard and suggested they sit on the ground by the wreckage. I tied them to each other, and then to the engine. The gold car, still intact, sat on the line, just as we needed it to do.

As Montague rode up and brought the heavy horses and wagon to the train, parallel to the gold car, he grinned at me and said, "Well, that was easy." Next, he connected our steam engine's drive belt to the conveyor. Everything was going according to plan. I started by lifting one of the gold boxes, all one hundred and ten pounds of it, and swung it onto the belt.

Off it went to the wagon to be taken off the belt and stacked. After loading up ten boxes, I was feeling hot and tired. I signaled Montague to stop the conveyor for a few minutes while I stripped off my 'robbers' gear' until I was standing in my underwear. Montague saw what I was doing and did the same. Once we removed the heavy clothing and armaments, we picked up the pace. It took us three hours to load the boxes we wanted, plus ten more for luck.

Looking back to Gold Run, we thought we saw a plume of dust, as if a posse were galloping our way. We donned our getaway clothes, picked up our handguns and rifles, dumped the steam engine and conveyor belt. Next, we stacked the hay bales around and on top of our pile of gold boxes. We became a couple of farmers with a load of hay to sell. The barn rented in Reno will store the gold and the wagon. We headed east. After dark, Montague and I rested for four hours and then continued our journey.

Arriving in Reno just after ten am, we reached our barn without incident. The whole town was abuzz with news about the gold train robbery. Fortunately, the Reno townsfolk had seen us and the wagon many times when we were practicing the escape portion of our plan. No undue attention wasted on us. It took us the next four hours opening our hiding place for the gold and transferring the boxes there. When all was done, we reloaded the hay on the cart and then added more bales from our stash to make the cart look as it did when we rode into town. The horses needed fed and watered and a rest. We looked after them and took a break as well.

Late afternoon, a thunderous banging on the barn door woke us up. We grabbed our weapons, opened the 'man-door' set in the barn's main entrance and saw a group of thirty men led by a grizzly looking, six-foot tall, mustachioed lawman, who stared at us and said, "My name is Wyatt Earp and me and my men would like to talk to you two."