(The Statesman Journal posted the following story on its website on October 7.)
SALEM, Ore. — Nancy Pope knew nothing about the last great American train robbery before she began working at the Smithsonian Institution.
She had never heard of the DeAutremont brothers.
Despite growing up in Oregon, where the infamous robbery occurred. Despite attending the University of Oregon, where one of the brothers worked as a custodian after getting out of prison.
Today, Pope is something of an expert on the subject. As the historian for the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, she is in charge of a display that commemorates the crime, which happened 80 years ago Saturday.
Ray, Roy and Hugh DeAutremont held up a Southern Pacific mail and passenger train near Ashland on Oct. 11, 1923. After dynamiting the mail car and killing four men, they fled empty-handed and remained at large for four years.
The brothers eventually were arrested and sentenced to life in the Oregon State Penitentiary. All three were released before their deaths.
They later were interred at Belcrest Memorial Park in South Salem.
The display at the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., includes the detonator that the DeAutremonts used.
Pope has held the device that reduced the train’s mail car to kindling.
“Boy, is it heavy,” said Pope, who has worked at the Smithsonian since 1984. “It stuns me to think of them carrying all of their other stuff and this.”
Closer to home, the Jackson County Museum has a collection of photographs and other memorabilia.
Around this time every year, the museum receives inquiries about the crime and the three young men who bungled it so badly.
“There’s always been a great deal of interest,” said Carol Samuelson, who has worked for the Southern Oregon Historical Society for 18 years. “But it’s waning a little because some of the old-timers who remember the excitement and the association, they?re starting to pass away.”
John Howard, a former police officer who lives in Portland, is one of the last remaining links to the DeAutremonts.
Howard befriended Ray after he got out of prison. Howard co-wrote the book “All For Nothing,” which was published in 1976.
On many an anniversary of the holdup, Howard has been known to visit the site — Tunnel 13 at the summit of the Siskiyou Mountains — and leave a wreath in memory of the trainmen who died that day.
He is not expected to make the pilgrimage this year because of failing health, although he continues to cling to the hope that someday someone will make a movie about his friend?s life.
“I wish he would get the backing and see it on the big screen before (he dies),” Samuelson said.
The robbery
Twins Ray and Roy were 23 at the time, and Hugh was just 19.
Only Ray had been in trouble with the law, as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, a radical labor group.
Four years later, when they were on trial, there would be talk of their boyish charm. Newspapers would describe the twins as dapper and Hugh as handsome.
“These boys weren’t cut out for a life of crime,” Samuelson said. “What a shame.”
The DeAutremonts planned for weeks to rob the Southern Pacific rail, which was known as the “Gold Special” because it frequently took gold shipments up and down the West Coast.
The brothers, employed in the summer of 1923 at a logging camp near Silverton, believed that the train would be carrying at least $40,000 in its mail car.
They agreed it was worth the risk, so they plotted to hold up Train 13 in Tunnel 13, not far from Ashland.
They took with them a suitcase full of dynamite and a detonator, both of which they had stolen.
On the day of the robbery, they soaked their shoes in creosote to help cover their scent.
“That is the reason your dogs wouldn’t do any good,” Roy wrote later in his confession, a copy of which is at the National Postal Museum.
As meticulously as they planned, they mindlessly botched the holdup.
They used too many explosives, destroying everything in the mail car. The mail clerk inside was cremated.
Each brother wound up shooting someone: the engineer, the brakeman and the fireman.
As they fled the scene, Roy dropped a .45-caliber revolver on the railroad tracks that the investigators later traced back to him, as well as a pair of coveralls. A receipt for a registered letter sent by Roy to another brother in New Mexico was found inside a pocket.
The manhunt
Oregon National Guard troops, local posses and angry railroad workers were involved in the massive manhunt.
Before it was over, it would cost the Post Office Department some $500,000.
Wanted posters offering a $15,900 reward in gold — $5,300 for each brother — were placed at post offices, railroad stations, barbershops and jewelry stores worldwide.
More than 2.5 million posters in six languages were circulated, Howard?s book states.
The brothers split up, with Hugh joining the Army and Ray and Roy settling in Ohio. Ray married and had a son.
Hugh shipped out under the alias James Price. He later explained that he used “James” in every alias in honor of his idol, Jesse James.
He was the first to be arrested. A former Army buddy recognized him on a wanted poster and turned him in.
A few months later, during Hugh’s trial, the twins were arrested.
All three eventually confessed and were sentenced to life in prison at the Oregon State Penitentiary.
Prison life
Ray worked in the prison flax mill. He learned several languages and taught French, Spanish and Latin in the prison school. He also learned to paint, and several of his landscapes won awards in local exhibits.
Hugh founded a monthly magazine called “Shadows,” which twice won national honors for best prison publication.
Roy worked as a barber and contributed to his brother?s magazine. He later was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was transferred to the Oregon State Hospital, where he had a lobotomy.
A younger brother, Verne DeAutremont, settled in Salem and became well-known as an aircraft dealer.
Bill Hellie, who lives in South Salem, knew Verne for 30 years.
“I used to have lunch with him every day,” said Hellie, a pilot. “I asked him one day, ?How come you weren?t with your brothers when they robbed that train?? He said, ?I was too young or I?d have been there.?”
Hellie met Ray once and had coffee with him.
If having the name DeAutremont was a burden for Verne, who was about 13 at the time of the robbery, he never let on.
“Most people didn?t know anything about his brothers,” Hellie said. “But he was very defensive of them.”
Free men
Hugh was the first to be paroled, in 1958. He went to work in San Francisco as a printer before dying three months later of stomach cancer.
Three years later, Ray was paroled, at the age of 61. He settled in Eugene and worked for many years as a part-time custodian at the University of Oregon.
It was during that time that he came to know John Howard, the Portland police officer who became his good friend.
In 1979, Roy was sent to a Dallas nursing home and later was paroled. He died in a Salem nursing home in 1983.
Ray, the last of the DeAutremont brothers, died the following year.
They are buried at Belcrest Memorial, next to their mother, Belle. There is one grave marker for the three of them.