Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  The next year O’Donnell was reported in Salt Lake City. Two Coal and Iron Police who claimed they knew him were sent to pick him up, and they brought a man back to Chicago. He turned out to be James Dugan, who had known McParlan so well that the detective had served as his second in a prizefight. Dugan was released, and it was not for three decades that McParlan learned that O’Donnell, under the name James McDonald, had worked for years at the Daly West Mine in Park City, Utah. Having grown a full beard, he proved impossible to identify but “was always regarded there as a very harmless man, earned good wages and spent all he earned, and did not have a dollar when he died,” around 1905.56

  Hurley, too, remained at large, but one of the strangest stories came from a man who was actually in prison. About three weeks before he was hanged, James Roarity gave an interview to Tom Fielders of the Daily Herald. “I don’t believe that McParlan was ever a detective until Kerrigan squealed and I am not the only one,” Roarity stated mysteriously. He went on to say that: “McParlan wrote a letter, telling me to clear out. . . . [W]hen I got it I wouldn’t do anything of the kind, because I knew that there was nothing that I had done for which I could be punished. . . . Some days before I was arrested a man came to me and told me . . . there was danger for me in staying, but I laughed and said I wouldn’t go because no man could prove anything against me. . . . I little thought fifteen months ago that today I would have the halter around my neck.”57

  The entire interview is perplexing. Was Roarity being honest, and, if so, what did he mean about McParlan not being a detective until Kerrigan turned state’s evidence? Why would McParlan send a note to him? Did he know that Roarity was not guilty and wanted him to escape? If so, why did he not give different testimony at the trial? There are no certain answers. This kind of doubt would continue throughout McParlan’s life and work, as in the ensuing years he once again found himself in an undercover role, and later still he was able once more to bask in the fame of being America’s greatest detective.

  CHAPTER 12

  A NEW LIFE

  The 1880s was a decade of upheaval and confrontation throughout the United States, and nowhere saw more change, more unrest, and more violence than the territories west of the Mississippi River, which were in a state of constant expansion. Railroad entrepreneurs, mining magnates, industrialists, and livestock ranchers accumulated almost unimaginable wealth and holdings, while others less fortunate—including displaced Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and followers of the Mormon Church—faced punitive social legislation, economic sanctions, and widespread public prejudice.1 Whole new regions were opened up, settled, and brought into the Union. Cattle being driven to market replaced the disappearing buffalo as the most numerous creatures on the plains. Workers joined together in record numbers to gain or protect their rights. Bloodshed was rampant, from racist riots in Wyoming and Washington to violent labor strikes and demonstrations in Kansas and Chicago to gunslinging killers on both sides of the law. In a nine-month period, beginning midway through 1881, Billy the Kid was shot dead in New Mexico; the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday gunned down three members of the Clanton gang near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona; and Jesse James was killed by Bob Ford in St. Joseph, Missouri.2

  Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency was connected in one way or another with virtually all of these events. Building on its success in the anthracite region, during this decade Pinkerton’s began providing services to more diverse and greater numbers of big businesses—particularly railroad and mining companies, heavy industry, and the large ranching community—as well as to local governments. Certainly hunting down criminals continued to play a major role in Pinkerton’s income and image, but antiunion activities, as well as protection against and suppression of strike actions, became increasingly important. So well-known did the agency become for these activities that detectives and private police in general—and there was a large number of such organizations, as by 1892 Chicago and New York each had more than twenty “detective agencies”3—began to be generically labeled “Pinkertons.”

  No Pinkerton’s operative, or member of any other investigative outfit, was more deeply involved in tracking down villains and fighting to subvert the new and growing unions than the country’s most famous detective, James McParlan. In fact, his investigations mirrored in their way the entire development of the criminal-justice system of the Old West.

  McParlan did not immediately just jump back onto the national scene after he left Schuylkill County, however. Despite the time he spent at Larch Farm and with his family, he did not make a quick physical recovery. In the autumn of 1879, a friend wrote that he still was “broken up badly. The excitement, great labor, poisonous mine gases, and more poisonous miners’ whisky or ‘mountain dew’ he was compelled to freely use and distribute . . . nearly wrecked him. At one time his eyesight was despaired of.” He also suffered in other ways. The writer continued: “Not all the wealth on earth would induce McParlan to again go through what he has. . . . I believe he regrets it. . . . Never a more honest, upright and sincere man lived. But this is a load that he carries. No man can contemplate a score of scaffolds and a score of souls plunged into eternity through his instrumentality free from a regret which must be eternal.”4

  McParlan’s experiences had, in some ways, made a new man of him, one appropriate for the tasks his career would require in the future. “He was formerly simply ‘a broth of a boy,’ kind-hearted, impulsive, not ignorant, but what is termed quick-witted, and that’s all,” the friend wrote, noting that if he had not worked for Pinkerton’s, “he would have remained to this day what he was before, and what I believe he often wishes he still was—a sort of a porter or man of all work about stores and wholesale houses. But now he is a man of brains and intellect. . . . Intellectually, in experience, in thought, motive and purpose, he has virtually been recreated.”5

  Changes were occurring in the detective’s personal life as well. At some point in the mid-1870s his relatives in Ireland added a “d” to the end of the family name—“McParland.” In fact, his brother Frank had been using the new spelling since at least 1868, when he married Margaret Kennedy in New Zealand.6 By 1879, the Pinkerton’s operative had added a final “d” to his name as well.

