In the early 1850s, a former medical doctor and his gang of rough and ready road agents terrorized travelers in the Gold Rush camps of the Sierra Nevada near Reno.

Thomas J. Hodges was born in 1826 and in an upstanding family in Rome, Tennessee. He received a good education, went to medical school, and became a surgeon. Not long afterward, he joined the U.S. Army and fought in the Mexican-American War of 1846, where he served honorably as a non-commissioned officer and became an expert with a rifle and bayonet.

He was said to have stood over six feet tall, had blue eyes, sandy hair, and a blond mustache and goatee. He was known for his natural leadership abilities, and people were drawn to him.

Dr. Thomas J. Hodges had his nose was badly broken while serving in the Mexican-American War. After the war, he settled in the California Gold Country and stopped practicing medicine. But, when mining and gambling failed to make him rich, he turned to highway robbery.

Dr. Hodges had traded in his medical career for a six gun and life of crime. Hodges was arrested for a minor offense in 1855, but when the county peace officers asked for his name, he told them Tom Bell. The clever Hodges had heard of a small-time cattle thief by that name, and he decided to confuse the police. It worked. The judge had no idea that Hodges had been a violent road agent, so he gave Tom Bell a short prison sentence at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.

Shortly after his arrival at Angel Island, Hodges put his medical training to good use. He feigned a severe illness that convinced the prison doctor that he was too sick to remain incarcerated on the remote island. He was sent to San Francisco from where he quickly escaped. Tom Bell returned to the Sierra mining camps where he organized a gang of tough criminals. Bell and his band of thieves robbed anyone they caught on the road. No one was safe, not even local miners or merchants.

Despite the bold and frequent holdups, lawmen seemed helpless in their efforts to catch Bell and his boys.Tom Bell was having some success as a road agent, but he had grown weary of his small-time hits on teamsters and beer merchants. No one had yet robbed a stagecoach carrying a Wells Fargo treasure chest full of coin or bullion, so Bell decided to be the first.

While planning the big heist, Bell reined in his henchmen and the gang laid low. With Bell’s men off the road, the summer of 1856 was unusually quiet in the mining country. Local citizens and lawmen assumed that Tom Bell had fled to another part of the country.

The temporary peace was shattered on Aug. 11, 1856. Early that morning, the stagecoach pulled out of Camptonville loaded with passengers and a strongbox filled with $100,000 in gold.

There had never been a Sierra Nevada stagecoach robbery, but Wells Fargo wasn’t taking any chances and a horseman rode out in front of the stage, ahead of the choking dust. On the way the stagecoach decided to take a little-used fork in the road, which spooked three masked men hidden in the brush.

The horseman quickly ran back to the main road, which he reached just as gunfire erupted in the hot afternoon air. Tom Bell and two of his accomplices had ambushed the stage, but their carefully planned heist was disrupted.

Bell had assigned six armed men on horseback for this job, three converging on each side of the stage.

The horseman's unexpected appearance had thrown off their timing and with the attack coming from only one side, the armed guard was able to blast one bandit with his first shot. At that, Bell and his men opened fire, riddling the stage with bullets. Several passengers inside the coach produced their own weapons and a fire-fight ensued.

Some 40 shots were fired within those first 2 minutes. The withering barrage forced Bell and his wounded men to retreat into the brush and the stagecoach to race on.

Tom Bell’s gang failed to get the gold, but there was no cause for celebration among the citizenry. A male passenger had suffered a head wound and another had been shot in both legs. The wife of a barber, had been killed instantly.

The next day, details of the brutal crime headlined the local newspaper and the entire countryside was up in arms for Bell’s capture. Both a sheriff’s posse and citizen vigilantes conducted a massive search for the gang.

But, the gangster showed no remorse and wrote a letter to the paper which said “Catch me if you can.”

The chase was on and one by one Bell’s gang members were either caught or killed.

Finally, in early October, a posse led by Judge George Belt ambushed Tom Bell at his secluded camp.

The Sheriff then raced to arrest him, but he arrived too late. When he found Bell on October 4, 1856, an impromptu posse commanded by Judge Belt, a rancher, had already hanged him from a tree.

The young outlaw, Tom Bell (Dr. Thomas J. Hodges), was given a chance to write a letter to his mother before he was executed. It read:

“Dear Mother, As I am about to make my exit to another country, I take this opportunity to write you a few lines. Probably you may never hear from me again. If not, I hope we meet where parting is no more.”