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Train Robberies
From the start of the Railway Mail Service in America in 1832, postal clerks who rode with the mail did so under life-threatening conditions. Ever present were the dual dangers of robberies and wrecks.
Railway Mail Service clerks were highly skilled and expected to sort six hundred pieces of mail per hour in cramped conditions on moving trains.
Small fortunes transported in mail cars tempted thieves like Jesse James and the DeAutremont brothers to ambush trains in order to get rich quick. Railway robberies often resulted in explosions, derailments, injuries and deaths.
Although some train wrecks were the work of evildoers, most were accidents. Between 1890 and 1905, as many as seven thousand wrecks resulted in the deaths of one hundred and forty-three postal clerks. At least three thousand more were injured.
A Robbery Gone Awry
In 1923, Hugh, Ray and Roy DeAutremont ambushed a mail train in the mountains of southern Oregon, but the robbery didn’t go as planned. Too much dynamite incinerated the mail car and everything in it, including the postal clerk. The brakeman, engineer and fireman were also killed during the hold-up, and the forty thousand dollars the brothers had hoped to steal was nothing more than an unfounded rumor. After a worldwide manhunt, the bandits were captured in 1927.
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| Reward circular used in the manhunt for the DeAutremont brothers |
Interestingly, a registered mail receipt fingered the DeAutremonts. The telling paper, signed by Roy, was discovered in a pair of overalls the brothers had intended as a decoy to throw bloodhounds off their trail.
Train Wrecks
From the beginning of the Railway Mail Service in America, the clerks who rode with the mail served under conditions that could be life-threatening. The worst danger was from train wrecks. In order to help protect passengers in the train, mail cars were placed between the locomotive and the passenger cars. As a result, Railway Mail Service clerks often bore the major impact from collisions or explosions.