  An even bigger change took place on August 26, 1879, at St. Joseph Church in Chicago—which had reopened the previous year, having been rebuilt following the great fire—when the thirty-five-year-old McParland married Mary Ann Fitzgerald, age nineteen, following which they went to Larch Farm for their honeymoon.7 The marriage was a political coup, because Mary Ann was the daughter of James Fitzgerald, the captain of Pinkerton’s Preventive Police in Chicago.8

  McParland had courted Mary Ann while still assigned to the Philadelphia office, where major changes were occurring. In the spring of 1878, Franklin—citing his role with the Molly Maguires—had pressed for a 50 percent pay increase. Unlike those in Chicago and New York, however, the Philadelphia office had not been a financial success, and Pinkerton was not pleased by the request, writing to Bangs that “I beg him [Franklin] to remember that first the praise, honor and glory of breaking up the MM’s belongs to MacParlan.”9 Franklin’s continued demands—reportedly at the insistence of his wife, who annoyed Pinkerton—were the final straw for the principal, who had long been concerned about Franklin’s drinking, which had led to his earlier dismissal from the Philadelphia police.10 In late 1878, Franklin was replaced by Linden.11

  With his good friend in charge, leaving Philadelphia was not something McParland would have done without serious thought. This was particularly true as his brothers left the Reading and moved to the Philadelphia area, both working as shoemakers, the same profession as their older brother Michael in Ireland. Charles, going under the surname Laughlin, a variation of their mother’s maiden name, began operating a shoe store in Conshohocken, while Edward did the same in Philadelphia proper, where he used another variation of her maiden name: Loughre
n.12

  Nevertheless, soon after his marriage, McParland transferred to Chicago.13 Then, in March 1880, his father-in-law died suddenly of typhoid fever,14 and McParland—appointed administrator of the estate and guardian of Mary Ann’s sixteen-year-old sister Margaret—took over Fitzgerald’s family and financial responsibilities. This was not easy, because Fitzgerald left behind not only the two daughters and his son Edward—a member of Pinkerton’s Preventive Police—but his widow, Bridget, the stepmother to the three children, with whom she was not popular. Fitzgerald’s financial holdings included four valuable lots of property stretching along Menominee (later changed to Menomonee) Street between Larrabee and Hurlbut (now Cleveland) in the well-to-do area of Lincoln Park in northern Chicago.

  By summer Bridget had left the family home and relinquished her widow’s inheritance and rights to the property in exchange for eleven hundred dollars paid by Edward and Mary Ann out of their share of their father’s insurance policy.15 Meanwhile, McParland, his wife, and her two siblings were joined at 146 Menominee by two girls, Jenny and Lilly Robertson—aged twelve and five—whose father, David Robertson, was a Scottish immigrant employed as chief clerk by Pinkerton’s. Robertson was not listed as living in Chicago in the Tenth U.S. Census that summer, although he was in that year’s city directory.16 This was likely because he was away on an assignment; although a clerk, he was in the process of shifting to more of an operational position.17 Always politically aware, McParland undoubtedly took in the children because he was currying favor with another rising star. Four years later Robertson became an assistant superintendent, and he was later promoted to superintendent, and then assistant general superintendent for the division of Pinkerton’s covering the center of America.18

  For a while it looked like the household would expand even further. In April 1881, Mary Ann gave birth to the couple’s first daughter, Mary, only for the baby to die five hours later due to a congenital defect exacerbated by atelectasis (collapse of a lung).19

  In the midst of these changes and traumas, McParland was required to submit an agency form entitled History of Detectives, in which he detailed his background. The supplement to the form, completed by Chicago superintendent Frank Warner, gives an intriguing look at how the famous operative was seen by his superiors, including his strengths and weaknesses:

  General deportment and appearance

  Genteel Irishman

  Classes of society can become readily adapted to; whether higher or laboring class, sporting men or thieves

  Both

  Class of “Roper”; whether makes acquaintance easily, and ability to obtain friendship and confidence

  Good

  Class of “Shadow”

  Not good

  Ability for making investigations

  Good

  Knowledge of criminals

  Not good

  Whether Moderate in expenditures or inclined to be extravagant

  Medium

  Impulsive or cautious

  Impulsive

  Determined or timid

  Determined

  Secretive or talkative

  Talkative

  Self-reliance and ability to originate a plan of operations beyond instructions

  Good

  Failings to be guarded against

  Operating too fast20

  The report is as interesting for what it says about the attitudes at Pinkerton’s as what it records about McParland. To the hierarchy of the agency, “Genteel”—refined or well-mannered—differentiated McParland from the stereotype it long had held of the common Irishman: the low-class, hard-drinking, undesirable thug personified by some of the men in the Molly Maguires. The report also shows that McParland was not particularly good at one of the basic skills of being a spy—“shadowing,” or tailing a suspect—and that he clearly was not guarded enough, as he was listed as both “impulsive” and “talkative.”

