The People’s Songbag

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

The People’s Songbag

ties handed over the prisoners. But even then it was not without difficulty that the prisoners reached their final appointment. Halfway across the river on the American side at Detroit a steamer bore down on the tug carrying Pinkerton and his prisoners and cut it in two. The prisoners, in heavy legirons and handcuffs, almost drowned.

Tension built up after the prisoners reached the New Albany gaol. Vigilantes vowed to storm the gaol, and the remnants of the gang threatened to reduce the vigilantes’ home town of Seymour to ashes if the prisoners were harmed.

By October the gang and the Southern Indiana Vigilance Committee had declared open war. Men were shot, beaten, tortured. At midnight on December 11, the vigilantes moved. Singly and in pairs they gathered at the Seymour railway station, overpowered the engineer of a train which had just arrived and moved out of the depot to go 50 miles south to the Jeffersonville station. There they overpowered the engineer of another train and set off for New Albany, reaching it at 3.20 a.m.

Still wearing their flapping red masks they marched up the street to the gaol, shot and wounded the sheriff and forced two deputies to turn over the cell keys.

Frank, then William Reno were dragged from their cells and hanged. Simeon Reno fought violently, dragging a heavy iron sink from the corner of his cell and using one of its legs as a club. But he was overpowered and flung after his brothers over the secondstorey landing. He took half an hour to die.

The vigilantes dragged out a fourth outlaw, Charlie Anderson. The first noose they put on his neck snapped, flinging him to the floor. They drew tight the second and left him to strangle slowly.