Historical
and Literary Influences on the GenreHistorical
and Literary Influences on the Genre
Charlie Siringo
(1855-1928)
"The risks he ran, the deadly situations through which his extraordinary nerve took him safely, his resourcefullness, his loyalty, and above all his cold-blooded bravery, always made men remeber this picturesque, modest figure of the American frontier."
-- John Hays Hammond
A
lot of folks have tried to trace the private eye, as we understand
it, to the American cowboy myth. While I think it actually goes
back further than that, you could certainly make a case if you
consider CHARLIE SIRINGO, who billed himself as "The
Cowboy Detective." He's a fascinating character, a real-life
frontier figure who spent more than two decades as The
Pinketon Agency's "Cowboy Detective."
Charlie Siringo was born on February 7, 1855, in Matagorda County, Texas, the son of an Irish mother and an Italian father. He received some schooing, but by the age of fifteen he was working as a cowboy, mostly in Texas, at first, before eventually becoming a trail driver, and working the Chisolm Trail. In 1884, he quit the cowboy life, settled down and got married, becoming a merchant in Caldwell, Kansas. It was there he began writing his first book, A Texas Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony. A year later, it was published to much popular acclaim -- one of the first real looks at the cowboy life by someone who actually lived it.
In 1886, perhaps bored with the quiet life, Siringo moved to Chicago and joined Pinkerton's National Detective Agency (using Pat Garrett's name as a reference) and ending up working for them for over twenty years. He worked cases all over the West, from as far north as Alaska to as far south as Mexico City. In a long and varied career, Siringo chased rustlers and robbers, and went undercover in outlaw gangs and labour unions.
Posing as Charles L. Carter, a gunfighter on the run from a murder charge, he infiltrated Butch Cassidy's notorious Train Robbers Syndicate, and with the information he gathered, seriously put a crimp in their plans for over a year. A few years later, following the legendary Wilcox train robbery of 1899, Siringo would once again be assigned to tracking down Cassidy's Wild Bunch, "dogging the Bunch over mountains, deserts, across raging rivers, through blizzards, from Wyoming to Arkansas... he was four years in the saddle... and covered an estimated twenty-five thousand miles." (from Desperate Men).
It was the kind of work Siringo loved, being out in the open, free from the restrictions and rules of the Agency, but he didn't always get to choose his assignments. In the early 1890s, Charlie was assigned to "city work" and worked out of the Denver office for a few years. Charlie hated it -- he didn't like being in the city, and he wasn't particularly fond of many of tworking in such close proximity to the other agents. The exception seems to be another operative who had recently been hired, the soon-to-be-notorious Tom Horn. Perhaps Siringo recognized something of his own free spirit in Horn
The "city work" ended in 1892 when Siringo was dispatched to the Idaho mine fields, where he went undercover to get the goods on one of the early labour unions. And again, it wasn't the sort of work Siringo ever really took a shine to.(Siringo himself was originally quite pro-labour and reluctantly agreed to work such cases, but his acquaintance with radical union leaders while undercover apparently completely changed his attitude, and he once famously referred to the Western Federation of Miners as"that blood-thirsty dynamiting bunch.")
Despite his reluctance, Siringo was also involved in the infamous Coeur d'Alene miners' strikes, the Haymarket anarchist trial, and the trial of Western Federation of Miners Secretary "Big Bill" Haywood, who had been charged with the murder of a former Idaho governor.
By most accounts, Siringo was brave, loyal, tough and exceeedingly honest. Despite his disdain for the tactics of the radicals of the labour movement, when Haywood was found not guilty, Siringo helped protect the labour organizer and his lawyer, Clarence Darrow, from a lynch mob. Although reputed to be a crack shot, he liked to boast that he made most of his arrests without resorting to violence.
Perhaps taking his cue from Allen Pinkerton himself, Siringo decided to write up his adventures as a detective. He left the Pinkertons in 1907, and began writing another book. Originally titled Pinkerton's Cowboy Detective, the agency held up publication for nearly two years, objecting to the use of their name and pointing out that it violated the confidentiality agreement that Siringo himself had signed when he first joined them. Siringo ultimately deleted the name "Pinkerton" from the title and throughout the book, and re-named all the characters. He eventually wrote two books, both purportedly relating his many adventures, A Cowboy Detective, and Further Adventures of a Cowboy Detective -- both were published in 1912.
Still smarting from the lawsuit, which would go on for years and became the focus of his life, Siringo wrote and tried to clandestinely publish another book, Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism in 1915, but once again the Pinkertons stopped the printing of the book. But this time they also tried to extraditie Siringo from his Sante Fe ranch to Chicago to face charges of criminal libel. Fortunately, the New Mexico governor refused the extradition request, and the matter was dropped. In 1916 Siringo became a New Mexico Ranger and saw active service against cattle rustlers in the southeastern part of the state for a couple of years.
But times were tough, and with both his ranch and his health failing, he moved to Los Angeles, and became something of a celebrity, hobnobbing with assorted politicians, writers and movie stars, and possibly even appearing in a couple of silent westerns. In 1927 Riata and Spurs, a composite of his first two autobiographies was released, burt once again the Pinkertons halted publication, again threatening a lawsuit. The book was eventually reissued later that year with a revised subtitle, and whittled down many of Siringo's detective experiences, padding out the book with plenty of fictionalized and often irrelevant material on outlaws.
Still, Siringo's recollections of his life as both a cowboy and a detective helped romanticize the myth of the West and of the American cowboy, as well as that of the private detective. He died in Altadena, California, on October 18, 1928.
Unfortunately, Siringo seems to be largely forgotten now. Then again, judging by a couple of less-than-successful attempts to dramatize his life, perhaps it's just as well.
UNDER OATH
NOVELS
TELEVISION
CHARLIE SIRINGOREFERENCE
Respectfully submitted by Jim Doherty and Kevin Burton Smith.
