Solano Chronicles, Dec. 20, 2020
By Brendan Riley
The loot taken in Solano County’s only mail train robbery wasn’t much – $14 in cash and a small silver spoon found in stolen registered mail pouches – but the daring April 16, 1910, hold-up by two masked gunmen made headlines around the country, including the front page of the New York Times.
Three months later, on July 15, a Sacramento constable arrested two men suspected of stealing a bale of hay. Three revolvers found in their wagon linked them to the late-night train robbery near Benicia, and Joseph C. Brown and Charles Dunbar Bishop eventually confessed. By late August they were starting 45-year prison terms.
Here’s a detailed account, drawn from various 1910 newspaper stories and a few columns written in later years, of the carefully planned robbery:
Brown and Bishop had holed up in an abandoned shack near Benicia and, with high-powered field glasses, had been watching the mail trains come and go for days. They knew that eastbound trains took a few minutes to pick up speed after leaving a ferry that hauled them across the Carquinez Strait. The night of the robbery, they stowed away on one of those slow-moving trains. At a remote spot between Benicia and Suisun, they emerged from hiding, pointed their guns at Jack Marsh, the engineer, and Jim Blakely, his fireman, and ordered them to stop the locomotive.
Marsh and Blakely then were marched back to the mail car, where two clerks were forced to throw out registered mail sacks. One clerk started to toss out sacks filled with newspapers but the robbers detected the ruse and threatened to kill him unless he handed over the registered mail sacks. The crewmen were then ordered to put the pouches in the engine cab and unhook the locomotive.
The robbers took off in the engine, stopped a couple of miles down the tracks at a bridge over Goodyear Slough and unloaded the pouches into a small boat. Then the engine was turned loose, with the throttle wide open.
As the locomotive passed the station at Suisun, the station operator saw it was running wild and alerted dispatchers, who ordered that the engine be shunted onto a siding at Tolenas, several miles down the line. The engine, almost out of steam, ran onto the siding and rammed into two boxcars. Had it not been switched from the main line, it would have run into a westbound passenger train that had stopped at Tolenas.
While railway employees rushed to prevent a train collision, the robbers rowed from the slough to a point just east of Martinez, across the Carquinez Strait from Benicia, and made their getaway in a stolen horse and buggy. They hid out near Mount Diablo for a couple of days, and then went to Los Angeles.
Investigators found a shotgun and other weapons abandoned by the robbers as they made their escape, and learned that the shotgun had been stolen from a Riverside, Calif., store. There were other clues, along with a $5,000 reward offered by Southern Pacific for information, but the trail had gone cold – until the July 15 arrest of Brown and Bishop in Sacramento by Constable Michael Judge. Authorities determined that the three handguns found in their wagon also had been stolen from the same Riverside store. The two men immediately became the prime suspects in the train robbery case.
Brown was the first to crack under questioning, admitting four days after his arrest to the gun thefts, the train robbery and other crimes. He also implicated Bishop, who held out but a few days later also confessed. A Sacramento Bee account stated that Bishop was “highly incensed at Brown for making the confession and has on several occasions since being in jail here intimated to some of his jail mates that if an opportunity presented itself that he would do Brown bodily harm.”
On Aug. 22, the two men appeared before Solano County Superior Court Judge A.J. Buckles in Fairfield and entered guilty pleas to the train robbery. Several witnesses were called, including the mail clerks on the train, Tom Clancy and Herbert Block; and Constable Judge from Sacramento. The constable eventually collected a total reward of $10,000, or $5,000 per man, for the arrests and convictions of Brown and Bishop.
Judge Buckles was prepared to impose 50-year sentences on Brown and Bishop but reduced the time after the county prosecutor, District Attorney Joseph Raines, said the pair had confessed and thereby saved the county time and money had the case gone to trial. The judge “stated that he was convinced that they were criminals of the first water and that they deserved no leniency,” the Oakland Tribune reported. “The limit, he stated, was not too good for them, but he believed that 45 years would serve the ends of justice.”
Bishop was sent to San Quentin Prison, was paroled in late 1919 and eventually returned to his hometown, New Haven, Conn.. Brown was sent to Folsom Prison but escaped from a prison convict work gang near San Andreas in May 1917 and was never apprehended.
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Vallejo and other Solano County communities are treasure troves of early-day California history. The “Solano Chronicles” column, running every other Sunday, highlights various aspects of that history. My source references are available upon request. If you have local stories or photos to share, email me at
[email protected]. You can also send any material care of the Times-Herald, 420 Virginia St.; or the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum, 734 Marin St., Vallejo 94590.
