Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  After a speech that impressed even Siringo, Dallas announced a recess, at which he expected the detective to flee. But Siringo did not fall into such a simple trap, and calmly presented his minute book for examination. After several minutes Dallas found the page that had been cut out. “Here’s a leaf cut out of this book. We want an explanation,” he said triumphantly. When Siringo mentioned that the union president had told him to cut the page out, Hughes jumped up and called him a liar. But Siringo reminded him of the exact instance wherein they had planned to flood the mines, and the president had to acknowledge it was true.28 For the moment, Siringo had dodged a bullet, but he knew that his time was running out.

  • • •

  In the following days, Siringo’s success in staying alive owed a great deal to Kate Shipley, his landlady when he first arrived in Gem. In the spring, Siringo had paid three thousand dollars—most of his savings—for a two-story building in the center of the town. Upstairs were furnished rooms, and downstairs he opened a small store. He moved Mrs. Shipley and her five-year-old son in behind the store and paid her half the income to run the place. His room—removed from prying eyes—was upstairs, and to prevent anyone from prowling around the house, he built a sixteen-foot-high fence. “As a precaution,” he noted, “I left the bottom of one wide board loose so that I could crawl out instead of going over the fence.”29

  Not long after the union meeting, Mrs. Shipley told Siringo that she had seen a man following him. Watching out, Siringo recognized “Black Jack” Griffin, who had been involved in the dynamiting of two mine owners’ houses in Nevada a few years before, a case that Siringo had investigated. Siringo had no doubt Griffin would tell Dallas that the man going by “Allison” was the detective “Charles T. Leon.” But Siringo did not feel that he could leave yet—Pettibone had told him that a major uprising was planned for early July, to take possession of the mines and run the owners and scabs out of the country.30 Wanting to provide as much advance information as possible, Siringo waited.

  All Canyon Creek, from Burke to Wallace, seemed on edge. Guards at the Gem Mine prevented anyone from entering, while union men outside prevented anyone from leaving. A friend warned Siringo not to attend a union meeting on July 9, or “I was doomed to die the death of a traitor.”31 Instead, he gave the guard at the door his minute book and a letter that denied he was a spy but included his resignation from the union due to the unwarranted suspicions. A short while later he was told by a late arrival that the “Homestead, Pa., riots of a few days previous would be child’s play as compared to our approaching storm.”32 Before he reached his house, Siringo was accosted by a group of about twenty men in an ugly mood. “I sprang out into the street and with my hand on my cocked pistol, threatened to kill the first man who undertook to pull a gun. In this manner I backed across the street to the hallway leading up to my room.”33

  By the next day, more than one thousand union men had arrived. Despite the danger, that night Siringo slipped out the back, dislodged the piece of fence, wriggled out through the hole, and crept to the river, wading through it in a dark place that the guards on the bridge could not see. He then crawled on his stomach until he neared the Gem Mine, where he warned the superintendent that rioting would start the next morning.34 When daylight came, Siringo boldly walked back into town, his rifle under his coat, and returned home. At precisely 6:00 A.M., shooting started from near the Frisco Mill, the targets of which were the replacement workers and their guards.35

  Siringo realized this was his chance to leave, but when he peeked outside he saw strikers blocking all the possible exits. He then saw a man from the Thiel Detective Service Company, which had been hired to guard the Gem Mine, walking into town. The operative was shot dead in his tracks. Shots were then fired in earnest, at the mine and all around it. After considering barricading himself upstairs and defending the place until he died, Siringo decided to try to escape. His store was built on an uneven piece of land, and although the building rested on the ground at the rear, it was built on piles at the front. So he sawed a hole in the floor and, still holding his rifle, squeezed beneath the house.

  Siringo found he could see through the cracks of the board sidewalk on the main street, and standing nearby with a shotgun was Dallas. “I up with my rifle and took aim at his heart,” Siringo wrote, “but before pulling the trigger, the thought of the danger from the smoke going up through the cracks and giving my hiding place away, flashed through my mind.”36 Moreover, just then there was a huge explosion from the direction of the Frisco.

  Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Shipley agitatedly told Siringo through the hole in the floor that the Frisco mill had been blown up, many men killed, and “now they’re coming after you to burn you at the stake.”37 He calmly told her to recover the hole with the rug and put the trunk on top of it. Just in time, as soon there were hundreds of men in the street baying for Siringo’s blood. They kicked in the door to the store and demanded to know where the “dirty Pinkerton detective” was, but Mrs. Shipley insisted she hadn’t seen him.

  Knowing it was only a matter of time until the hole was found, Siringo wormed his way under the sidewalk, pulling his rifle behind him. When he paused to rest he could hear men directly above talking about killing him. With no room to crawl on hands and knees, he wriggled on his belly, inch by inch, the length of three buildings before reaching the saloon; there he could see light coming from an open space toward the rear. Emerging, he saw three armed men only thirty feet away, but their attention was on the main street, so he sneaked past them and rushed toward the creek, reaching a culvert that led under the railway embankment toward the Gem Mine just as a bullet whizzed past his head. Making his way through, he raced across hundreds of yards of open ground to where the guards allowed him in. He was safe—for the moment.

