McParlan lived in Gateshead for about a year and a half and was employed by C. Allhusen and Sons, soap and alkali manufacturers at the site known as the Tyne Chemical Works, making “chloride of lime—bleaching powder, in other words—not a very pleasant occupation either.”12 Tiring of this job, he worked briefly at the Jarrow Chemical Company before moving north to Wallsend—the easternmost point of Hadrian’s Wall—for a position with the Carville Chemical Works. However, it proved similar to the previous ones, and within a year he was back in Gateshead with yet another chemical firm.
According to one account, McParlan then briefly toured with a traveling circus—for which he worked as a roustabout, gambling shill, and barker. “I took on all comers for two bits, if I didn’t throw them with both shoulders on the mat in less than two minutes,” he supposedly said. “I can tell you we didn’t pay out many quarters!”13 Sadly, this colorful story does not ring true: There were no quarters in the British currency, the term “two bits” was distinctly American, and, most important, he testified in court that his only employment in England was with chemical companies.
In September 1866, after almost three years of working with powerful, reeking, dangerous chemicals, McParlan returned home. There was still little draw for him on the farm, however, and after a few weeks he took a position as a stockkeeper at the wholesale linen warehouse of William Kirk and Sons in Belfast. But what appears from even the beginning to have been a restless personality made him unsuited for such a sedentary job. So before long, the United States—with its seemingly unlimited possibilities of entrepreneurial success—began to beckon to McParlan, as it did to so many young Irishmen at the time, and he started saving to purchase a passage to a new life.
The next June he boarded the Inman Line’s immigrant transatlantic steamer City of London, in which he joined 1,002 other steerage passengers—mainly Swedish, Irish, and English—and headed to New York. The stories of his voyage vary from helping a priest aboard give communion, to preparing meals for young mothers too ill to cook, to beating the stuffing out of a ham-fisted bully that picked a fight. Regardless, the passage ended on July 8, 1867, when—with his name incorrectly registered as James McPharland and his occupation listed as laborer—he landed at Castle Garden in New York City, America’s first official immigrant reception center, in a brutally sweltering summer.14
Typically, even for something so straightforward as that voyage, McParlan seemingly was driven to muddy the waters relating to his background. His trial testimony in the 1870s matched the official records about the Atlantic crossing, but years later he stated that he had first come to America in 1857—after spending thirteen years as a sailor. If one believes his usual claim of being born in 1844, this story would mean that he must have been stolen from his parents and taken to serve before the mast before he was a year old!15
Upon his arrival, New York was not particularly welcoming. He was immediately confronted with the anti-Irish attitude so blatantly expressed in an advertisement in The New York Herald, the largest newspaper in the United States: “WOMAN WANTED—To do general housework . . . any country or color will answer except Irish.” Or, as the New York weekly Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper commented: “The real American hates the Irishman, very often without denying he is useful, because he is weary of his rowdy, noisy, anarchical ways.”16
Such sentiments made it difficult for immigrants to find jobs and meant that many drifted into the city’s crime-infested tenements and dirty side streets and alleys, particularly in Manhattan’s infamous Five Points slum, which had become, according to one Methodist reformer, “the synonym for ignorance the most entire, for misery the most abject, for crime of the darkest dye, for degradation so deep that human nature cannot sink below it.”17 Despite having a volatile streak, McParlan was not of such an ilk, however, and he proved to be single-minded about bettering his situation. Thus, it was not long before he landed a position working behind the counter and making deliveries for McDonald and Boas, a retail grocery at the corner of Ninth Avenue and West Thirty-sixth Street in what became Manhattan’s Garment District.
