The Cowboy Detective

Monk scouted up a new biography of “Cowboy Detective” Charlie Siringo. I’m in. Siringo is one of my favorite Western figures. Here’s the caper:

As Nathan Ward reveals in his evocative new book, no figure in the Old West lived or shaped its history more fully than Charlie Siringo. Born in Matagorda, Texas in 1855, Charlie went on his first cattle drive at age 11 and spent two decades living his boyhood dream as a cowboy. As the dangerous, lucrative “beeves” business boomed, Siringo drove longhorn steers north to the burgeoning Midwest Plains states’ cattle and railroad towns, inevitably crossing paths with such legendary figures as Billy the Kid, Bat Masterson, and Shanghai Pierce. In his early thirties he joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s Denver office, using a variety of aliases to investigate violent labor disputes and infiltrate outlaw gangs such as Butch Cassidy’s train robbing Wild Bunch. As brave as he was clever, he was often saved by his cowboy training as he traveled to places the law had not yet reached.

Siringo’s bestselling, landmark 1885 autobiography, A Texas Cowboy, helped make the lowly cowboy a heroic symbol of the American West. His later memoir, A Cowboy Detective, influenced early hard-boiled crime novelists for whom the detective story was really the cowboy story in an urban setting. Sadly sued into debt by the Pinkertons determined to prevent their sources and methods from being revealed, Siringo eventually sold his beloved New Mexico ranch and moved to Los Angeles, where he advised Hollywood filmmakers and especially actor William S. Hart on their early 1920s Westerns, watching the frontier history he had known first-hand turned into romantic legend on the screen.

In old age, Charlie Siringo was called “Ulysses of the Wild West” for the long journey he took across the western frontier. Son of the Old West brings him and his legendary world vividly to life.

Siringo features in the excellent J. Anthony Lukas tome Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. The exploration of the assassination of a former Idaho governor regarded as anti-labor by a bomb planted by an anarchist becomes Lukas’ means of probing the titanic struggle  between labor and capital that rent the Mountain West at the turn of the 20th Century. The labor wars in the West and in Appalachia are seldom taught or talked about — another dark corner of American history that people don’t want to look at.

Siringo hated anarchists, whom he considered a force bent on destruction — and he came to hate the Pinkerton Agency for whom he worked undercover with equal fervor. He considered Anarchism and anti-labor Pinkertonism the “two evil isms” that threatened American freedom and well-being. He wasn’t wrong.

Might be a good — if demanding — topic for a podcast series. There have been several times that I’ve taken a deep dive into that history. I had a mandatory economics class back in the day, where most of the grade was dependent on a special project. I chose to do a paper on The Molly Maguires and the coal wars in Pennsylvania in the 1870s. James McParland’s infiltration of the Irish secret society of coal miners/terrorists is a helluva yarn. That was the problem.  The prof gave me a ‘C.’ Too heavy on the detective yarn and too light on the economics. Like that’s a bad thing…

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I first discovered Siringo in the pages of John Byrne Cooke’s delightful Western South of the Border. The conceit of the novel is that it is a third memoir of the Cowboy Detective, to be published only after his death. Siringo is in Los Angeles, consulting with Hollywood movie makers, when he joins a film company’s 1919 expedition to make a movie in Old Mexico. Along for the ride is a man he knows to be Butch Cassidy — who didn’t die in Bolivia. The film company runs afoul of Pancho Villa in his late guerrilla phase…

It’s a hoot.

John Byrne Cooke led an interesting life. He was a bluegrass musician, a Western history aficionado — and Janis Joplin’s road manager from 1967 to her death in 1970. THAT must have been a wild gig…

South of the Border is well worth running down.

The great Loren D. Estleman — who mastered both the Western and the detective story — couldn’t resist taking Charlie for a character, too — in Ragtime Cowboys. Another hoot. Here’s the caper:

In prohibition-era Southern California, real life detectives Charles D. Siringo and Dashiell Hammett must solve a mystery involving a ruthless politician―Joseph P. Kennedy. With sharp dialogue and rich historical background, Ragtime Cowboys is an exciting, suspenseful tale in which the Old West and Hollywood collide.

Los Angeles, 1921: Ex-Pinkerton Charlie Siringo is living in quiet retirement when Wyatt Earp knocks on his door and asks him to track down his missing horse. What begins as horse thievery turns into a deeper mystery as Siringo and another ex-Pinkerton, the young Dashiell Hammett, follow clues that take them from the streets of Los Angeles to Jack London’s farm, until they discover a conspiracy masterminded by the notorious and powerful Joseph P. Kennedy.