Big Springs, Nebraska: The Greatest Train Robbery on the Union Pacific

Big Springs is a small village in Deuel County, Nebraska, and it might be entirely forgotten had Sam Bass not arrived on the night of September eighteenth, eighteen seventy-seven. Bass and five companions captured the station-master, cut the telegraph line, and flagged down Union Pacific express train Number Four. They pulled sixty thousand dollars in fresh twenty-dollar gold pieces and currency from the express car, the largest single robbery in the history of the Union Pacific Railroad.

The gang scattered across the plains. Bass was eventually tracked down and killed in Texas the following year. Big Springs itself was not formally platted until the eighteen eighties and grew into a modest farm community.

Today it has fewer than five hundred residents, but the robbery of eighteen seventy-seven remains one of the defining stories of the Nebraska panhandle.