But McParlan hoped for something still better, and before long he was offered a post through the New York agents of his old Belfast employers, William Kirk and Sons. Promised twenty-five dollars a month plus board, he seemed to be already moving up in the world, as he traveled to the village of Medina, on the Erie Canal in upstate New York. He soon learned, however, that the clerks had not been paid for two months, and that the owner thought he was just another “gullible Mick” like the others. McParlan saw things differently: “I wanted my pay and I could not get it, and I kind of concluded that one month’s pay was enough to lose.”18 So he headed to Buffalo, and, finding nothing in the offing there, continued west a few days later.
By the autumn of 1867, McParlan had reached Chicago, a city with its own rough reputation but where hard physical labor allowed him to make ends meet. He first worked as a teamster, paving and grading streets for DeGolyer & McClelland, and then at the same job for John Anderson and Company. He next drove a meat wagon for a slaughterhouse, and then served as a deckhand on the steamer J.J. Truesdell, which traded on Lake Michigan between Chicago and Grand Haven, Muskegon, Sheboygan, and Manitowoc. During the heartless winter he trudged through deep snow to chop timber in the forests of Berrien County, Michigan. After a job as a laborer in H.W. Holden Brothers’ hardwood lumberyard back in Chicago, and a second stop with John Anderson and Company, he was hired as a coachman by John Alston of the firm Alston, Devoe & Company, a wholesale paint, oil, and glass store, a position he kept for about four months.
But McParlan was ambitious and clearly wanted something more exciting, more challenging, and with more of a future than short-term jobs as a manual laborer. To find such a position he turned in July 1868 to W.S. Beaubien and Company, one of Chicago’s early private detective agencies. It is intriguing that he had apparently not attempted to join the police force in New York, which featured an uncommonly high percentage of Irish immigrants, because once he was hired as a merchant or preventive policeman, he proved a natural for a job usually populated by rough, rollicking, hard-drinking men, of which he had become one. He later claimed that he stayed with Beaubien for more than two years, carrying out a variety of duties in Illinois and Ohio, including walking a beat, guarding business premises, and investigating crimes—serving “in the capacity of private policeman, and as detective just as required.”19
From Beaubien it was but a short step to the then-expanding Chicago Police Department, as many of the duties were similar to those of the private police, including making visible patrols, arresting drunks and beggars, controlling public disorder, regulating saloons, and suppressing vice. To be effective, a policeman needed to be physically fit and willing to step straight into the fray, as he had to face challenges from rowdy and drunken men and young delinquents, race after criminals, and push, drag, or carry unwilling offenders to the station house.20 One can well imagine that McParlan—like many policemen of the time—settled his fair share of arguments, disorder, and petty crimes on his own terms, with fists or police truncheon.
Despite the many ways that law enforcement seemed to fit McParlan’s temperament, it did not pay well—which was perhaps part of the reason why the Chicago force became so notably corrupt—so, with his eye still on more lucrative opportunities, he left it for a job as a traveling salesman for the wholesale liquor suppliers Dodge and Brothers in downtown Chicago. McParlan’s outgoing disposition, sense of humor, inherent garrulousness, and enjoyment of drinking made him a natural for interacting with a hard-swilling clientele. Therefore, after what he stated was seven or eight months, he embarked on a venture “upon my own hook,” using his savings—and some assistance from Dodge and Brothers as well as John Alston—to start his own liquor store at 349 South Canal Street, in the heart of Chicago. It was a resounding success, and he soon opened a saloon at Twelfth Street and Centre Avenue
, which also thrived.21 McParlan’s future looked secure as long as people continued to drink.
Then suddenly, over the course of a day and a half, everything changed for both McParlan and the city of Chicago. On the night of October 8, 1871, according to disputed legend a cow kicked over a lantern in a small barn behind De Koven Street, and what became known as the Great Chicago Fire was whipped by strong winds through the parched wood buildings of the city.22 The flames eventually destroyed an area of approximately four square miles, including some 17,500 buildings, while making 30 percent of the city’s inhabitants homeless. One of the buildings incinerated was McParlan’s liquor store, including its entire stock, which represented virtually his entire monetary worth.
