While the pair was lodged in the county jail at Brownstown, members of the Jackson County (or Southern Indiana) Vigilance Committee, also known as the Scarlet Mask Society because of the long red bandannas they wore, tried to break in, but they were kept at bay by the sherriff. Later, both train robbers were convicted and sent to the Indiana State Prison at Jeffersonville — Colleran for five years and Hammond for six.

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Frank and John Reno decided it would be safer to make their next foray out of state. They headed to Missouri. On November 17, 1864, several gang members raided the treasurer’s office at the Daviess County Courthouse, in Gallatin, Mo., and made off with some $23,618 in cash and bonds. John Reno was positively identified as one of the robbers, and the Pinkertons were hot on his trail. On December 4, when John went to the Seymour railroad station, a half-dozen Pinkerton men reportedly hopped off a train and arrested him with the help of the Daviess County sheriff. However, the December 19 issue of the North Missourian said that Reno was arrested by ‘Capt. Ballinger and Woodruff’ of Daviess County in Indianapolis. In any case, once Reno was approached, officers whisked him off to Gallatin, where he stood trial for the treasury job. He pleaded guilty on January 18, 1868, as a lynch mob formed outside the courthouse. John Reno was sentenced to 25 years at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. He had been the leader and brains of the Reno Gang, but older brother Frank and the others carried on without him. John would get out of prison in February 1878 and return to Seymour. By then, all his criminal brothers were dead. Seven years later he would be sentenced to three years in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City for passing counterfeit bills. John Reno would die at his home in Seymour on January 31, 1895.

When Frank Reno took control of the gang after John was sent to prison in 1868, he figured it would be safer to strike out of state again, so he brought the boys west to Iowa. On February 18, 1868, the band robbed the Harrison County treasury office in Magnolia of at least $14,000. During the following week, Frank and company looted the Louisa County and the Mills County treasury safes for a total of close to $18,000. They collected another $18,000 in late March from the Howard County treasury. Following this last success, Frank Reno and gang members Albert Perkins and Miles Ogle hid out in Council Bluffs, Iowa, at the home of a former outlaw, Michael Rogers. The Pinkertons traced the gang there, and Allan Pinkerton’s brother William led a raid on the house, where the detectives recovered about $14,000, which the outlaws had been trying to burn in a stove, and arrested the quartet. Incarcerated in the Sidney jail, Frank and the others broke a hole in the cell wall and escaped on April 1, 1868. Over the hole in the wall, written in chalk, were the words ‘April Fool.’ Shortly thereafter, Frank was back in Seymour and planning something even bigger.

The Reno Gang struck another train on May 22, 1868, this time in Marshfield, Ind., some 17 miles south of Seymour. The May 23 edition of the New Albany Ledger reported: ‘The last train of the night on the Jefferson, Madison & Indianapolis Railroad left Jeffersonville, Indiana at 9:30 p.m. and proceeded north. The train stopped at a refueling station in Marshfield [near present-day Scottsburg] at about 11:00 p.m. to take on water and wood. As the engineer and fireman were seeing about the locomotive, they were waylaid by a gang of twelve men who moved out of the darkness of the densely wooded, swampy area. The railroad men were quickly overpowered and the engine and Adams Express car uncoupled from the rest of the train and taken at full steam toward Seymour. Four of the robbers broke into the express car and were fired upon by the messenger. His shots were ineffective and he was badly beaten with pistols and crowbars, then thrown from the door of the car. He was found the next morning on the rail embankment barely alive.’

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