A cowboy detective : a true story of twenty-two years with a world-famous…
"A cowboy detective" by Charles A. Siringo is a memoir written in the early 20th century. It recounts two decades of undercover work for a prominent detective agency, blending frontier cowboy life with covert investigations across the American West, Mexico, Alaska, and beyond. Expect firsthand tales of labor unrest, train and mine cases, moonshiners, outlaws, and the rough ethics and improvisation that shaped early detective work. The opening of the memoir sets
the stage with a preface explaining the use of fictitious names and the author’s plainspoken approach, then moves from his Texas cowboy youth to Chicago during the Haymarket riot, where a chance and a phrenologist’s nudge lead him into detective work. He joins the Dickenson Agency, survives a brief jailing after a circus scuffle, helps on the anarchist case, shadows suspects in Chicago, and transfers to Denver. There he goes undercover in the Archuleta County uprising, narrowly avoids a lynching, turns deputy long enough to stave off bloodshed, then slips away to Mexico City to shadow a Wells Fargo thief until an arrest back in Kansas. He helps seize the Bassick mine against a threatened mob, probes a Ute “war” he deems a murder by whites, and rides in a Denver cowboy tournament as “Dull Knife,” unlucky but skillful enough to earn notice. He next infiltrates Tom Hall’s outlaw ranch in Wyoming by faking a leg injury, learns of the jailbreak of a condemned killer, files reports amid dances and a chaotic wake, sees grand jury indictments follow (later dropped), and begins a Rio Grande train-robbery case by posing as a prisoner alongside the suspects as the narrative pauses. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Siringo, Charles A., 1855-1928 |
|---|---|
| LoC No. | 13001057 |
| Title | A cowboy detective : a true story of twenty-two years with a world-famous detective agency; giving the inside facts of the bloody Coeur d'Alene labor riots, and the many ups and downs of the author throughout the United States, Alaska, British Columbia and Old Mexico, also exciting scenes among the moonshiners of Kentucky and Virginia |
| Original Publication | Chicago: W. B. Conkey Company, 1912. |
| Credits | deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | F590.3: United States local history: The West. Trans-Mississippi Region. Great Plains |
| Subject | Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.) |
| Subject | Crime -- West (U.S.) |
| Subject | Siringo, Charles A., 1855-1928 |
| Subject | Pinkerton's National Detective Agency |
| Subject | Private investigators -- United States -- Biography |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77835 |
| Release Date | Feb 2, 2026 |
| Most Recently Updated | Feb 6, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 581 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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