In the months following the fire, Chicago’s population had little money to spend on alcohol, and McParlan’s income decreased dramatically. The saloon became insolvent, and in March 1872 he sold out. McParlan once again had to start his career from scratch. But he now had experience in police and investigative work—which he had discovered suited his nature—so he decided his best option was to return to that. But rather than go back to Beaubien, in April 1872 he joined a bigger and better known company—Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.
• • •
Allan Pinkerton, who personally interviewed and hired McParlan, probably saw something of himself in the young man struggling to make a career in a new country.23 Born in 1819 in the Gorbals, a rough slum of Glasgow, Pinkerton’s schooling was interrupted at age twelve, when his father died. He initially worked for a harness maker, but then apprenticed as a cooper. When he was nineteen—the same age as McParlan when he left home—Pinkerton began a four-year journey through Scotland and northern England, making barrels wherever he could find work.
When he returned to Glasgow, the normally taciturn Scot was caught up by the emergence of Chartism, a political effort to broaden suffrage to working-class men and to make Parliament more representative of the masses. He became an active campaigner, and later asserted that he had participated in the Newport Rising of November 1839, when several thousand Chartist sympathizers marched into the Monmouthshire town to free some imprisoned comrades, only to be driven back, with many killed in a fiercely contested battle against soldiers and constables.24
Legend has it that Pinkerton left Scotland a step ahead of the police, by whom he was wanted for participation in other Chartist riots. The story may or may not be true, but what is certain is that he reached Montreal in May 1842 with his new bride, but only after their ship had foundered on the reefs off of Sable Island, some two hundred miles southeast of Halifax, following which they were robbed by unscrupulous locals before being rescued by another ship.25
As it turned out, the couple was not in Montreal many months before an invitation from a friend who had also emigrated from Scotland led them to the frontier town of Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan. It proved to be a raw, nasty place, and it was not long before Pinkerton moved to Dundee, a heavily Scottish settlement about forty miles northwest of Chicago. As the only cooper in the area, Pinkerton quickly built up a business employing eight men.
In 1846 or 1847, while cutting timber on an island up the Fox River, Pinkerton stumbled upon a camp of counterfeiters. He led the sheriff back to arrest the men, and in the aftermath, in which Pinkerton became a bit of a local celebrity, two merchants convinced him to help end the fast-growing problem of distribution of fake currency. His audacious tactics quickly proved effective—when a man named John Craig arrived in Dundee, Pinkerton sought him out and asked to buy some counterfeit money. Craig produced the notes, and after arrangements were made for a larger exchange, Pinkerton arrested him.26
That Pinkerton had the right to take Craig into custody might seem odd, but the system of arrest for crimes was significantly different in the first half of the nineteenth century than today. The first police department in the United States—New York City’s, patterned roughly after the London Metropolitan Police—had only been established in 1844, there were essentially no state law-enforcement organizations, and local constables had more civil than criminal duties.27 Members of the public not only had broad law-enforcement powers, it was considered their duty to aid in the arrest of criminals.28 When a crime was committed, citizens were expected to arm themselves and pursue the suspect, and “not faintly and with lagging steps, but honestly and bravely and with whatever implements and facilities convenient and at hand.”29
Similarly, the investigation of crimes was considered the province of the private citizen, not the government.30 However, although individuals inquired into crimes affecting them personally, it was not commonplace for a private individual to probe numerous unrelated offenses. But when his role in the Craig case became known, Pinkerton began to be sought out for other enquiries.
