by Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony A Texas Cowboy or
By his early thirties, Siringo seemed to be riding high in a new kind of saddle. But his fresh mount soon cantered in unexpected, less favorable directions. After a few months in Chicago with Pinkerton’s, Siringo transferred to Denver, where, tragically, Charlie’s young wife Mamie died in 1890. Later, Charlie married three more times and divorced each wife; none of these later marriages seemed happy.
Although Charlie enjoyed much of his work with Pinkerton’s, he also found the agency corrupt to its core. After a time, Siringo came to agree with critics who viewed the company not as a “model institution” fighting “a righteous cause” but a “school for the making of anarchists.” As a man who opposed mob rule and favored law and order, Charlie reluctantly accepted the coercive and unjust tactics of the detectives because their announced goal was to defeat—and perhaps destroy—radicals. That was an end with which Siringo agreed.
Soon after Charlie joined Pinkerton’s in 1886, the agency realized his abundant strengths as an independent operator. During the aftermath of the famed Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, during the next year in a county and ethnic conflict in southern Colorado, and particularly during the Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho, mining war of 1891-1892, Siringo played dangerous roles. Infiltrating one side of the conflict, usually that challenging the status quo, Charlie tried to break the organization or to sneak out information that led to a court judgement against the disrupters. In the north Idaho case, Charlie plunged into a vicious union struggle, nearly losing his life on two or three occasions during the fourteen months he served as an undercover agent.
Even more often, however, Pinkerton’s sent Charlie to chase down robbers or other outlaws. Charlie excelled in these lonely, dangerous pursuits; he became a superb man hunter. In addition to several other assignments that took him throughout the inter-mountain West and even into the Deep South, Siringo spent nearly four years riding after members of the Wild Bunch. With Charlie, other Pinkertons, and still other detectives relentlessly tracking the Wild Bunch, the gang gradually faded away. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled to Bolivia, and most of the other outlaws were jailed or killed. Then, as his final assignment for Pinkerton’s, Charlie participated in the notorious Boise trial of “Big Bill” Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Serving as the bodyguard of Albert E. Horsley (Harry Orchard), Charlie helped Pinkerton’s build their case against the radical union. But Clarence Darrow’s defense of Haywood and the WFM’s behind-the-scenes deals kept Pinkerton’s from winning their case. Orchard went to prison for life, but the union leaders were freed. When the case ended, Siringo returned to Denver and resigned from Pinkerton’s.
As soon as Charlie was able to do so, he returned to New Mexico. There, some years earlier, he had purchased a small acreage just outside Santa Fe, which he dubbed the Sunny Slope Ranch. Before relocating to his ranch, Charlie made a quick trip to Oregon to marry his third wife, Grace. By late 1907, they were beginning to settle in at Sunny Slope.
Despite his statements to the contrary, Charlie was restless. His itchy feet seemed to ready him for action. When his former boss, James McParland of Pinkerton’s, asked Charlie to take on a case in South Dakota, he accepted. Then, a few months later, the William J. Burns Detective Agency of Chicago, learning of Siringo’s experience as a lone star detective, importuned Charlie into investigating a cloudy mining operation in Nevada. Siringo again packed his bags. But his long absences were too much for his new, lonesome bride. After six short months of marriage to an absent husband, Grace, much younger than Charlie and short on worldly experience, went home to her parents and refused to return. Even before they celebrated their second anniversary, the couple had divorced.
Then, in 1913, Charlie tried matrimony for the fourth and last time. While involved in detective work on the Texas coast, Siringo met well-to-do widow Ellen Partain. That spring Charlie proposed, Ellen accepted, and they returned to Sunny Slope. But the cramped and rather primitive adobe house on the ranch and the isolated life there were too much for the new bride. She abandoned Charlie for Texas, and they were divorced in October 1913.
Other than his marital failures, Charlie enjoyed himself in New Mexico. Saddling one of his beloved horses and accompanied by his carnivorous Russian wolfhound “Eat ’em Up Jake,” Siringo relished riding into Santa Fe, where he became a familiar sight. In the next few years, freelance detective work often took Charlie throughout the West, but he returned to his ranch for rest and rejuvenation. Gradually, however, as the temporary jobs disappeared, Charlie began to experience tighter times.
