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Charlie Siringo, Pinkerton Detective

© Elizabeth Gibson

Charlie Siringo was born in Matagorda County, Texas in 1855. At an early age, he learned to ride and rope steer and bust broncos. He met Billy the Kid when he helped Pat Garrett go after the gang in 1880. In 1881 and 882, he worked for some Texas cattlemen to bust up a ring of horse thieves. It was his first taste of detective work. During this time he wrote a book called “A Texas Cowboy,” chronicling his experiences on the trail.

In 1884 he got married and soon afterward he and his wife Mamie had a baby daughter, Viola. They moved to Caldwell, Kansas. One day, on a whim, he went to a phrenology reading. The phrenologist declared that Siringo would make a good detective. He remember those words in 1886, when he and his family were in Chicago. Anarchists had just caused the Haymarket Riots and killed some sixty policemen. Siringo was eager to discover who did it. He went to the Pinkerton agency and applied for a job. He was assigned to the Haymarket case and helped put several men in prison.

After that, the agency sent him to their new office in Denver. One of his first major cases was to track down a brakeman who stole $10,000 from a Wells Fargo express car. He trailed the man to Mexico City. He couldn’t arrest him there, but he kept an eye on him. He kept track of everything he bought with the stolen money. Eventually the man thought the heat was off and headed back to his home in Leavenworth, Kansas via El Paso, Texas. As soon as he reached Leavenworth, Siringo arrested him.

He worked on several smaller cases, the most notable being stopping a gang of rustlers who had used their positions as employees to steal cattle. Another time, he pretended to be an outlaw so he could infiltrate an outlaw hideout to catch up to the crook Bill McCoy. He went to Aspen, Colorado, and disguised himself as a miner to break up a gang of ore thieves in the silver mines.

One case that took a particularly long time to solve started in the small town of Tuscarora, Nevada. Two wealthy mine and mill owners, C. W. Prinz and George Pelling, hired the agency to find out who blew up their homes. Siringo suspected a man named Tim had been “in on it.” He took Tim prospecting near Wichita Falls, Texas, hoping to get a confession out of him. They roamed around northern Texas and Oklahoma for some months before Tim finally told him what he wanted to know. On the way back, Charlie lead him through Denver, where Siringo’s boss