Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  • • •

  Throughout his career McParland had always been blessed with the strong support of both Pinkerton and Bangs, the agency’s general superintendent. That changed in September 1883, when Bangs died suddenly in Roselle, New Jersey.33 The following July, Pinkerton himself passed away.34 These losses might have inspired McParland to consider an alternative career, as in the 1885 Chicago directory he was not listed as a detective, as usual, but as a “commercial traveler.”35 Of course, that might simply mean that he had actually gone undercover again, or that he was taking on additional jobs. But what can be stated with certainty is that even if he had any serious thoughts about leaving the agency, they were soon set aside due to the persuasion of Pinkerton’s sons, both of whom were as positive about McParland as their father had been.

  The year after Pinkerton died, McParland received an even tougher personal blow. On August 10, 1885, having suffered from consumption for an extended period, Mary Ann died at the age of twenty-four, leaving him a widower with a three-year-old daughter.36 In a state of extreme emotional distress, McParland was saved by an event that occurred only three days later and forced him to think about work rather than just his sorrow.

  Around 2:00 A.M. on August 13, the residents of Columbus, Kansas, were woken “by a terrific explosion which shook every building in the town . . . The court house vault, a brick structure attached to the main building, and by its peculiar construction has long been dubbed the court house ‘bake oven,’ was found to be blown to atoms. . . . It is a wreck that would put to shame the best cyclone invented, as records and papers are torn to shreds, the great vault door blown out and the accumulation of years of the county’s valuable books totally destroyed.”37

  Pinkerton’s was brought in to discover the perpetrators. Leaving Kittie with Charles and his brother’s new wife (also named Mary Ann), McParland proceeded to Columbus, located in the volatile southeast corner of Kansas, only thirteen miles from both its formerly hostile neighbor Missouri and the Indian Territory that would become Oklahoma. McParland’s suspicions quickly fell on two men, Richard Lawton and C. L. Woodruff, whose firm—normally engaged in real estate, insurance, and moneylending—had been making abstracts of the records that had been destroyed, suggesting to the detective that the crime could have been not just for gain but to cover up a misdeed.38

  While McParland was investigating, the records that had survived the explosion were targeted once again. They had been moved into the Register of Deed’s office in a building near the courthouse, and on an extremely cold night in January 1886, a saddle and harness maker who slept above his shop, near the rear of the office, was awoken by smoke. He broke down the door to the office to find flames consuming the records, which had been doused with coal oil. Although he contained the fire, many more volumes were damaged.39

  About three weeks later McParland arrested nine men, who were charged with “making forged mortgages, forged deeds, and the execution of forged papers” in order to cover up fraudulent land transactions.40 Two of them—Lawton and Luther Archer—were also charged with arson. McParland worked a confession from Archer,41 and then convinced one of the others to turn state’s evidence. Most of the accused were convicted, but Lawton was pronounced physically unable to go to trial. Immediately after he was released from jail on bond, he bolted. His bondsman again sought out Pinkerton’s, and McParland, finding that Lawton had traveled to Cincinnati, assigned an operative named Greenfield to shadow him. On the morning of June 24, Lawton was found dead in his bed, having, according to the coroner’s report, died from “paralysis of the heart resulting from fatty degeneration and accelerated by mental depression consequent on business complications.”42

  A month later McParland was brought back into the case when rumors surfaced that Lawton had faked his death. The detective accompanied several Columbus representatives to Lawton’s burial site in Greenville, Ohio, so that they might disinter and identify the body.43

  • • •

  The visits to Columbus were not the Great Detective’s only reasons for being in southeast Kansas. In March 1886, while he was still involved in Columbus, the Knights of Labor—the country’s largest union, which included railroad machinists, trackmen, switchmen, car repairers, engine wipers, coach cleaners, and baggage and freight handlers—went on strike against the Southwest Railroad System controlled by Jay Gould. Perhaps the most reviled and ruthless commercial entrepreneur of the Gilded Age, Gould was also a financial and business genius44 who at times controlled not only the Western Union Telegraph Company, The World newspaper of New York (which he later sold to Joseph Pulitzer), and the elevated railways of New York City, but the largest railroad network in the country, including the Texas & Pacific; the Missouri Pacific; the International & Great Northern; the Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific; the St. Louis & Iron Mountain; and the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railroads. At its height, the system contained more than fifteen thousand miles of track, making it the biggest transportation structure in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, the Indian Territory, and Kansas, while also extending into Louisiana, Nebraska, Colorado, and Illinois.45

  The strike—set off when C.A. Hall, a carpenter in Marshall, Texas, was dismissed after attending a meeting of his local union, despite having received permission—quickly spread throughout Gould’s system,46 with the early days marked by strikers taking over shops and workhouses and doctoring the engines, “making them unfit for service until the missing parts are returned or new ones made.”47 The rail companies quickly employed detectives from both the Furlong Secret Service Company and Pinkerton’s. One of these was McParland, because one of the flashpoints in the strike was Parsons, Kansas, an important railroad junction with a major car repair shop only thirty-five miles northwest of Columbus.