At first, Charlie’s marital squabbles and financial pressures were minor difficulties compared to his do-or-die conflicts with his former employers, Pinkerton’s. When Siringo set out to vent his mounting animosities toward the detective agency in his next book, originally titled Pinkerton’s Cowboy Detective, the Chicago-based firm went after their erstwhile operative like an angry, tormented bull attacking a courageous but unhorsed cowboy. Although Charlie tried, through a friendly lawyer and his own bravado, to fend off Pinkerton‘s, he was forced, via court order, to retitle his book A Cowboy Detective (1912) and to disguise most of the agency-related names in the manuscript. Three years later Charlie tried again to gain revenge in his privately printed brief book, Two Evil Isms, Pinkertonism and Anarchism (1915). Yet the long, relentless arm of the detective agency caught up again with Siringo, impounding all unsold copies and the plates of his attack. As we shall see, more than a decade later, Charlie again took on Pinkerton’s—with similar negative results, unfortunately for him.
By the early 1920s, Charlie Siringo was in deep difficulties. He had mortgaged his land near Santa Fe to finance publication of his books, thinking their sales would offset his mounting debts. But A Cowboy Detective and Two Evil Isms, as well as A Lone Star Cowboy (1919) and History of “Billy the Kid” (1920), ultimately failed to meet his expectations. Then, in late November 1921, after foolishly spending a freezing night in the snow, Charlie quickly became ill, which soon turned into a debilitating bronchitis. It was an illness from which Siringo never fully recovered, and that undermined his health during his remaining years.
Mired in mounting debts, his health precarious, Charlie abandoned Santa Fe in 1922 and retreated to family and friends in southern California. First staying with his daughter in San Diego and later with his son in Los Angeles, Charlie then relocated in Hollywood. Finding a small house to his liking (“Siringo’s Den”), Siringo gradually made friends with a small collection of supportive acquaintances. Novelist Henry Herbert Knibbs, noted movie star William S. Hart, and others such as humorist Will Rogers and artist Charles Russell befriended Siringo. Still in debt and sometimes nearly penniless, Charlie barely existed on sporadic income from movie parts Hart sent in his direction as well as financial aid from other friends.
In 1926, hearing of the western interests of Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin, Charlie cobbled together a new manuscript. Part autobiography, part snippets from his earlier works, Riata and Spurs appeared in 1927. Houghton Mifflin, evidently not fully aware of Charlie’s earlier shoot-outs with Pinkerton’s, was largely taken by surprise when the detective agency once again moved quickly to force a Siringo book off the market. After initial efforts at compromise proved fruitless, Charlie’s publisher gave in, agreeing to replace all of the objectionable information about Pinkerton’s with new material about western bad men from an unpublished Siringo manuscript.
These renewed battles with Pinkerton’s and the death of Charlie’s close friend and lawyer Alois B. Renehan in April 1928 upset Charlie. Depressed and uncertain, he seemed to sense his own mortality. Then, feeling better and rallying, Siringo began to speak of new writing projects. But they were not to be. A sudden heart attack stopped the old, frail cowboy on October 18. Family members, author Knibbs, and other Hollywood friends attended Siringo’s services four days later. Will Rogers and William S. Hart, in New York City and unable to attend Charlie’s funeral, sent a heartfelt telegram to his
son LeRoy: “Another American plainsman has taken the long trail. May flowers always grow over his grave.”
During the more than a century since its publication, A Texas Cowboy has struck participants as well as observers as the real thing. For them, Charlie not only put his brand on ranch matters; he also lassoed the important ingredients of the epic long trail from Texas to the waiting Kansas cow towns. Commentators such as Will Rogers often added that Charlie knew his stuff, whether dealing with roundups, brandings, stampedes, or other daily duties of the rangelands. These readers particularly responded favorably to the realistic details contained in the thirty-page addendum to the 1886 edition. If Siringo’s contemporaries saluted his recounting of what they experienced or heard about late-nineteenth-century cowboys, later readers and writers praised his classic account of cowboying as a wonderfully evocative piece of verisimilitude, in every way useful for recapturing the vanished open-range man on horseback.
