West Gone Wild
Chapter 1
It is 1875: Gold Run is a small town in California and is the collection point for gold dust and nuggets, placer mined by enterprising citizens. After crushing the rocks, the prospectors melt any extracted gold into rough bars and seal them in boxes ready for transportation. The Gold Train runs four times a year and takes 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 many 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 the Eastern-styled clothing. It gives me a sense of being more civilized than the riffraff of Westerners.
My friend Montague Powell and I have made a fair bit of money over the years of robbing banks, ranchers, and other wealthy people. The Washington politicians say that wealth can only create more wealth if it circulates, so we see liberating all those gold bars and dollars from the people who hoard them as our civic duty.
We are planning to rob the summer Gold Train. Its schedule is random and only gets confirmed a few days before, 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 two days' notice. This is to be our fifteenth and biggest robbery. We have never been caught. Montague and I have spent months planning this train job. The hardest part is, of course, stopping the train. The local track runs for 43 miles in a dead straight line from Gold Run California to Truckee. No turns, no hills, no siding, no place to hide. Nothing but wide-open spaces, sun, dust, and railroad tracks. Then it continues for another forty-three miles, twisting and turning, crossing the border to Carson City. At Truckee, which is near 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.
The plan is to hide ourselves in the middle of nowhere and stop the train.
We agreed that only part of the gold can be stolen because the rest would be too difficult to transport. Each bar weighs four hundred troy ounces. When you do the math, it works out to be twenty-seven pounds per bar. At $18.94 per troy ounce, a gold bar is worth $7,576, or 400 heifers. Both of us would be millionaires if we took 264 bars.
I figured a wagon, and a heavyweight horse, could transport three hundred bars or more. It is possible to load the wagon by hand, 4 bars at a time. Allowing five minutes and 2 bars each per trip, it will take us almost 6 hours to load the wagon. If we could break open the boxes and load more in that time, there would be plenty of room and horsepower to succeed.
Last night, we were sitting in the saloon after a hard day of planning, when we were approached by a down-and-out geezer who weaved his way to our table. He nodded and asked if we would buy him a drink. "Sure buddy" says I. He sat and inhaled his drink in one swallow and then looked at us and said, "yer only got four days to do your thing". This was the message we had been waiting for. We calculated the train was leaving on July 1st.
We had already worked on our individual tasks. Montague had found a suitable horse to train. He had figured out an efficient way of loading the cart. I had refined our disappearing act so the train driver would not see us lying in wait. I already had a notion of how to do this.
The plan for the guards was already worked out, and I had been busy getting the materials to make our disappearing act work. For that, I had taken a few photos of the scenery around the ambush site, using a Bubroni daguerreotype camera. This camera has been available for eleven years and is simple to use. I picked it because it would develop the plates inside the camera, and no-one else would be involved. The #6 bellows model was a simple choice because it would take a larger photo, about 7.2 inches by 9.6 inches, and would be ideal for the purpose. I’d shot photos from several angles. Once I had them, I'd taken them to an artist in Reno, 74 miles away, and told him what I wanted. I felt comfortable using him as he had a big underground business of pornographic paintings and photography. Meanwhile, Montague had thought of a new idea for unloading the gold, and after explaining it to me, I'd asked around in Reno until I found the perfect equipment to do the job.
As all the material ordered from Reno was on-hand and we had already practiced the robbery twice. We’d found a rail track at an old, abandoned mine, out of sight from Gold Run, and we used that to perfect our plan.
Trying to think of everything that could go wrong and how to get over those difficulties was challenging.
The decision, in the first stages of planning, had been to use one heavy horse. When we practiced with it, we found the horse struggled a bit, so we figured a team of two would be better. The thing is, if you have one horse, it could just about do the job; if you had two, you would think you’d get double the pulling power. In fact, what you got was triple. We wanted to make sure we had the horsepower to transport the bars with enough left to take more. Also, each horse would not have to work so hard and this would increase their endurance in the heat.
We did one trial run to the site picked for the robbery to see how long it took and check if the horses could handle the temperature and the cart, loaded with rocks for weight, and hay bales for disguise.
Montague and I had chosen the right clothes for the job, and a change for our getaway. There was no need for disguises. Instead, our usual robbery attire was all about giving us a crucial edge in every conceivable combat scenario. It is composed of some clothing adapted with a few mechanical additions. The hats, grey felt toppers, with some added accessories. The crowns altered by adding a pouch in which there is a sheathed throwing knife. A set of custom goggles adorn the brims. A coating had been added 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 have many pockets to stash compasses, bigger knives, matches and spare bullets for our two-shot derringers. Both of us would have vambraces on each arm. These vambraces held quick-draw sleeve-guns, smaller caliber, but just as deadly as a six-gun at close range. Around our necks were bolo neckties with small pocket watches attached. Our waistcoats were filled with little sheaths and pockets for all the other items which might be handy to get out of trouble. Gun belts were customized to carry our larger eight-guns. An eight gun is an improved six-gun that has a wider cylinder to hold eight bullets. Sash styled across our waistcoats were two bandoliers filled with more cartridges for use with both our handguns and our 1873 Winchester rifles. Each Bandolier also holds four hand-grenades. The long pants, tucked into our boots, adorned with more derringer type guns and extra ammo, completed our work clothes. All dressed up and ready to roll. A pretty sight we made.
