A cowboy detective

"A cowboy detective" by Charles A. Siringo is a memoir written in the early 20th century. It traces a cowboy-turned-operative through decades of undercover work with a prominent detective agency across the American West and beyond, recounting labor strife, mine wars, train robberies, and outlaw hunting in a blunt, plainspoken style. The opening of the memoir sets a factual, unvarnished tone: a preface explains delays due to former employers’ objections and the use of some fictitious names, stressing that these are true adventures, not fiction. Siringo sketches his Texas cowboy youth, his proximity to the Chicago Haymarket riot, a fortuitous push toward detective work (via a blind phrenologist and a bank introduction), a brief jailing after a circus fracas, and his first cases—including the anarchist trials, Irish National League surveillance, and city “shadowing”—before moving to Denver. He then recounts infiltrating an armed uprising in Colorado’s Archuleta County (narrowly escaping a lynching and defusing a planned massacre), pursuing a Wells Fargo thief through Mexico (with vivid asides on earthquakes, bullfights, and a relic grabbed from Santa Anna’s grave), and seizing the Bassick mine against a threatened mob. Further early episodes include probing a Ute “war” he deems a murder spree, riding incognito as “Dull Knife” in a Denver cowboy tournament, and penetrating a Wyoming outlaw camp by faking a crippling injury to learn the fate of a condemned killer; grand-jury indictments follow, later undercut by local politics.

A cowboy detective, by Charles A. Siringo. Republished by OpenStories from Project Gutenberg eBook #77835.