Soo Line Robbery

45° 32' 22" N | 89° 45' 19" W

The first moving train robbery in American history occurred on 6 October 1866. Brothers John and Simeon Reno took $13,000 from a train in Jackson County, Indiana. This robbery innovation improved upon previous methods like bank and stagecoach theft. The outlaws usually took cash or precious metals. The Reno Gang became the prototypical outlaw gang of the period. Butch Cassidy, leader of the Wild Bunch, is probably the most famous example of this type of post-Civil War marauding gang. The train companies retaliated by hiring private security. Outlaws, including the Renos, were publicly lynched by vigilantes. The use of federal injunctions to protect interstate commerce—especially after Pullman—replaced the need for private security and vigilantism with the United States army.

1894 Soo Line robbery "between Heafford and Bradley" was planned by Domonick Paflinski. Leverette C. Hazelton was his accomplice. The train's engineer was killed during the robbery. Hazelton got "20 years at Waupun and died of TB in 1899." Paflinski got "25 years..." he "went to Northern Hospital for the criminally insane where he died 5/12/1927.

Bradley was about three miles from Heafford Junction on the Soo line between the Twin Cities and Pembine. This was a major rail artery with daily passenger service. Highway 8 was commissioned in 1926 to run between Pembine and Forest Lake (eventually Minneapolis) and runs alongside this East-west line.

The 1930's Federal Writers Project had little to say about the twin stops of Bradley and Heafford. The landscape was described as "built on a half dozen lakelike sloughs formed by power and mill dams on the Wisconsin River..." one of these slough crossings proivded a perfect location for a train robbery. Tomahawk was in a boom time during the robbery. The mill and railroad came in 1886 and four mills were running by 1890. Everybody was "making money." This was the target of Paflinski and Hazelton.
Higway 8 highway serves the logging downs between: St. Croix Falls, Barron, Ladysmith, Prentice, Bradley (north of Tomahawk), Rhinelander, Crandon and Pembine. It runs mostly over Ojibwe land (as defined by the 1800 treaty). The town of Bradley is named after Tomahawk's founder. This lumber barron is remembered in street signs, parks and murals from Lake Tomahawk to Lake Mohawksin.

Heafford Junction is close to present day Tomahawk. This location has access to the Wisconsin River. It cannot be navigated to the Mississippi because of falls. During the first big cut, much of Wisconsin's forest came past this point—going down toward civilization. This landscape was in flux at the time of the robbery. Transport was being redefined as rail replaced rivers. Farmers were moving west, coming to plow the stump filled landscape Native tribes were facing the twin pressures of reservation life and boarding schools. The mowed over landscape was also being changed by the damming of the river and flooding of impoundment reservoirs—in this case the Spirit, Willow and Rainbow. Resort towns replaced the logging camps along the artificial shorelines. Vacationers from the cities came to where there used to be woods and took as many fish out of the lakes and reservoirs as their technology allowed.

Outlaw train gangs came to northern Wisconsin during that same period. The three miles between Heafford Junction and Bradley make a land bridge surrounded by lakes: Nokomis, Bridge, Deer and Crystal. This is a logical place to put a railroad bridge in this marshy wet landscape. This is where Paflinski and Hazelton decided to rob the train.

The Reno Gang started robbing trains at the tail end of the Civil War using the uncertain conditions of a border state in upheaval following the end of the war. This is the same lawless period that produced the extra-legal vigilantism of the KKK. The vigilantes who lynched the Renos and the Pinkertons who chased the Wild Bunch were acting in a similar model of stateless nihilism. Both sides: the outlaws and the privateers were primarily moved by profit.

The 1894 Soo Line robbery was also precipitated by a political and economic upheaval. The Panic of 1893. This panic was created and maintained by international commodity speculation, a restriction of free silver (repeal of Sherman Silver Purchase Act), the Pullman Strike and a financial instability caused by a credit crunch. This is the period of Left Wing Populists and labor activism. The political realignment—typified by the election of President McKinley, the use of injunctions against labor and imperialism in places like Hawaii, Cuba and the Philippines.

The political and economic instability of 1893-1898 is similar to the reconstruction era realignment—as federal military, land grants, rail roads and anglo-development promoted industrial development. Guys like Custer were used to scout and protect like the Ouchita Mountains and Black Hills—preparing the land for resource extraction, farming, rail roads and other forms of development. Wisconsin's northwoods was an underdeveloped land of Indians, immigrant farmers and underemployed lumberjacks in 1894—this landscape would have been very familiar to any federal Cavalry rider who had seen the post-contact frontier.

