Stickups before banks: 129 stagecoach jobs, the Bonnot getaway, the gun-camera bank
We always picture stagecoach robberies as these high-speed horseback chases across the open desert, but the reality was mostly just guys waiting on foot behind rocks at the top of a steep hill. Hey, I'm Salt. I'm Grace. So, True West Magazine went back through the archival records for Arizona territory between 1875 and 1903. Out of 129 stagecoach robberies in that window, only three involved any kind of horseback chase.
Wait — what? Yeah, just three. The vast majority were pulled off on foot. The bandits would pick a geographic choke point, you know, a steep grade or a sharp turn where the heavy wooden coaches had to slow down to a crawl. They just stepped out into the dirt road and pointed a shotgun.
Okay, that makes sense. You don't need a fast horse if the coach is dragging itself uphill anyway. When does that shift to the classic getaway vehicle? The first recorded motorized heist happens on December 21st, 1911. A French anarchist group called the Bonnot Gang held up a bank messenger in Paris and fled in a stolen car.
Do we know what kind of car they used? It was, um, a Delaunay-Belleville. They drove off, and the local police literally couldn't catch them, because the the responding officers were pursuing on bicycles and horses. You're kidding. No, I mean it.
Bicycles against a luxury automobile. It gave the criminals a speed advantage that local law enforcement just wasn't equipped to handle. And that gap, uh, it only got worse once fast cars like the Ford V8 hit the market in the US. Right, because suddenly you can rob a payroll wagon and be across the state line before word even reaches the next county. Exactly.
Local sheriffs had zero jurisdiction once a crew crossed a border. They'd hit a target, punch the gas, and disappear into a different state where the the local cops couldn't touch them. So how does the government actually close that loophole, Grace? Congress passes the Dyer Act on October 29th, 1919. That law essentially — they wrote it to turn the interstate transportation of stolen vehicles into a federal crime.
Oh, I see. It kind of gives federal agents the authority to hunt these crews down regardless of where the actual robbery happened. Right. If you stole the getaway car and drove it across state lines, the feds could come after you for the car. It forced law enforcement to coordinate on a national scale, which eventually fed into modern federal policing.
That solves the jurisdiction problem, but what what about the physical banks? The branches themselves are still just sitting there on the corner. The banks started building up their own defenses. The turning point for surveillance happens on April 12th, 1957, at the St. Clair Savings and Loan in Cleveland, Ohio.
What changed in 1957? The Cleveland Police Museum notes this as the world's first hidden camera recording of an active bank robbery. The bank installed a surplus military gun camera and rigged it to start rolling when the alarm was tripped. Like, uh, from a fighter plane? Yeah.
They wired the trigger of the camera up to a silent alarm so that the second the teller stepped on the floor button it would start burning through this big spool of film hidden up in the ceiling. It caught it all. Huh. Did they catch the guy? They did.
He walked in, pulled his gun, and the camera got clear footage of his face. It proved that catching the guy on film worked, and it kicked off the era of banks turning into high-tech fortresses. Which brings us to today, where a bank is, you know, a giant surveillance box. So, Salt, knowing how hard they are to hit now, take a guess at how many bank robberies happened in 2023 compared to their peak. Oh, I have no idea.
Probably, um, a fraction of what it used to be. A fraction is right. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, US bank robberies peaked in 1991 at 9,388 incidents. And as of that 2023 dataset, the number dropped to just 1,362 incidents. Wow.
That's a huge drop. Ethical Systems published an analysis suggesting it's mostly a shift in — they pointed to the the math of crime. Physical branches deployed bullet-resistant glass, dye packs, and better alarms. The risk of getting caught skyrocketed while the amount of cash sitting in the drawer went down. Because nobody uses cash anymore.
If you want to steal a million dollars now, you don't walk into a branch with a note, you just hack the network. Yeah, cybercrime replaced the stickup. As vaults get more secure and the numbers keep dropping, the physical heist is fading into history, right alongside the stagecoach. Which is probably for the best. I'd guess the bank tellers certainly agree.
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