In 1854, the United States acquired the roughly 30,000-square-mile
region of present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico from
Mexico as part of the Gadsden Purchase. This new Southern Corridor was
ideal for train routes from Texas to California, and soon tracks were
laid for the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe rail lines. Shipping goods by
train was more efficient, and for desperate outlaws and opportunistic
lawmen, robbing trains was high-risk, high-reward. The Southern Corridor
was the location of sixteen train robberies between 1883 and 1922. It
was also the homebase of cowboy-turned-outlaw Black Jack Ketchum's High
Five Gang. Most of these desperadoes rode the rails to Arizona's Cochise
County on the US-Mexico border where locals and lawmen alike hid them
from discovery. Both Wyatt Earp and Texas John Slaughter tried to clean
them out, but it took the Arizona Rangers to finish the job. It was a
time and place where posses were as likely to get arrested as the
bandits. Some of the Rangers and some of Slaughter's deputies were train
robbers. When rewards were offered there were often so many claimants
that only the lawyers came out ahead. Southwest Train Robberies
chronicles the train heists throughout the region at the turn of the
twentieth century, and the robbers who pulled off these train jobs with
daring, deceit, and plain dumb luck! Many of these blundering outlaws
escaped capture by baffling law enforcement. One outlaw crew had their
own caboose, Number 44, and the railroad shipped them back and forth
between Tucson and El Paso while they scouted locations. Legend says one
gang disappeared into Colossal Cave to split the loot leaving the posse
out front while they divided the cash and escaped out another entrance.
The antics of these outlaws inspired Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
to blow up an express car and to run out guns blazing into the fire of a
company of soldiers.
