A Cowboy Detective

A Cowboy Detective

A Cowboy Detective recounts the memoirs of Charles A. Siringo, a Texas-raised cowboy who abandoned fifteen years of range work to join the Pinkerton (fictionalized as "Dickenson") National Detective Agency in 1886, following the Haymarket riot. Over roughly twenty-two years he works out of Chicago and Denver, undertaking assignments that trade on his cowboy skills, gun-handling, and gift for assuming outlaw identities. Early cases include suppressing an armed political uprising in Archuleta County, Colorado; tracking a Wells Fargo embezzler into Mexico; forcibly reclaiming the Bassick mine through an armed standoff; infiltrating a Wyoming outlaw gang harboring an escaped condemned murderer; investigating a rigged "salted" silver mine in Fairplay that swindled London's Lord Mayor; and spending nine grueling months in Nevada and Indian Territory extracting a confession from a man involved in dynamiting two mine owners. He also probes a New Mexico political shooting by infiltrating the "White Cap" vigilante order, nearly dying of smallpox along the way, and loses his young wife Mamie to illness during this period. The narrative's climax is his deepest and most dangerous assignment: joining the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho miners' union under deep cover, rising to recording secretary, and secretly reporting union plans to the Mine-Owners' Association during the violent 1892 labor war. When his cover is blown amid mob violence, mine bombings, and a full-scale riot, he saws a hole through a floor to hide from a lynch mob, then makes a harrowing escape through a river culvert and over mountains under gunfire. Told in blunt, unliterary first-person prose, the book blends firsthand labor-war reportage with cowboy braggadocio, presenting Siringo as a resourceful, morally conflicted operative who moves fluidly between outlaws, lawmen, miners, and capitalists across the American West, Mexico, and beyond.

By Charles A. Siringo · Genre: autobiography, memoir, western · 22 chapters

Contents

More by Charles A. Siringo