The Mammoth Book of the West (37 page)

This Indian-fighting period saw the rise of such legendary Ranger figures as Captain Samuel Walker – who gave Samuel Colt’s .45 revolver its field trial – and Captain John (“Jack”) Coffee Hays. As everyone allowed, Hays was recklessly brave. A Lipan chief described him as a man “not afraid to go to hell by himself.” He was also capable of phenomenal endurance. On one notable occasion he joined a party of Delawares running (literally) after a band of Comanche who had stolen their horses. The foot chase was kept up for three days. It was Hays who commanded the regiment of Rangers who served under Zachary Taylor in the war with Mexico which erupted after Texas’s 1845 entry into the Union.

After the Mexican war, the Rangers were officially disbanded, the Army insisting that it take over the role of protecting settlements in Texas against the Indians. Unofficially, the Rangers continued to exist under such men as William A. (“Big Foot”) Wallace. A book about Wallace by Texas author John C. Duval,
Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace, the Texas Ranger and Hunter
, was so popular in the East that it was reprinted six times. Under public pressure, the governor of Texas reorganized the Rangers as a state Indian-fighting force, and they carried the war against the Native Americans deep into the southern plains. At the climax of the Rangers’ 1860 campaign, Captain Sul Ross engaged the Comanche band of Peta Nocona, and rescued the White captive Cynthia Ann Parker. The reformed
Rangers were also active against Mexican bandits, who raided north of the border, a detachment under Rip Ford killing the famed Juan Cortina at Rio Grande City on 26 December 1860. Additional duties included the pursuit, capture and return of runaway slaves.

For their part in the cause of the Confederacy, the Rangers were disbanded by the Union at the close of the Civil War. Death and disorder were so rife in the state, however, that the Rangers were once again revived. In 1874 a Frontier Battalion was raised under Major John B. Jones to fight Indians, while a “Special Force of Rangers” under Captain Leander H. McNelly was detailed to suppress lawlessness along the border with Mexico. Since the Indians of the southern plains were all but defeated, and Mexican banditry on the decline, the new Rangers became an organization that dealt almost exclusively with erring Anglo-Americans, whether rustler, robber, thief or murderer. Badmen brought to justice included the racist gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, captured by Ranger Captain John Armstrong (“McNelly’s Bulldog”) at the train station at Pensacola, Florida. Lame from having once shot himself in the leg, Armstrong eased into Hardin’s coach, drew out a .45 pistol and ordered Hardin and his companions to surrender. Hardin pulled a pistol, which became trapped in his suspenders. One of Hardin’s friends, 19-year-old Jim Mann, got off a shot at Armstrong, but it only holed his hat. Armstrong shot Mann through the chest. Hardin then started kicking the Ranger, who finally pistol-whipped him into submission. Armstrong afterwards set up as a rancher on the $4,000 reward he got for delivering Hardin up to justice.

Another prominent outlaw tracked down by the Rangers was Sam Bass. Orphaned at 15, Bass drifted west from his Indiana home to become a cowboy at Denton, Texas. In 1875 Bass and a colleague, Joel Collins, drove a herd up
the trail to Kansas, where – probably at Collins’s instigation – they absconded with the owner’s money. When this was lost in the gambling dens of Deadwood, Bass held up the Union Pacific train at Big Springs, Nebraska, taking $60,000 in gold. Later, he returned to Texas as a highway robber. Though only moderately successful at this, he was notably successful at eluding arrest. Efforts to storm his Cove Hollow hide-out were driven back by bullets. Eventually, he was betrayed by a henchman, Jim Murphy, who alerted the Rangers to a planned robbery by Bass of the bank at Round Rock. Five Rangers, led by Captain Lee Hall, ambushed Bass as he reconnoitred the town on 19 July 1878. Though shot in the spine, the outlaw was scooped to safety by fellow bandit Frank Jackson, and the two escaped into the evening. However, Bass proved unable to ride, and Jackson had to set him down just outside town. He was found next morning and taken into Round Rock, where he died the next day, his 27th birthday.

These successes aside, the Rangers of the post-War decades attracted a great deal of controversy. Their depredations on Hispanics on both sides of the border are well recorded, and on occasion they mounted something like invasions of northern Mexico, fighting sizeable skirmishes with Mexican forces and citizens, such as at Palo Alto and Las Cueces in 1875. One Ranger was once moved to boast: “I can maintain a better stomach at the killing of a Mexican than at the crushing of a body louse.”

