Southwest Train Robberies: Hijacking the Tracks along the Southern Corridor

by Doug Hocking

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.

239 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 1, 2023

About the author

Doug Hocking grew up on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation in the Rio Arriba (Northern New Mexico). He attended reservation schools, Ivy League prep school, and graduated from high school in Santa Cruz, New Mexico, in the Penitente heartland among paisonos and Indios. Doug enlisted in Army Intelligence out of high school and worked in Taiwan, Thailand and at the Pentagon. With an undergraduate degree in business he returned home for graduate study in Social Anthropology (Ethnography) and then returned to the Army as an Armored Cavalry officer (scout) completing his career by instructing Military Intelligence lieutenants in intelligence analysis and the art of war. He has earned a master’s degree with honors in American History and completed field school in Historical Archaeology. Since retiring he has worked with allied officers, entertained tourists with history and tall tales, built houses and taught at Cochise College where he initiated the Culinary Arts Program. He is now an independent scholar residing in southern Arizona near Tombstone with his wife, dogs, a feral cat and a friendly coyote. He is on the board of the Southern Chapter of the Arizona Historical Society and is Sheriff of the Bisbee Corral of the Westerners which won the Heads Up Award in 2014. He began writing a few years ago and has published in Wild West, True West, Buckskin Bulletin and Roundup Magazine. His photographs have appeared in the Arizona Republic, Tucson Star and Sacramento Bee as well as in numerous magazines. He has appeared as an historian on radio and TV. His short story “Marshal of Arizona” appears in La Frontera’s Outlaws and Lawmen anthology, a second, “The Bounty,” appears in Dead or Alive, a third, “Echo Amphitheater,” in Broken Promises. His historical novels Massacre at Point of Rocks and Mystery of Chaco Canyon are available on Amazon in print and eBook and from his website www.doughocking.com. He is working on a biography of Tom Jeffords, Cochise’s Friend.

Reviews

[Blaine DeSantis]

All you fans of the Western Genre will get a kick out of this new book by historian Doug Hocking. Always fascinated by Train Robberies, and this book gives us a detailed look at most every such event in the Southwest region of Arizona. Now, even the author admits to not covering the last robbery because that was when thieves broke into a parked train car and stole a load of SPAM!! LOL But other than that we have a good look at all sorts of robberies, the outlaws involved in them, the sheriffs and posses in pursuit and what was stolen. Some fascinating robberies and while the general reader may not get turned on by the topic, it is probably the most detailed and exhaustive book that deals with these robberies in Southwest Arizona. This also shows that not every robber was like Butch & Sundance, and how many seemed to involve inside jobs with railroad personnel involved. I really enjoyed this book. 3.5*** that I round up to 4**** due to my love of the genre!

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

The information is good, but the author writes like a teenager. With a decent editor to cut out some of the silliness it would have been better. However, read the book for the (seemingly) well done research.

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is primarily about train robberies that occurred in the old west primarily along the Santa Fe line. The author tends to drift off the subject at times (the introduction is approximately 10% of the book) and has a tendency to repeat facts and phrases on occasion. The book is interesting where he stays focused on the robberies themselves.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of Net Galley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook page