Download The Cowboy Detective: A True Story of 22 Years with a World-Famous Detective Agency AudioBook Free
After many years of cowboying, Charles A. Siringo had settled right down to store-keeping in Caldwell, Kansas, whenever a blind phrenologist, traveling through, took the measure of his "mule head" and told him that he was "cut out" for detective work. Thereupon, Siringo joined the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1886. A Cowboy Detective chronicles his twenty-two years as an undercover operative in wilder elements of the West, where he rode with the lawless, using more stratagems and guises than Sherlock Holmes to bring them to justice and escaping violent death more regularly than Dick Tracy. He survived the labor riots at Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in 1892 (his testimony helped convict eighteen union leaders), hounded moonshiners in the Appalachians, and chased Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch. Once described as "a small wiry man, cold and steady as a rock" and "born without fear," Charlie Siringo became a well liked of high-ups in the Pinkerton organization.
Nevertheless, the Pinkertons, ever sensitive to criticism, went to court to block publication of Siringo's book. Frank Morn, in his introduction to the Bison Books edition, discusses the changes that resulted from 2 yrs of litigation. Finally published in 1912 without Pinkerton in the title or the written text, A Cowboy Detective has Siringo doing work for the "Dickensen Detective Agency" and meeting up with the likes of "Tim Corn," whom every western buff will recognize. The deeper truth of Siringo's book remains. As J. Frank Dobie wrote, "His cowboys and gunmen weren't of Hollywood and folklore. He was an honest reporter."
