At 9.45 at night, on June 1st, 1892, six men robbed a southbound Santa Fe train as it arrived at Red Rock Station in Oklahoma territory.

They supposedly made off with at least $50,000 from a Wells Fargo safe.

In today's money, that's about a million and a half dollars.

US Marshall, William Grimes and two Wells Fargo detectives picked up the outlaws trail, but then they lost it.

It didn't help that the robbers had a two-day head start.

Five days after the robbery, Grimes heard that four of the six bandits had been spotted southwest of Guthrie, Oklahoma.

The next day, Grimes summoned his top trackers, which included his chief deputy, Chris Madsen, and another lawman named Tillman Lilly.

Madsen grabbed fresh horses and the prison carriage, which was basically a big wagon with iron bars that looked like a moving jail cell.

The three lawmen rode all night to re-acquire the trail.

Early the next morning, Grimes, Lilly, and Madsen found one lone robber. He was so exhausted that he told them the location of the rest of the gang in return for a night of sleep in the prison wagon.

Finally, at sundown, the lawmen spotted a pair of thieves riding leisurely about a half a mile ahead.

Quietly, Grimes spurred his horse forward and caught up to the two men. He pulled his wind chest a rifle and pointed it at their backs.

The outlaws quickly separated, and as Grimes chased one, the other took aim at the martial.

But as he did, Chris Madsen, who had been driving the prison carriage, leapt off the wagon.

He shot the horse of the outlaw who was about to kill Grimes, and then he grabbed the outlaw as the man started to fall.

In seconds, both outlaws were in custody and joined their friend in the prison wagon.

Within a day of US Martial William Grimes enlisting the help of his chief deputy, Chris Madsen, half the train robbers were in custody.

It took a few more weeks for Madsen to track down the last of the four robbers who were seen near Guthrie.

None of those four were known members of the most feared crew in Oklahoma, the dual-indulten gang,

and the names of the remaining two train robbers never made it into the papers, so their affiliation isn't known.

But everyone assumed they were from the notorious dual-indulten gang.

Legend has it that the Red Rock job was simply a trial run for a deadly train robbery six weeks later.

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