Finding that such work appealed to him a great deal more than building barrels, Pinkerton moved back to Chicago, where he was appointed a deputy sheriff of Cook County. In 1850 or 1852—he indicated each at different times—he formed Pinkerton and Company, although he continued to handle most of his cases personally. At the time, with few investigative means at their disposal, it was common for government agencies to hire private individuals as investigators, and in those early years the U.S. Treasury Department used Pinkerton to fight counterfeiting in Illinois. Then, in 1854, working for the Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana Railroad—while still holding down his Cook County position—Pinkerton arrested a man for attempting to destroy lines and derail cars.31
February 1855 marked a major turning point in Pinkerton’s career. His agency agreed to a contract with six railroad companies, for which it would police the burgeoning network in the regions surrounding Chicago.32 Pinkerton and Chicago attorney Edward A. Rucker expanded the company into the North West Police Agency. Its primary tasks were to provide protection for the passengers from armed robberies and for the railroad companies from hooliganism along rural routes and from theft by employees. Pinkerton quickly began hiring operatives to work the train lines.33
That spring, Pinkerton arrested a station manager who was stealing from freight cars in Oak Ridge, Illinois.34 But an even bigger concern for railroad companies was conductors embezzling money by pocketing the fares they were paid. Determined to end the practice, as well as that of conductors sleeping on the job and letting friends travel free, Pinkerton developed what he called a “testing program,” in which agents checked the honesty of employees by posing as travelers. Before long, Oscar Caldwell, a conductor for the Chicago Burlington and Quincy line, was caught pocketing money from onboard ticket sales. In a showcase trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to prison, providing an incredible boon of publicity for Pinkerton.35
At the same time, the Chicago Post Office hired Pinkerton as a special agent, tasked to investigate a series of postal thefts and to check the honesty of its employees. He went undercover in the sorting section, and by sending a decoy letter that appeared to contain large sums of money was able to nab Perry Denniston—who worked as a “piler,” arranging letters so that the addresses could be read easily—in the act of stealing it. Four months later he arrested Denniston’s brother Theodore after finding four thousand dollars stuck to the backs of pictures at his home.36
Pinkerton also had success protecting the post office from external crime. When the owner of a lottery business accused post office employees of stealing payments coming to him, Pinkerton sent another decoy letter, which led to the arrest and confession of an employee of the lottery company.37 The success of these cases made Pinkerton believe wholeheartedly in what he called “discreet or covert surveillance” and promoted his agency’s long-term involvement in spying on workers.38
Rucker left the company after about a year, and under Pinkerton’s sole control, it soon began a meteoric rise. In 1856, he hired George H. Bangs, who had previously been a reporter for The Era and a New York City policeman, serving on the squad detailed to New Y
ork’s Crystal Palace. Bangs proved to be a better administrator than an operative, and eventually became the agency’s general superintendent.39 The year after that Pinkerton made an even more important professional contact, when the Illinois Central hired as its chief engineer the former U.S. Army officer George B. McClellan. He and Pinkerton respected each other, and they remained in contact after McClellan was promoted to vice president of the Illinois Central, and then, in 1860, left to become president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad’s Eastern Division.40
Another acquaintance was the head of the firm serving as the legal consultant for the Illinois Central—Abraham Lincoln. The two again came into contact in early 1861, when—while investigating threats by Southern sympathizers against the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad—Pinkerton became aware of a plot to assassinate the president-elect en route to his inauguration. Pinkerton contacted several of Lincoln’s advisers, and with their help persuaded Lincoln to alter his travel plans. Hard proof of a conspiracy never surfaced, however, and it was later claimed that Pinkerton invented the plot to gain attention for his agency. The truth has never been determined with certainty.41
At the beginning of the Civil War, McClellan was appointed commander of the Department of the Ohio and asked Pinkerton to head an intelligence-gathering system. When later given command of the Army of the Potomac, McClellan instructed Pinkerton to form a secret service for that army. While serving as Major E. J. Allen, Pinkerton provided reports of troop strengths determined both personally and by his operatives.42 Concurrently, his work included counterespionage, the exposure of corrupt contractors, interrogation of deserters and prisoners, and efforts against black-market racketeers. After McClellan was dismissed in 1862, Pinkerton resigned and returned to criminal investigations with his renamed Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.
Pinkerton’s Great Detective Page 3