  In his remarks, Warner noted that “whilst in Philadelphia Agency [while undercover] he acquired the habit of excessive drinking. He reformed however and married previous to joining Chicago Agency. He is suspected of having fallen from grace since employed here, but no harm resulted.”21 The abstemious Pinkerton abhorred drinking, and in 1875 almost fired even Bangs for being intoxicated on the street.22 It is almost certain that McParland’s “fall from grace”—a term used by those in the temperance movement—referred to his heavy drinking, which, although curtailed again, is rumored to have reappeared on and off for the rest of his life.

  • • •

  Drinking was probably not the only thing about which McParland was at odds with his supervisors. He showed throughout his career that he regularly thought he knew best about anything in which he was involved, and it must have been difficult for Warner and the assistant superintendents to have as a subordinate the country’s most famous detective, who was also a favorite of Pinkerton. In 1882 the conflict apparently escalated to a point where McParland was ready to leave the agency, as he and his brother Charles—who had joined James and Mary Ann in the cottage on Menomonee and gone back to using the name McParland—established a furniture business. However, the new enterprise quickly proved unsuccessful, so McParland remained while Charles returned to shoemaking.23

  Shortly thereafter, McParland and Mary Ann welcomed a second daughter, named Kate on her birth certificate, but generally called Kittie.24 But all was not well on the family front. In February 1882, two months before Kittie’s birth, Mary Ann’s sister Margaret turned eighteen and, six days later, for a small sum of money, she conveyed to her sister her one-third interest in the real estate their father had left them.25 This gave sole ownership to McParland and Mary Ann, who had previously paid Edward $980 for his part of the property. Although Margaret had reached her majority, McParland did not make his final report as guardian until May 25, thereby, in effect, continuing in that role in the interim. In June, Margaret married Peter Larkin, a fireman who moved in with the McParlands.26

  Likely encouraged by her husband, Margaret soon filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against McParland, Mary Ann, Charles, and Michael J. Dunne and Conrad L. Niehoff (the last two holding liens on the property) to return her former share of the property, which had proved to be worth considerably more than what had been paid for it. After bitter proceedings, the court found on Margaret’s behalf, but rather than declaring the transfer deed void, referred the matter to a “special master” to “ascertain the value of the land and improvements, and the amount of the encumbrances, and to take an account of rents and taxes” prior to making a final decree.27 There the matter lay fallow, as, for several years, no report from the master was received. When McParland and the others appealed the decision, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the appeal itself must be dismissed, as no final decree had been entered due to the absence of the master’s report, and without such a decree, there was no decision that could be appealed.28

  The special master, forced by the criticism implicit in this ruling, then submitted his findings, and the Circuit Court entered a final decree on behalf of Margaret. Once again, McParland and the others appealed, but in 1895, in what is considered a classic judgment, the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision. Although the final decree would not have hugely impacted McParland financially or personally—by that time he had remarried and moved to Denver—its findings are important in assessing his ethics.

  The Supreme Court—having indicated that unless the influence o
f the guardian upon a ward has ceased, “such transactions are always to be regarded with suspicion”29—concluded that: “the ward was a female, barely past the age of 18 years, practically without knowledge or experience in business affairs. The peculiar interests of the guardian were opposed to her own. . . . The ward was induced to execute a deed, prepared by the guardian for her signature, for an inadequate consideration, greatly less than the real value of her interest.”30 Under such circumstances, the court noted, it was not necessary to prove intentional fraud but only that the guardian “gained some advantage by the transaction with his ward” in order to “throw the burden of proving good faith and absence of influence . . . upon the guardian. This we are not prepared, after the most careful consideration of the evidence, to say has been done, and the decree . . . setting aside the deed must be affirmed.”31

  In essence, the courts at both levels believed that the McParlands, while standing “in loco parentis to the minor” and supposedly caring “for her as though she was their child,”32 had taken advantage of Margaret’s naïveté to better their personal economic situation at her expense. This is a significant assessment of McParland’s ethics. During the Molly Maguire trials he had been attacked as corrupt and unscrupulous, but his honor was equally vehemently defended. However, in these much less public legal proceedings, his principles and morality once again were questioned, and this time they seem to have been shown wanting.