A Cowboy Detective

A Cowboy Detective by Charlies Siringo - Siringo was famous for infiltrating Butch Cassidy's Train Robbers' Syndicate and, following the Wilcox train robbery of 1899, Siringo was assigned to track Cassidy and his outlaw gang. This is a true story of the detective's encounters with moonshiners of Kentucky and Virginia and his adventures in Alaska. It is a classic tale of America's frontier at the turn of the century -- the cowboys, the villains, the cattle ranchers and the outlaws that made up America.... ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Charles Siringo (1855-1928), was a detective and agent for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency during the late 19th century and early 20th century. He was undercover, a new technique at the time, and infiltrated gangs of robbers and rustlers. He posed as a gunman on the run from the law for murder when he infiltrated Butch Cassidy's Train Robbers Syndicate. He was born in Texas and work on local ranches as a cowboy. He worked on several cattle drives before settling down and marrying. His first book, "A Texas Cowboy; Or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony" was a bestseller. In 1886, Siringo moved to Chicago and joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency, using gunman Pat Garrett's name as a reference. The Pinkertons were larger than the army in the 19th century, with 2,000 active agents and 30,000 reserves. They provided services for management and included secret operatives like Siringo. His cases took him from Alaska to Mexico City where he infiltrated gangs of robbers and rustlers, making more than 100 arrests. In the late 1890s, posing as "Charles L. Carter", an alleged gunman on the run from the law for a murder, he infiltrated outlaw Butch Cassidy's Train Robbers' Syndicate. He hampered the operations of Cassidy's Wild Bunch gang, but without a large number of arrests. After they committed the now-famous train robbery near Wilcox, Wyoming, in which they robbed a Union Pacific train, he again found himself assigned to capture the Wild Bunch.