A number of Rangers were also outlaws rather than the pursuers of outlaws. Prime among them was James Miller, resident Ranger at Memphis, Texas, in the late 1890s.

Miller began his long career as a murderer and gunfighter in 1884 when, aged 17, he murdered his brother-in-law. There followed a known 12 other victims. He survived a number of gun battles by the simple expedient of wearing an iron breastplate. Outwardly he was a devout
Methodist, and “Deacon Jim” spoke regularly at prayer meetings. Perhaps his most famous victim was Pat Garrett, the killer of Billy the Kid, whom Miller assassinated in February 1908 near Las Cruces, New Mexico. When Garrett stepped out of his buggy to urinate in the road, Miller opened fire from concealment, shooting Garrett in the head and stomach. He died instantly. By coincidence, Garrett had once served as a Texas Ranger himself.

The Rangers continue to exist as a small, elite force of criminal investigators. They still, when need arises, saddle up to hunt men in the brush country.

When the Texas Rangers ambushed Sam Bass at Round Rock, they were not the only detectives on his trail. The much-robbed Texas and Pacific Railway had retained in the case the services of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency (“We Never Sleep”), the most significant of the private police forces in the West. Although the Pinkertons missed their badman this time, they would get others. They would also attract controversy, even hatred, in the course of doing so.

Founded by Allan Pinkerton, a Scots emigrant and ardent abolitionist (his Chicago home was used as a hiding-place by escaping slaves), the Agency gained fame just before the Civil War, when it foiled a plot to assassinate Lincoln. During the War it helped organize Union secret-service operations under the direction of General George B. McClellan. In the late 1860s and early 1870s the Agency grew rapidly, and played a major role in the labour–management conflicts of the Pennsylvania coalfields, famously breaking the labour terrorist organization, the “Molly Maguires”.

Also giving rise to prominent cases was the Agency’s involvement with Western railroad robbers. Pinkertons trailed the Reno brothers, the first in the world to hold up a train, apprehending John Reno in 1867, and William and Simeon Reno in Canada in 1868. (Extradited to the USA, William and Simeon were lynched by the Southern Indiana Vigilance Committee.) Another early target was the James–Younger gang, one which led to the death of a Pinkerton operative in March 1874 when he tried to infiltrate it. Shortly after this another Pinkerton detective, Louis J. Lull, was shot dead in a gunfight with Jim and John Younger. The Pinkerton bomb attack of January 1875 on the James cabin, in which the James boys’ mother was seriously injured and their half-brother killed, brought the Agency to a low in popular opinion. Jesse James’s hatred for Allan Pinkerton became an obsession. Once, the outlaw even went to Chicago to kill him. He failed, but told a friend that “I know God some day will deliver Allan Pinkerton into my hands.” Pinkerton died in 1884. His would-be Nemesis was already two years under the sod.

By the time Pinkerton died, leaving the business to his sons William and Robert, the Agency had opened offices in Seattle, Kansas and Denver. Head of the Denver office was James McParland, the agent who had infiltrated the Maguires, while operatives included gunslinger Tom Horn and ex-Texas cowboy, Charles A. Siringo. The work of a Western operative for Pinkertons, as recalled in Siringo’s memoir,
A Cowboy Detective
, included “testing” (spying on) train conductors, investigating the Ute Indian War in Utah for the government, undercover work in mines to expose thieves, detecting murderers, infiltrating unions, and chasing rustlers. Pursuing train and bank robbers was a staple Pinkerton activity. Aside from Sam Bass, the Agency was assigned to the case of the Texas outlaw gang
headed by Rube and Jim Burrows, the Agency’s detective work leading to the shattering of the gang in 1888. Further north, Pinkertons so persistently harassed the Wild Bunch that they drove them out of their Wyoming–Montana stomping ground, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid eventually fleeing to Bolivia.

While some Pinkerton agents were chasing Western outlaws in the 1890s, others were employed by capital in the rash of labour wars that spread through the mines of Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Idaho. The “class struggle” in the West took on a violent, blood-red colour, with mining disputes exacerbated by the stand-up-and-fight frontier attitudes of the participants. Labour militants used dynamite to blow up mines and concentrators. Employers hired gunmen-thugs to guard their property and break up strikes. And they employed Pinkerton agents to infiltrate the unions.