  • • •

  Siringo had not been at the mine long when a union messenger demanded they surrender or else the mill would be dynamited. The superintendent, having been ordered by the owners to avoid loss of life and destruction of the mill, surrendered. Meanwhile, Siringo, certain he would be murdered, escaped with a nonunion miner by crawling on his stomach through the surrounding brush, and then slipped into the local mountains. As he paused at the crown of a nearby hill he could see the union men looking into the face of each remaining man, hunting him.

  Siringo and the miner stayed hidden in the hills for several days, while the strikers marched on Wardner and forced the closure of the Bunker Hill facility. Governor Norman B. Willey thereupon declared martial law and, at his request, federal troops were sent to quell the strike. After several days, nonunion workers returned to the mines with military protection, while hundreds of miners were arrested and, as local jails were inadequate, placed in hastily built stockades, or “bullpens.”38 Siringo was appointed deputy sheriff to help round up those who had escaped. Among them was Pettibone, who had lit the fuse to blow up the Frisco mill, killing one.39

  Siringo later testified in the trials, helping to convict eighteen union members, including Pettibone.40 So intense was the feeling of some of the union miners against him that the building he owned in Gem—into which Mamie’s uncle and aunt had moved with Viola—was burned to the ground. On appeal, the conviction of the union leaders was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the men spent less than a year in prison.41

  Not long after their release, five of the former prisoners met other labor leaders representing miners in Montana, Colorado, Utah, and South Dakota. Together they founded exactly what the mine owners had long feared: “a grand federation of underground workers throughout the western states,” consolidating a number of individual unions into the Western Federation of Miners (WFM).42

  • • •

  Even before the disastrous intervention by Pinkerton’s at Homestead in July 1892 there had been growing concern about equipping what were essentially private armies for use in the increasingly aggressive struggle between big busine
ss and the unions. Pressure was brought to bear by numerous groups, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, which, following the Burlington Railroad strike in 1888, began lobbying Congress to abolish the use of Pinkerton’s detectives.43

  Although such legislation received some support, serious congressional action did not begin until after Homestead. After this, both the Senate and the House of Representatives held hearings about the use of “large bodies of armed men to discourage strikers from interfering with the orderly operation of business.”44 In response, an amendment to the civil appropriations bill for that year included what became known as the Anti-Pinkerton Act. This act prevented the federal government and that of the District of Columbia from employing Pinkerton’s or similar organizations.45 More broadly, however, the hearings determined that it was not up to Congress but to the states to pass such legislation, if desired. By the end of the century twenty-four states had forbidden armed guards to enter their jurisdictions.46

  Most of these laws focused on the prevention of employing organizations that “offered for hire mercenary, quasi-military forces as strikebreakers and armed guards.”47 Therefore, this did not greatly affect McParland’s operation in the West, which concentrated not on protecting strikebreakers but on using detectives for criminal investigations and as undercover operatives.

  McParland’s agents were not significant, however, in the first major test of the Western Federation of Miners. In January 1894, a dispute arose in the gold mines around Cripple Creek, Colorado, an area that had expanded rapidly during the gold rush of the first years of the 1890s. When mine owners increased the workday from eight to ten hours for the same pay, the gold miners, who had only recently affiliated with the WFM, went on strike.48 Minor violence and a brief appearance by the state militia followed, but by late April, all but seven of the thirty-seven local mines were working an eight-hour day.

  The more militant owners and union men would not give in, however, and the situation turned ugly when the owners hired Sheriff M. F. Bowers to assemble a large force to protect the strikebreakers.49 As Bowers deputized some twelve hundred men—called by the local union president “the scum from nearly all the cities in Colorado”50—the union armed and began training. The actual conflict began on May 24, when the miners captured the nonunion Strong Mine from armed deputies and ordered everyone to leave. Shortly thereafter, the shaft house was blown up, trapping the superintendent, foreman, and engineer in it. Each side blamed the other for the explosion, with McParland writing: “This gang of union men ordered every man to leave the Strong Mine. Mr McDonald, the Supt and a few others did not come out of the mine quick enough, so they dynamited the tunnel and left those men in there to die. A large number of deputy sheriffs . . . eventually cleared away the debris and released Mr McDonald and his men more dead than alive.”51

  The next day the strikers approached the deputies’ camp not far from several mines and gunfire broke out, killing two and wounding several others. Fearing anarchy, Populist governor Davis H. Waite asked the strikers to lay down their arms and declared the deputies an illegal force that must disperse. When that did not happen, he called in the state militia, which quickly took control of the situation and successfully quelled the violence. Waite also later served as the arbitrator for an agreement between the owners and the union to end the strike.52

  The strike was widely considered a union victory, and the WFM had huge success in organizing workers in its immediate aftermath.53 At the same time, it taught the leaders of the federation some of the wrong lessons. The famed muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker wrote: “The strike at Cripple Creek in 1894, and that of Telluride in 1901, were called great victories for unionism. They were not. They were defeats. Victories obtained by such violence and bloodshed are always defeats. They laid the foundation for other violence. They encouraged the unions, once successful with rifles and fists, to use rifles and fists again.”54 The seeming success therefore masked not only that the government still maintained the power, but that the image of the WFM was damaged with both the owners and the public by gaining a reputation for violence and lawlessness. Further, it increased the call of the owners for antiunion measures by Pinkerton’s, the Thiel Detective Service Company, and other such organizations.

