Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

7. CHARLIE SIRINGO AND THE PINKERTONS

+7+ CHARLIE SIRINGOANDTHE PINKERTONS T HERE ARE HU N DRED S of books about cowboys- I've even written one myself- but the very first, and maybe the best, was written bya native Texan, C harles Angelo Siringo. He wrote it when he was only thirty, in 1885, but he started cowboying at the age of fifteen, so he had a lot of experiences to pack into it. Siringo called his book A Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck ofa Spanish Pony. The subtitle was a sly allusion to the popularity of nautical memoirs at the time, particularly those of whalers. Siringo almost singlehandedly changed that. The publication of A Texas Cowboy marked the beginning of a shift of America's national hero from the sailor to the cowboy. Siringo had a lot to write about. He was born in Matagorda, and he started out working for some of the legendary cattlemen of the Texas coast- W. B. Grimes and Abel Head "Shanghai" Pierce. In the mid-l 870s he became a trail driver and took several herds up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas, where he got his chance to "whoop 'em up, Liza Jane," as he put it, in Wichita and Dodge City. On one of his trips to Dodge City he met two men who wanted to establish a ranch in the Panhandle, so he took a herd there and helped to locate the headquarters of the 187,OOO-acre LX Ranch in Potter County. He worked for the LX for a few years and had an encounter with Billy the Kid when the owners sent him to New Mexico to recover stolen cattle. VVhen he was twentynine he married, quit cowboying, and settled down in Caldwell, Kansas, to run a tobacco shop and ice cream parlor and write his book. He probably thought that his adventures were over and looked forward to a long and prosperous life as a small-town merchant . But his book catapulted him into a new career, one that most people who have read A Texas Cowboy have no idea about. He printed and distributed the book himself, and it was a tremendous success, so he decided to bring out a second edition through a Chicago publishing company, and he moved his family to Chicago so that he could oversee the printing. The Haymarket bombings took place shortly after he arrived, and Siringo impulsively joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency to help track down the anarchists who were allegedly responsible. In those pre-FBI days the Pinkerton Agency was the closest thing the country had to a national police agency. Even though it was privately owned, it had resources far beyond those available to local sheriffs or even big-city police chiefs. The Pinkerton Agency was Siringo's introduction to the modern urban world, which he quickly discovered ran on very different principles from the cattle business. He found he was expected to pad his expense accounts, falsify evidence, and overlook the criminal activities of some of his colleagues in the agency. Even though he stayed with the Pinkertons for twenty-two years and participated in some of their most famous cases, he never completely reconciled himself to their methods. He used his savings to buy a small ranch outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, which he named Sunny Slope Ranch and to which he intended to retire. He did retire there in 1907, and began writing his second book. It was a tell-all autobiography called Pinkerton's Cowboy Detective, A True Story of 22 Years with Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. When the Pinkerton Agency saw the prepublication posters advertising the book they went absolutely crazy. They managed to get the galley sheets from Siringo's Chicago publisher and had an injunction issued forbidding the book's publication on the grounds that it was libelous. In the ensuing negotiations, Siringo agreed to drop the name "Pinkerton" from the title and to delete all references to the agency from the text, as well as to change the names of all the agents mentioned. The book was eventually published in 1912 under the title A Cowboy Detective, but the incident rankled with Siringo the rest of his life. He stewed about it for two years and then sat down and wrote a third book entitled Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism. This time he pulled out all the stops...