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| Harry (The Sundance Kid) Longabaugh and Etta Place |
If you’re driving on Interstate 80 about 35 miles southwest of Winnemucca you might notice a sign indicating something called “Humboldt House.” If you look fast, you might be able to see a few older trees and a handful of buildings, but not much activity.
But about 150 years ago, Humboldt House, also called Humboldt Station, was a pretty happening place. Established in 1866 as a stagecoach stop, it soon became an important stop on the Central Pacific Railroad after that line was completed in 1869.
From the early 1870s until 1900, Humboldt House grew into a small settlement with a hotel that catered to railroad travelers. It became known as one of the best places to eat on the rail line.
It was that very same railroad line, in fact, that brought a small group of outlaws to Nevada on July 14, 1898. At about 2:30 a.m., two men stopped the Central Pacific Railroad’s east-bound passenger train No. 1 at a spot about one-mile east of the Humboldt House.
According to Winnemucca’s Silver State newspaper, the train was operating at a high rate of speed “when two masked robbers, one armed with a Winchester and the other with a revolver, leaped over the tender of the engine and covered Engineer (Philip) Wickland and Fireman McDermott with their weapons and demanded that they stop the train immediately.”
After Wickland brought the train to a stop, he and McDermott were ordered to climb down from the locomotive and escort the armed men to the Wells Fargo express car. Once there, Wickland was instructed to tell the guard inside the car to open the door.
The guard, whose last name was Hughes, shouted he wasn’t going to comply and extinguished the lights inside car. He grabbed a rifle and prepared to protect whatever valuables were inside the car’s safe.
One of the would-be thieves then put a small stick of dynamite under the door, lit it, and reportedly said, “I guess that will fetch him.”
Following an explosion, which demolished a part of the railcar door, the robbers called to the messenger to come out and “be a good fellow.” This time he did so and one of the thieves climbed in the car with more dynamite, which he used to successfully blow open the safe.
After collecting any valuables from the safe, the robbers led the railroad employees a little way away from the train, then, according to Hughes, “shook hands with us and saying adios disappeared in the darkness.”
Hughes later described the two men with one being of medium height with a reddish beard and hair, while the other was shorter and very dark. “They were both cool and seemed to know what they were about,” he told the newspaper. A third man, who remained unseen, apparently was in the shadows, holding their horses.
So who were these train robbers? The following day, the Silver State reported that the thieves had gotten away with between $20,000 and $26,000 or, it noted, it could have been as little as $9,000. Later reports further downgraded the robbery, saying the pair only stole $450.
Regardless, a train robbery is still a train robbery, and law enforcement immediately began searching for the culprits. A posse was formed and followed the horse tracks of the thieves but then disbanded when it became apparent the robbers had too great a head-start.
Authorities quickly arrested two men they thought were responsible but they were found not guilty after a short trial.
Soon, however, the Pinkerton Detective Agency settled onto new suspects: members of the notorious Wild Bunch Gang, who had been seen in the Humboldt County area in the days before the robbery.
According to Donna B. Ernst, author of “The Sundance Kid: The Life of Harry Alonzo Longabaugh,” the Sundance Kid had a distant cousin, a bartender named Seth Longabough, living in Eureka, Nevada, so he regularly visited him in the late 1890s.
The Pinkerton Agency soon decided the three men responsible for the robbery were Wild Bunch members Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan, George “Flat Nose” Curry, and the Sundance Kid.
In his book, “He Rode With Butch and Sundance: The Story of Harvey ‘Kid Curry’ Logan,” author Mark T. Smokov wrote that the three men met up at Robbers Roost in Utah before heading to Nevada. According to the Pinkertons, they spent a couple days scouting the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks near Winnemucca planning their robbery.
In the end, none of the suspected hold-up men was ever prosecuted for the crime. Logan would later kill himself after being cornered by a posse for a different crime in 1904. Flat Nose Curry would die in 1900 after being shot by a sheriff while rustling cattle. And the Sundance Kid is believed to have been killed, with his partner-in-crime, Butch Cassidy, during a shootout with federal police in Bolivia in 1908.
