Charles A. Siringo (1855–1928)

Charles Siringo grew up as a South Texas cowboy before applying for a job as a Pinkerton detective after seeing the Chicago Haymarket riots. (Because Pinkerton threatened lawsuits, it’s the “Dickenson” agency here, and Pinkerton operative and convicted murderer Tom Horn is named as “Tim Corn”). Siringo specialized in undercover work, convincing cattle rustlers, gold mine swindlers, moonshiners, and bank robbers that he was an outlaw fleeing from Texas. Although Pinkertons repeatedly sought to reward him with a desk job at the Denver office, he always refused, preferring work as a field agent.

Siringo notes that he was sympathetic to the nascent labor movement and was reluctant to get involved in the famous Coeur d’Alene miner’s strike, but changed his mind when the miners began attacking mine owners with dynamite. When his cover story was broken, he narrowly escaped being lynched by miners by sawing through a bedroom floor and crawling away undetected. Siringo, in turn, prevented a plan to lynch Bill Haywood, Clarence Darrow, and other union members and sympathizers.

His writing style is straightforward, and, unfortunately, not politically correct; Irish immigrants and black people he encounters are always quoted in dialect, usually not favorably. Siringo knew just about every famous name from Western history – Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch (he expresses some admiration for Cassidy, calling him one of the shrewdest and most honorable criminals he had to deal with). Illustrated with a few contemporary photographs. No notes, bibliography, or index.… (more)

Charlie Siringo was real, a genuine lawman who was a friend of Charlie Bowdrie, who was a friend and often companion of William Bonney, "Billy the Kid". Siringo drifted uphill from his birth on the Texas Gulf coast, and was a spectator (...just a spectator, honest! ) of many colourful parts of the Old West. He eventually became a technical adviser to the William S. Hart Movies. This is his version of his salad days, and it's a good read. His later book on the use of private security forces to carry out class warfare "Two Evil Isms: Anarchism and Pinkertonism" is always hard to find, though it's more valuable to the historian. Check out the final episodes of HBO's "Deadwood" for the results of that book.… (more)

This book is one of the first books written in the USA warning of the abuses of power by private Security forces. Charlie Siringo was a real old-west lawman who took a job to chase down rustlers and other low-lifes and ended up plotting to blow up labour organizers. Eventually he couldn't take that element of the task, the defence of unrestricted capitalism by violence, and retired to Hollywood where he found employment as a technical adviser to the William S. Hart Western movies. it is interesting to note that only after Siringo's death was the ground clear for the creation of the more mythic parts of the Wyatt Earp legend. I read the 1977 reprint.… (more)

It has been said that A Texas Cowboy was the original western. Will Rogers said it was "the Cowboy's Bible" when he was growing up. An historian said it was the first authentic memoir by a real cowboy. It contains a gold mine of names, cowboy lingo, places and events such as "Whiskey Pete", Billy the Kid's secret hideout, and "grub". I felt a constant déjà vu since so many later books and movies drew from things described here (though not only here). It's not a romanticized account, it reads like non-fiction and is unflinching - children beat up and generally very harsh times in particular during the 1860s when Siringo left home a young teenager. It seemed Siringo initially became a cowboy because he could at least obtain meat on the prairie since there were so many cattle around for the taking, he was otherwise a starving homeless kid. The story of Billy the Kid is the most famous and attracted much attention, then and now, but there is a lot of incident of the regular cowboy life that I found interesting. (Via the excellent David Wales narration at LibriVox).… (more)