Our getaway clothes were everyday cowboy attire. No fancy accoutrements. Well-worn California style woolen pants – the ones with a tight waist and loose-fitting bottoms - complete with suspenders. Our shirts were long-sleeved woolen button-ups, no collar. Vests with pockets to store miscellaneous items for long rides. Our hats were mundane felt, deep crowned, wide-brimmed hat, to protect us from the sun. As usual, they were designed for use as a water bucket, a feedbag, or as a 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 most 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. We looked like and could pass for any casual 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 all the gear, including the hay bales.
We estimated it would take 10 hours to arrive at the ambush point. We would rest for an hour and then set up the ambush. Our calculations had the Gold Train passing us at about 4pm 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 would be sitting 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. There would only be six guards on this leg of the journey.
We rode beside the tracks, away from Gold Run, and found a suitable join in the rail to work with. The joins are the weakest part of a track, so were an easy target. We planned on packing their fishplates with the newly invented explosive gelignite. Gelignite is more stable than dynamite and adjustable to mold into any shape. To make it disintegrate the join, then bend each rail, we made sure the joins were full of gelignite, then molded more of it around the fishplates that hold the rails together. The idea was, blow the join, and the car would derail and throw the guards off it. Our Winchester rifles would do the rest. We wanted the guards' car to wreck but did not want to damage the flat-deck car with the gold on it or we would end up running around collecting the far-flung boxes.
"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 travel at speeds between eighteen and twenty-two miles per hour – depending on the condition of the track and the weight of its cargo. After the explosion, Goldilocks and the gold car would continue chugging on for almost two thousand feet and then roll to a halt. We could not let it do that, so we added another batch of explosives further down the track. We used less here, as we did not want the train to do more than crunch to a stop. The bomb would ignite just before the bogie wheels were on the rail joins. This would stop the train but not cause a full derailment. 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 explosive and I would be further down the track to deal with the engine. The one thing we could not control was the speed at which the steam engine would continue along the tracks. I sited the second bomb about 1,000 ft. up the line from Montague's. We were now 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 heavy horses. Both of us unloaded the hay bales and stacked them behind us. We had to rest as tomorrow would be a hard workday for us.
To transfer the boxed gold to the wagon involved lifting off and carrying wooden boxes, each weighing just over 110 lbs. 4 bars of gold are jammed together in a box, with a buffer of straw to prevent them from rubbing against each other. Montague and I figured we were up to the task as we had been practicing with weighted fake boxes for about 2 weeks now. We intended to unload sixty-six or more of those boxes to meet our target of 264 gold bars. The total weight we would move is about 7,130 lbs.
Chapter 2
Today is the day. It is 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, so as not to get too hot, we set up the eight-foot-high screens painted to look like the landscape we were operating in. As you will remember, I had taken photographs of the scenery and delivered them to an artist to paint the flats from. The tricky part for him was to minimize the hard edges of the flats – breaking them up so they were not visible from a short distance. The flat terrain and the straight track lend itself to this illusion. As he explained to me, people see what they expect to see, so the edges would just 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 would make them shimmer, as in a heat mirage. The heavy horses and the wagon were twenty-four feet long, so I had ordered eight panels to hide them, four to hide myself and my horse, and four more to hide Montague. The panels had to be joined in situ with nuts and bolts and then braced to keep them upright and stable. Some of our hay bales were being used to ensure the flats were stabilized.
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. All we needed to do was load the boxes from the train onto the belt, then unload them at the other end. I had located the equipment, and Montague adapted it to our purpose. The steam engine would power the conveyor from the wagon, and we had enough fuel and water to make it all work.
Next, we checked and double checked the flats, the small steam engine, the explosives, and the fuses. Then we rested for a couple of hours. About three pm, we dressed in our special gear and did a last check before the train was due. Our conveyor belt's engine was building up a good head of steam, and what little smoke the burning wood produced dissipated in a slight breeze. Everything was now ready.
Shortly after four pm I heard the train approaching. All was going according to plan. 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 had used too much gelignite. The front of the guard-car reared up, then crashed back and landed with its left wheels bouncing between the railroad ties, throwing the guards onto the ground around the car. Three were killed in the explosion and two were severely injured. The last one tried to run. Montague easily picked him off with Winchester.
The train was now free of the guard-car but was not slowing down. The engineer and stoker were working hard, trying to control it. I was waiting behind my screens, ready to chase the train if it seemed it would not stop before I blew the line. I made a quick decision to explode it right away so the train would not go any further than we wanted it to. This blast was also much stronger than we had expected. The rails tore off the ties and bent at crazy angles. The driver was fighting to slow the train before it reached the break. By now, I was riding fast to deal with the crew. By the time I reached them, both were standing in shock beside the engine. I got my Winchester out of its scabbard and suggested they sit on the ground by the wreckage while 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. " He hauled the conveyor belt over and secured it in place. 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.
