Verdi, Nevada, First Train Robbery in the West
Near Reno, Nevada
The little community of Verdi sits just west of Reno in the Truckee River canyon, and it was named in eighteen sixty-eight by Central Pacific railroad baron Charles Crocker in honor of the Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi. Two years later, on the night of November fourth, eighteen seventy, five men boarded the Central Pacific Overland Express at this stop, seized the locomotive and express car, and cut them free from the rest of the train. They hauled the engine five miles down the tracks, stopped it with a barricade, and made off with about forty-one thousand dollars.
It is often called the first train robbery in the West, and the news, as one newspaper put it, almost took away the public breath. A manhunt followed.