Charlie’s autobiography contained other appeals as well. For one, his narrative is the story of a Horatio Alger in chaps. Beginning as a fatherless boy, Siringo, by dint of perseverance, pluck, and pugnaciousness, wills his way to success as a wrangler and later as a trusted foreman. Charlie repeatedly tells of his grabbing circumstances by the horns and wrestling them to his own advantage. Even though the author sometimes seems unconscious of doing so, he links anecdote after anecdote, showing how his hard work, courage, and dependability make him a valued hired man on horseback for several ranchers. Those same meritorious characteristics undoubtedly led to his success as an irreplaceable and highly praised detective for Pinkerton’s for more than two decades.
Siringo’s account also included portraits of a faraway, romantic frontier West that appealed to many eastern readers in Gilded Age America. The autobiography, in treating most of Charlie’s first thirty years, depicts the large, open spaces of Texas, the plains, and New Mexico as nearly devoid of settlement except for a few river hamlets and cowtowns. Like a frontier picaro, the author wanders from scene to scene, always on the move and rarely hemmed in by physical or social constraints. Whether on the sprawling ranges of Texas, the trail northward, or in the dangerous pursuit of rustlers in New Mexico, Siringo rides across the unpeopled landscapes of the Southwest that have appealed to Americans for nearly two centuries. From beginning to end, A Texas Cowboy closely approximated what Americans had come to believe—and popular culture still frequently romanticizes—about a free, untrammeled West.
Siringo’s depictions of the American cowboy, that magical figure in many of our fictional and filmic Westerns, also illustrate the ever widening attention that character received at century’s end and in the early twentieth century. In 1881, President Chester A. Arthur warned the country about the lawless, vicious cowboys roaming the West. But personal accounts by cattlemen and cowboys during the 1880s and 1890s dispelled most of these negative images. At the same time, the romantic fiction and art-works of Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, and Charlie Russell portrayed cowpunchers as lively, picaresque figures; not as violent, murderous gunmen. Siringo’s personal account most resembled his friend Andy Adams’s novel Log of the Cowboy (1903), which made up in factual detail what it lacked in the romance so central to Wister’s bestselling novel, The Virginian (1902). Like the cowboys in Adams’s novel, Siringo’s narrator repeatedly and heroically faces down challenges of nature in the form of horrendous storms, dangerous stampedes, and menacing wild beasts. No less challenging in Siringo’s autobiography are the competing cowboys and drovers bent on beating—even destroying—their opponents in the rush to the Kansas railheads. Siringo’s men on horseback, whether surviving threatening nature or human competitors, emerge as heroes of the range country, able to overcome all challenges.
In addition to his generalized and appealing portrayals of cowboys, Siringo, albeit unconsciously, revealed much about his own character. Charlie was, most of all, a man who never found a cure for his wanderlust. From the opening pages of A Texas Cowboy, and throughout his life, Charlie Siringo remained a rider on the move. As a preteen, as a roving cowboy, and as a “cowboy detective” during his twenty-two years for Pinkerton’s, Siringo rarely stayed in one place. Even after he left the detective agency in 1907 and moved to Santa Fe, Charlie continued to ramble. In the next twenty years before his death in 1928, he called New Mexico and California home, yet he never stopped long in one location. His mail was always following him to his next stopover. This lifelong restlessness bubbles up throughout A Texas Cowboy.
So do Charlie’s independence and desire to be left alone. Unable to stay rooted, Siringo changed homes, schools, and jobs quicker than west Texas weather. When Charlie encountered a strict disciplinarian, a demanding teacher, or a bossy foreman, he soon trotted off to a new place. After he became an experienced cowboy in west Texas, he usually worked best alone or as the ramrod of other men. Undoubtedly his first marriage and quick family responsibilities account for Charlie’s staying with Pinkerton’s for more than two decades, but that company also soon learned that their crack detective worked best on his own, away from over-the-shoulder directions. Charlie’s incessant activity and independence impart an inviting sense of adventure to his autobiographical story.
