April 2026 • Nebraskaland 37
N
ext time you're driving through Omaha on I-80,
notice the Union Pacific tracks running parallel
to the Interstate. Just east of 72nd Street, imagine
you're still west of town, rolling east aboard the Overland
Limited by night, your hands on the steam engine's levers. It
is May 22, 1909.
Suddenly, two men appear over the coal tender and jump
down to the engine, pistols drawn. Wearing slouch hats, long
coats, and with blue polka-dot handkerchiefs covering their
faces, they look like Western outlaws. Which they are.
Holding a pistol to your temple, one of them looks out
the cab window until he spots a signal fire. He orders you to
proceed until he has you stop the train in a deep cut just west
of 42nd Street. There are four or five bandits in all, and in no
more than 15 minutes, they empty the postal cars of seven
registered mail sacks bound for eastern banks — "a hell of a
load to carry in an automobile," one of them complains.
Though the bandits do not enter the passenger cars,
they keep everyone cooperative by firing their revolvers at
random. Before disappearing into the night, they order you
to take the train ahead into the city. Shaken, you notify the
authorities as soon as you arrive at Union Station.
That's what you would have seen and heard had you lived
through the "Mud Cut Robbery." As soon as the morning
papers arrived, it became the talk of the city. But despite the
offer of thousands of dollars in reward money, days passed
without any useful leads.
A group of South Omaha schoolboys broke the case
open on May 27. They attended Brown Park Elementary
at 19th and U streets. Playing in a wooded gully nearby,
they discovered abandoned guns, hats and blue polka-dot
handkerchiefs. Police staked out the area and soon arrested
three men. Janitors then found the missing mail sacks —
minus everything of value — in the Brown Park school attic.
A double-header freight train leaving the Union Pacific
yard near South 35th Street in Omaha, 1921. This is about
seven blocks east of where the Overland Limited train
was robbed in 1909. NSHS RG2941-6-70
Post Office inspectors with the stolen mail sacks found in the
attic of Brown Park Elementary School. Omaha Daily News,
May 29, 1909.