  For McParland, the conflict with the WFM had one personally negative aspect. In the early 1890s, his brother Edward had moved to Cripple Creek, where he hoped to strike it rich in the gold rush. Not doing so, he returned to his shoe business, but in the interim he became friendly with members of the WFM.55 Many years later, Kittie Schick—the youngest daughter of Charles McParland, who had lived with her uncle James in Denver—was reported to have said that Edward was “a bit of an anarchist” who was “really a little off.”56 Exactly why she said so is unknown, but it is obvious that any alliance between Edward and the WFM would have been particularly distressing to McParland.

  • • •

  McParland’s success throughout this period—as the leader of the Denver office, in the early struggle against the WFM and other labor organizations, and in a number of personally led criminal investigations57—gained him a major promotion. In 1892, William and Robert Pinkerton jointly took on their father’s old title of principal. George D. Bangs, the son of Allan Pinkerton’s former number two, thereupon became the general superintendent, making him the number three man in the agency and directly in charge of operations in the eastern United States. Simultaneously, two new positions were created. McParland, while remaining superintendent of the Denver office, was named assistant general superintendent, Western Division, and his old colleague David Robertson became assistant general superintendent, Middle Division.58

  McParland was now more than ever one of the key players in the agency, but that only meant he would be expected to work even harder. Fifteen years before, Allan Pinkerton had decided that employment in his agency meant working seven days a week, a requirement that would continue under his sons into the twentieth century.59 However, in his initial year in charge of the Western Division, McParland found himself taking Sundays off for the first time since his recuperation at Larch Farm. Unfortunately, it was due to a serious bout of typhoid fever,60 which left him weak and listless. But this time there would be little chance to relax and enjoy life while regaining his health: He had half a country to oversee.

  CHAPTER 16

  BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE WILD BUNCH

  As the 1890s passed, Pinkerton’s Western Division continued to grow in both reputation and the number of clients it serviced. Some were railroad companies, for which the old task of testing conductors was still carried out, in addition to chasing train robbers. Others were mining companies, disturbed by the growth of unions, wanting help when they purchased a salted mine, or worried by the theft of ore or bullion. Yet others were banks, jewelry sellers, cattle ranchers, money brokers, or public officials who simply could not cope with the numbers of murderers, robbers, kidnappers, con men, and general thugs who made the Old West so wild.1 McParland’s vast domain stretched from Mexico to Canada—and at times into them—and from the shores of the Pacific to the Mississippi. And in that realm were more than enough “desperate men”2 to keep his expanding forces constantly busy.

  McParland himself continued to be more administrator, salesman to potential clients, and diplomat than anything else, but he did manage to keep his hand in the investigation business. He particularly liked to swoop in at the last moment, round up the criminals, and frighten, bribe, or cajole confessions out of them. It was not unusual at the time to read newspaper notes such as: “The real object of his [McParland’s] visit was the possible capture of a lot of confidence men who have been operating on the Union Pacific to the great annoyance of the company . . . and the discomfort of the passengers.”3

  As always, McParland employed numerous operatives, but the man as often as not assigned to the toughest investigations was his friend Siringo. In the period following his stint
in the Coeur d’Alenes, Siringo spent three weeks in a Pueblo, Colorado, jail with two killers, eventually wrangling a confession out of them that allowed him to give testimony that led to a seventeen-year prison sentence. On one job he posed as a wealthy mining man in Denver, and on another as a hobo hitching rides on railways in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. After having been thrown off the train in the Mojave Desert, he had to walk fifteen miles without water, and when he finally came to a house, the rancher told him to “git” before he let his dog loose on him. Fortunately for Siringo, just a short while before he had noticed a couple of milk cows in a deep arroyo. “Only one cow would let me go up and rub her head, and she was a Jersey with a bag full,” he wrote. “While she chewed the cud of contentment, I got down on my knees and milked the fluid into my mouth.”4

  On one of Siringo’s assignments, McParland sent him to Alaska to find ten thousand dollars in gold that had been stolen from the Treadwell Mine on Douglas Island, one of the largest gold mines in the world.5 Before Siringo left, McParland emphasized the political importance of the job—both within the company and without—because three detectives from the new Portland office had failed to find anything, and so it had been reassigned to Denver by an embarrassed William Pinkerton. Although both offices were under McParland as assistant general superintendent, Western Division, he was also the direct superintendent at Denver, so he wanted to show that his own office was still the best.