Night Of Blood

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 5

Night Of Blood

(Specially written for “The Press’ 1 by DERRICK ROONEY.)

“'T'HE Scarlet Masks are riding, to wipe out the Reno gang,” begins an old Indiana ballad, stating succinctly the motivation behind one of the worst lynching incidents in the history of the

American West: the Night of Blood in New Albany on December 11, 1868.

The Scarlet Masks was the popular name for the members of the Southern Indiana Vigilance Committee, a selfappointed vigilante group who fancied wearing their coats inside out and shrouding their faces in red flannel masks, and whose avowed intention was to rid the State of Indiana of the Reno gang, as mean a bunch of train robbers as the West has known.

The Reno brothers—Frank, John Simeon and William—acquired the distinction of being the first train robbers in American history on October 6, 1866, when they held up the Ohio and Mississippi express and robbed it of 10,000 dollars. They continued with robbery after robbery, getting hauls of up to 96,000 dollars, committing an occasonal murder on the side and organising the dozens of outlaw gangs which roamed Indiana after the Civil War into a massive organisation which virtually controlled Southern Indiana. The Pinkerton agency took up their trail in 1868 and after the gang had taken 14,000 dollars from the Harrison County Bank in Magnolia, lowa, managed to capture them at Council Bluffs. But the entire gang escaped on the morning of April 1, 1868, leaving a hole in the gaol wall and a chalked message, “April Fool.” The Pinkertons tried again, hanging out a tempting bait; 100,000 dollars in gold in an Adams Express Company railroad car. When the outlaws burst open the doors, they found, not a pile of safe deposit boxes, but the blazing revolvers of a Pinkerton posse. The Pinkertons rounded up the wounded outlaws and set off for the nearest gaol. On the way a mob of masked men overpowered the posse and lynched the outlaws. But the Renos were not among them: their turn came later, when Pinkerton agents caught William and Simeon Reno and Allan Pinkerton himself tracked down the others in Canada. After a long and bitter legal fight President Andrew Johnson signed the extradition papers and the British authori-