On a few occasions, however, Charlie indulges in self-evaluation. Early on, for instance, he realizes his indecisiveness. His inability to persevere, he admits (“to tell the truth”), remains because he is “still somewhat rattled over [his] recent bad luck.” He also concedes that he hesitated to go to Chicago because he “knew [his] failings”; there he would likely blow his wages and “wouldn’t have money enough left… to pay [his] expenses home.” Along the way, Charlie likewise discloses his expansive conscience, telling a saddle mate who adhered “to the old Texas style”: “[N]ever kill one of your own beeves when you can get somebody else’s.” Near the end of his story, Siringo urges his readers, if they have a “conscience … like your humble servant,” to ranch “as near as possible to one of those large English cattle syndicates,” where “your herd [will] increase faster.”
On the other hand, Charlie seemed unable to understand other facets of his character. Throughout his adult life, without showing any awareness of the fact, he exhibited the bittersweet ambiguities of that recognizable American type, the self-made man. Ambitious, independent, driven by insecurities, and incapable of easily adapting to change, Siringo survived remarkably well as long as individualism unlocked doors of opportunity, as it often did for him as a cowboy and detective. After those jobs ended, he foundered badly, lacking sufficient financial and political power to secure new, more prestigious positions. Likewise, he planned poorly for the future. Following his long years with Pinkerton’s, Siringo bounced around like a wind-driven tumble-weed, impelled along by new gusts of change. Often, too, when things did not go well, he found other people to be the causes of his difficulties. On several occasions he lashed out, with little hard evidence, at other writers for stealing his words and ideas. Also, for much of his career, Charlie self-published his books, preferring, like a traveling salesman, to peddle his books carried in a satchel.
These blindnesses about himself did not keep Charlie from seeing the limitations of several others, however. He was particularly adept and forthright in pointing out the questionable tactics of ranchers and fellow riders. In writing of Shanghai Pierce and his brother Jonathan, for example, Siringo says they had come to Texas from the North “a few years before poorer than skimmed milk.” Now, they have sold their holdings “for the snug little sum of one hundred and ten thousand dollars.” Their quick profits showed, Siringo adds, “what could be done in those days, with no capital, but lots of cheek and branding iron.” On other occasions, ranchers, operating as selfish and rapacious robber barons, keep Charlie and other cowpokes under their ever-tightening financial cinch. Later, Siringo scored Pinkerton’s for similar but even more repressive maltreatment of their operatives.
Scattered alongside Charlie’s introspective sentences and his oc
casional bits of social criticism are evidences of his literary artistry. In fact, on the whole, Charlie was too defensive about what he considered to be his inferior writing. At the end of the 1885 edition of his book, he warned readers that if they were not “pleased with the substance of this book, I’ve got nothing to say in defence, as I gave you the best I had in my little shop, but before you criticise it from a literary standpoint, bear in mind that the writer had fits until he was ten years of age, and hasn’t fully recovered from the effects.” Other snatches of Charlie’s prose betray this humor and his cow country vernacular. A ship captain who refused the youthful Siringo a free ride becomes “the old pot-bellied sinner,” and spending his two to three months’ wages on a new, racy outfit, Charlie says he tried to make himself “look like a thoroughbred Cow Boy.” In another incident, when a jerry-built cabin falls on a ten-year-old, the boy begins “squalling like a six months old calf being put through the process of branding.” Toward the end of his last trip, Charlie, suffering much from smallpox, awakens to feel “as though [he] had been sent for and couldn’t go.”
Although financial difficulties and poor health plagued Charlie Siringo’s final years, it is the youthful, robust, and individualistic range rider of A Texas Cowboy who is remembered. Like his literary contemporaries Mark Twain, Owen Wister, and Mary Austin, Charlie Siringo produced his best work early in his career. Filling his first cowboy autobiography with fresh, lively, and remarkable frontier experiences, Siringo produced our most important first-person cowboy narrative. For that reason alone, he deserves a secure place in the literature of the United States and the American West.