Like the Renos, Wild Bunch, Kiowas or Comanches—Paflinski and Hazelton tried to take advantage of the uneven development of areas between the anglo-population centers. Rural train tracks provided an obvious weakness of the America's private wealth.

Evidence of America's political development can be found in the liberalization of Paflinski and Hazelton's punishment. The moral of the story is about the even political and economic development of the frontier. If a state doesn't exist to protect 'rules based' capital then there will be outlaws like Indian raiders and train robbers. If the state doesn't exist to prosecute the outlaws then there will be vigilantism.

A third point could be made about the prospects for would be vigilantes. They come from lost opportunities as much as uneven development. The vigilantes, non state moral authority, fight to preserve a mode of life which is past. This is what the KKK, first nations and the self appointed lynch mobs have in common. In the face of liberal society—which seeks to ensure rights to the market, vote and education—the American luddites didn't stand a chance.

America's form of state liberalism is increasingly carcereal during this period. As Wisconsin became a more settled state there were improvements made to the first state prison at Waupun. It was initially completed by prison labor in 1854. There were nearly 300 cells. More cell block buildings were added in 1854, 1906 and 1913. All of them still house prisoners. Women's rights caught up with Wisconsin's Progressive Era prison system in 1933. Since then prisons have been segregated by sex. Hazelton, a seeming patsy, went to Waupun.

Another facet of American liberalism during this period, the asylum, is where Paflinski—the Soo Line robbery's mastermind—wound up. The Northern Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Winnebago (Oshkosh.) Waupun was a limestone rock fortress built by prison labor on the Rock River and designed by a three person committee designated in 1851. The Northern Hospital was built in 1873 after a 1870 law was passed. The original cost of the Waupun prison in 1854 was $93,600. The original cost of the Northern Hospital was $625,000 in 1873.

The sanitarium (a third, per-antibiotic Progressive Era institution) is similar to the first two. Criminality was seen as a mental defect which may also be a transmissible social disease. Sanitariums were the public health measure which would have best suited Hazelton. He died of Tb in Waupun in 1899.

To highlight the arbitrary nature of this 'rules based' liberal order see Paflinski's sentence at the asylum. He was given twenty five years. The robbery was in 1894. He died incarcerated in 1927... year thirty-three of his twenty-five year sentence.

sources
Central Wisconsin Digitization Project (.html)
Domonick Paflinski Train Robber "Domonick Paflinski planned the train robbery and wreck in which an engineer was killed in 1894 between Bradley and Heafford. Sentenced to 25 years, Paflinski went to Northern Hospital for the criminally insane where he died 5/12/1927." (.html)
Leverette C. Hazelton Train Robber "Leverette C. Hazelton and partner wrecked and robbed a train between Heafford and Bradley in 1894; killing the engineer. Hazelton was sentenced to 20 years at Waupun and died of Tb in 1899. (.html)
Plat map, Lincoln County, pre-1900 "T35, R6E, Lincoln County, pre 1900. Plat map showing tracks of MSP&SSM, Wisconsin and Chippewa and Milwaukee Road at Tomahawk, Bradley, and Heafford Junction." (.html)
Passenger trains at Bradley, 1900-1918 "The MTW ran a passenger train twice a day to Bradley until Oct. 1918, connecting with the Soo Line day trains between Pembine and the Twin Cities. About 10am one morning, westbound Soo Line train #85 is exchanging a few passengers, some mail and mounds of express with the one-car MTW train." (.html)
Heafford Junction depot, 1939 "Looking westbound along the Soo Line, the depot is surrounded by a broad platform."This was the Combination Station for the Milwaukee Road and the Soo Line. (.html)
Wisconsin Historical Society (.html)
Northern Hospital for the Criminally Insane "In 1870 a law was passed authorizing the creation of The Northern Hospital for the Insane, opening its doors to patients in 1873 for a total cost to the State of six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars." (.html)
Waupun Correctional Institution (.html)
''First Train Robbery in US History'' history.com (.html)
The Reno Gang is portrayed in: Love Me Tender (1956) trailer (.html) movie (.html)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Train Robbery Scene. (.html) The Federal Writers' Project. "Tour 7." Guide to 1930's Wisconsin St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006. 379. (first published: Wisconsin Library Association, 1941).