**Charles A. Siringo (1855–1928)** American cowboy, Pinkerton detective, and writer, born in Matagorda County, Texas, to an Italian immigrant father and an Irish mother. Orphaned young, he went to work on Texas cattle drives as a teenager and spent over a decade as a working cowboy, including stints on the storied XIT Ranch. In 1885 he published *A Texas Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony*, widely regarded as the first authentic cowboy autobiography — plainspoken, unromanticized, and hugely popular, going through dozens of printings. He left ranching in 1886 to join the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, working as an operative for over 20 years across the West, including strikebreaking and labor-espionage assignments (notably against the Western Federation of Miners) and a long pursuit of Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch. That experience soured him on the agency, and his 1912 memoir *A Cowboy Detective* drew a lawsuit from Pinkerton's, forcing him to alter names and details. He hit back harder in *Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism* (1915), an exposé of the agency's tactics that Pinkerton's also tried to suppress. Other works include *A Lone Star Cowboy* (1919), *Riata and Spurs* (1927, again censored under Pinkerton pressure until reissued), and *History of "Billy the Kid"* (1920), one of the earliest book-length treatments of that legend, drawing on his own acquaintance with New Mexico Territory figures of the era. Siringo died in Altadena, California, in 1928. He's remembered as a foundational voice in cowboy literature and an early, disillusioned insider's chronicler of Gilded Age corporate detective work.
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