The operative sent, in 1891, to the flashpoint of the Coeur d’Alene mining district in the Idaho panhandle was Charlie Siringo. His infiltration of the miners’ union in Gem was almost of a piece with McParland’s of the Molly Maguires a generation before, and would be one of the great escapades in Pinkerton history.

Arriving in the mining camp of Gem, Siringo took a job in the mine and joined the local union. This required him to take a Molly Maguire-type oath that “I would never turn traitor to the union cause; that if I did, death would be my reward.” Enthusiastic and industrious, he was elected recording secretary.

Initially, the miners were not suspicious of Siringo:

My worst trouble was writing reports and mailing them. These reports had to be sent to St. Paul, Minnesota, where our Agency had an office, with my Chicago friend, John O’Flyn, as superintendent. There they were typewritten
and mailed back to John A. Finch, Secretary of the Mine-Owners’ Association, where all the mine-owners could read them.

The Gem Post Office was in the store of a man by the name of Samuels, a rabid anarchist and Union sympathizer; so for that reason I dare not mail reports there. “Big Frank” was the deputy post-master and handled most of the mail. He was a member of the Gem Miners’ Union, consequently I had to walk down to Wallace, four miles, to mail reports; and for fear of being held up I had to slip down there in the dark.

Siringo sent out his reports for months, detailing the union’s secret plans for a coming offensive against the mine-owners. When these plans were published in a local pro-employer newspaper,
The Barbarian
, the union realized that it had a spy in its midst. Suspicion came to rest on Siringo, whose frequent trips to Wallace to mail letters had been noted. His exposure coincided with the start of what he characterized as an “uprising” by the union against Coeur d’Alene mine-owners. The atmosphere was murderous. After being tipped off that militants were looking to kill him, Siringo fled to the store of Mrs Shipley, where he roomed, and holed up:

I had Mrs. Shipley keep the store door locked, and told her to not let any one in. I then went out in the back yard to see if the coast was clear in the vicinity of my hole in the fence. I looked through a crack in the fence and discovered two armed men hiding behind a big log. I then went into a storeroom adjoining the fence on the east, and through a crack saw my friend Dallas [a union militant] walking a beat with a shotgun on his shoulder. He was evidently guarding a rat in a trap, and I happened to be that rat.

In this storeroom I discarded my hat and coat and in
their place put on an old leather jacket and a black slouch hat. Then I got a saw and went into Mrs. Shipley’s room, and next to the store wall, tore up a square of carpet and began sawing a hole through the floor. I sawed out a place just large enough to admit my body. This done, I replaced the carpet in nice shape, loosely, over the hole.

At first I had planned a scheme to barricade the head of the stairs with furniture and bedding and then slaughter all who undertook to come up the stairs. Had I carried out this plan, the newspapers would have had some real live news to record; but I hated to wait upstairs for business to come my way, hence made up my mind to go under the floor and do some skirmishing, which would at least keep my mind occupied.

The back part of my store building rested flat on the ground, and the front part was up on piles three feet high.

Finally I bade Mrs. Shipley and her little five-year-old goodbye, and dropped out of sight. Then Mrs. Shipley pulled her trunk over the hole as per my instructions.

In scouting around under the house, I could find no possible way to get out, except up under the board sidewalk on the main street. Through a crack the width of my hand, on the east side, I saw Dallas resting on his beat. He was leaning on his shot-gun. I up with my rifle and took aim at his heart, 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, and the rifle was taken from my shoulder.

Just then an explosion took place which shook the earth. It was up towards the Frisco Mill. The rifle shooting was still going on, but it soon ceased.

In about 20 minutes Mrs. Shipley pulled the trunk from the hole, and putting her head down in it, cried: “Oh, Mr. Allison [Siringo’s cover name] run for your life. They have just blown up the Frisco Mill and killed lots of men and
now they’re coming after you to burn you at the stake, so as to make an example of Dickenson [for legal reasons Siringo was obliged to refer to Pinkertons as the Dickenson Agency in his narrative] detectives.” Crawling near to the hole I asked Mrs. Shipley how she had found this out. She replied that Mrs. Weiss, a strong union woman, who was a friend of mine while I was in the union, had just told her when she went across the street to find out the cause of the explosion. I told Mrs. Shipley to keep cool and put the trunk back over the hole. It was explained to her that I could find no way to get out, hence must stay.