Even if they immediately try to stop the train, it still takes time for the train to come to a full stop. The train is now miles from where they jumped off their horses. Do you think the horses will keep running and try to catch up to them? I’m betting those horses will never be seen again unless someone stays behind to wrangle them with food or water, and remember, they still need those horses to make a clean getaway.
Some of the gang jumps on the train and some of them wrangle the horses and catch up.
The article below says that actually horseback train robberies were rare. More commonly part of the gang would board as a passenger and eventually hold up the engineer and get him to stop at a prearranged point where someone was waiting with the horses.
Just one of the gang . . . provided he uses enough dynamite.
This makes more sense since trying to jump from a galloping horse onto a train going 30 or 40 mph would have been pretty dangerous, and there was no reason to do it.
It would be much easier to jump on a stagecoach going seven or ten mph, but you would have been spotted pretty easily and shot trying.
Of course, the sentence might depend on who owned the horse… and the prevalence of crime.
They couldnt hang everyone on the the wilds ?
But in the east…
Nitpick: Mustangs aren’t exactly a breed; for most of them, their bloodlines are a mixture of a number of different breeds that got loose from humans and went feral; they can vary quite a bit in color and build. There are subsets of mustangs that can be classed as a breed based on genetic analysis and breeding true to type, such as the Kiger mustang. [edit] An explainer of six distinct mustang types/breeds.
A pinto (lower case) is a coat pattern, color (brown, chestnut, or black) and white; there are different types, such as overo and tobiano, but pintos as a color pattern can be found in many breeds. A Paint (capital P) is an established stock horse breed, like a Quarter Horse but with more chrome. An explainer.
Not every jurisdiction will have the same penalty for all crimes. The Indian territories were under the legal jurisdiction of the federal court out of Fort Smith AR.
It wouldn’t shock me if local or state laws differed. Or if outsiders (as these two men appeared to be) were subject to harsher penalties than locals.
For example, this prof did some digging and found that, despite stereotypes, horse theft was probably never a capital offense in the state of Texas, despite some periods of relatively high violence/crime.
Basically, Westerns have always played fast and loose with history and this is just one more example.
Unless they are documentaries, Western movies are complete fiction and should not be considered source material on what it was like to live in the West in the 1800s. Some TV shows, like Deadwood, try to recreate what it might have been like, but since the creators weren’t alive then, it’s a lot of guesswork.
The real West was, for the most part, a lot less violent than we see in Westerns, but there was violence, and it was sometimes gruesome in its treatment of robbers and thieves, but lots of normal people, like you and me, lived their entire life in Dodge City, Kansas and never witnessed a gunfight or saw anybody hanged for cattle rustling.
Seems like it would be much easier to block the track with something. I suppose the idea is that a group of outlaws on horseback can just pop up out of nowhere and chase down the train. But then I can’t imagine the Pinkertons would be patrolling the entire length of every track. Even if they could, seems to me you would be just as likely to be caught setting up for hour “jump on the train” robbery or collecting your horses afterwards as you would be parking a wagon on the tracks.
The Pinkertons would be on the train. Like how we have Air Marshals now.
I know we are getting off-topic here, but I agree with this. Yet, every town with an old west or gold rush history always claims shootouts were common, brothels were numerous, and bar fights were the norm. It’s like a fake badge of honor or something, to have a “notorious history”, and when I hear these stories of how the town was “known as the roughest, toughest place west of the Pecos” (like every other town), I just chuckle.
I know of one town that was actually like that, but it was in the 20th century and the town no longer exists.
Mondak, Montana. Located where the Missouri River and the Great Northern RR cross the Montana-North Dakota border. From just after statehood in 1889, ND was a dry (no alcohol) state. Montana was not, so border towns in Montana did good business selling booze. Mondak, though, had the advantage of the rail line. The town wasn’t founded until 1903 and thrived on whiskey until Prohibition in 1920. As Robert Temple puts it in Edge Effects:
Once Prohibition hit, the town dried up pretty quick and most of it eventually burned down in wildfires.
And Lefty whines, “awww, hows come I always gotta wrangle?”
A modern train, yes, the stopping takes a bit. Older steam trains with a dozen cars or so, stopping was typically in the range of 800 to 1200 yds from 45mph in the 1800s.
And “normal” people would not have the cash to buy an expensive, unreliable handgun. Shotguns would have been common for dealing with varmints and some people would have owned long guns, although ammunition would have been expensive too.
The idea that every cowboy had a handgun is pure Hollywood. Cowboys were poor and lived right on the margins.
Yeah, but in Cattle towns, the cowboys getting drunk, starting fights, breaking stuff and shooting their guns off into the air (this was why some towns made cowboys turn in their guns on the way in) was a common occurrence. “High noon” gunfights were rare.
So, drunken rowdy cowboys, -yes. Daily shootouts- No.
Pinkertons were hired thugs, union busters, etc. They were not real law enforcement, but yeah, could be hired to protect a gold shipment or something.
If you look at actual period photographs or painting from the old west, you will see this is wrong. Yeah, even tho cowboys didn’t need the gun for gunfights, it was a status symbol, not “real” cowboy would be without. You can read plenty of stories about cowboys “hurrahing” a town at the end of the trail.
A new Colt was $17, which was about half a months wages- but remember, a cowboy also had room and board, etc included so his “dollar a day” was net after living expenses and few taxes. Used guns would be way less. Nor were cartridge revolvers “unreliable”.
High Noon Gunfights are almost “pure Hollywood”. But owning a gun was not.
Here is an anti-gun article-Gun Control Is as Old as the Old West | History| Smithsonian Magazine
“People were allowed to own guns, and everyone did own guns [in the West], for the most part,” says Winkler. “Having a firearm to protect yourself in the lawless wilderness from wild animals, hostile native tribes, and outlaws was a wise idea. But when you came into town, you had to either check your guns if you were a visitor or keep your guns at home if you were a resident.”
Good point. They were hired security like at a concert and not government agents.
same with stagecoaches …
Let it be bleed!