  McParland quickly discovered that Parsons, the largest city of Labette County, was no place for the weak and timid. In the heart of southeast Kansas, it was located in a region that had a remarkable history of mayhem.48 The settlers had experienced conflict with the Cherokee and Osage Indians, been a part of the violence between the “free-soil” and proslavery advocates that created “Bleeding Kansas,” and had seen the murder and pillage of guerrilla warfare during the Civil War. Many of those ruffians found uncontrolled violence suited their temperament in the postwar years, so they continued that life in what was as unbridled a region as any farther west. In the early 1870s western Labette County was the home to the Benders, four serial killers whose well-placed homestead allowed them to rob and murder travelers lured in to what seemed to be a store and inn. The railroads brought their own brand of thieves and outlaws to Labette County, as did the Shawnee Trail, one of the great cattle trails from Texas to Kansas.49

  The rampant violence of the area is demonstrated by a few headlines from a Parsons newspaper in the first half of 1886:

  “Epps in Eternity—The Murderer of Farmer Dobson Taken from Jail and Hanged”

  “A Destroyer of Domestic Happiness Shot Down on the Public Streets”

  “Graham, the Wife-Murderer, Pays the Penalty for His Crime—He Is Taken From Jail by a Mounted Mob and Hanged to the Limb of a Tree”

  “A Brute’s Fate—Arrested for an Outrage and Shot by an Injured Neighbor”

  “Eli Owens Forcibly Taken from Jail, Severely Pummelled and Left to Ornament a Lonely Tree”50

  Yet all this bloodshed was nothing compared to what was allegedly happening in the center of Parsons.51 At that time, a bloodthirsty killer named Jacob McLaughlin owned the sixty-room Grand Central Hotel in Parsons. Men moving along the rails or returning from the cattle sales in Kansas City were entertained there with liquor (which had been constitutionally prohibited in Kansas in 1881), women, gambling, or anything else they wanted. Hopefully they enjoyed it, because afterward, unable to defend themselves in their drunken stupors, they were “chloroformed and robbed” and their bodies “dropped into the basement for burial,” filling up the vast vault benea
th the structure to such an extent that McLaughlin had to import more than three feet of earth to cover the corpses. In another basement room “McLaughlin, and a man who was said to be a big eastern detective used to sell boot-leg whiskey and manufacture counterfeit money.” And that mysterious detective, it was written, was none other than James McParland, “wielding the dagger of assassination in the subterranean tunnels . . . the infamous, heartless detective [who] grinned with delight and gloried in his crime.”

  One might ask how this astounding transformation from detective to butcher and purveyor of pure evil had occurred. And the answer, of course, is that it hadn’t. The author of the defamatory claims was George Shoaf, a sensational journalist who wrote for Appeal to Reason, a weekly socialist newspaper published in Girard, Kansas.52 Shoaf had a passionate hatred for McParland, whom he saw as the epitome of the capitalist abuse of labor, and he and two colleagues at Appeal to Reason—Walter Hurt and P. M. Eastwood—launched an all-out smear-campaign against him.53 This included such pettiness as always referring to him as “McPartland,” an effort to link the detective in the reader’s mind to a much publicized criminal case in which an ex-convict named James McPartland—known by the police as Sharkey the Brute—brutally murdered a woman in front of her bedridden husband.54

  In a series of outrageous yarns, Shoaf created a story of McParland’s involvement at McLaughlin’s Grand Central Hotel, including cleverly expanding their supposed relationship to include more illegal and immoral activities by McParland. Unfortunately, even though there is no indication of any truth in Shoaf’s stories, they have occasionally been accepted as accurate.55

  On the other hand, there is little dispute that McLaughlin was a bad, bad character.56 In the summer of 1885, he and his associate Wash Bercaw were fined for violation of the Kansas liquor prohibition. When they refused to pay they were put in the county jail in Oswego, where another inmate, Frank P. Myers, was awaiting trial for stealing a span of mules. McLaughlin and Bercaw were eventually released on bail, but Myers yo-yoed in and out. In July, the three men broke out, supposedly forcing Myers to accompany them; the next morning, he gave himself up. Myers escaped again later that month but was quickly caught. Then, in early August, he yet again went missing—“this time singularly not a lock, door, or bar was broken, and his cell was locked as securely as it was the night before and it would have required the unlocking of five locks to open it.”57 The following week boys swimming in the Neosho River found his body, and an autopsy confirmed he had been killed before being thrown into the water.

  The next spring, McLaughlin and Bercaw were charged “with taking Myers from the Oswego jail . . . and bringing him to Parsons and strangling him to death.”58 At a preliminary hearing, Frank and George Davis, brothers who had been in the jail at the time, stated that McLaughlin and Bercaw took Myers out of his cell, at which point McLaughlin said: “If you boys say anything about this or tell [jailor] Charlie Wooden your necks will be stretched before morning. We are only taking Myers out to set him free.”59 Further testimony from Mrs. Myers indicated that she saw the clothes Myers had on when he was in jail being worn by bus driver Frank Goultrie, who, in turn, reported that he had obtained them from McLaughlin.

  When McLaughlin went on trial in June 1886, however, the stories had changed. Not only did Goultrie’s brother declare that he had bought the clothes and given them to Frank, but the Davis boys suddenly remembered things differently, claiming that their earlier statements were not true. Questioned intensely, George Davis broke down on the stand and stated “that E.C. Ward, the defendant’s attorney, had agreed to pay him two hundred dollars if he would go on the witness stand and swear that his former statement was a lie. . . . The most singular part of the affair is that Davis claims that his first statement was actually false, but that he was to get the two hundred dollars for admitting that it was untrue instead of standing up and insisting that it was true.”60 The next day, McLaughlin was found not guilty, and the charges against Bercaw were dismissed.

  That was not the end of the matter, however. The judge—commenting, “I never saw such unblushing and shameful perjury as has been flaunted in my face during the past few days”61—appointed a committee to investigate the shenanigans since the preliminary hearing. The Davis brothers were later found guilty of perjury and sent to state prison, and Ward was disbarred.62

  And this is where the accounts of Shoaf and Eastwood incorporated claims that were unconfirmed by any court or newspaper records. First, Shoaf wrote, “Myers was in possession of information about McLaughlin which the latter was afraid would be sprung during some pivotal case. . . . McLaughlin determined to send the fellow to . . . whence no traveler ever returns and so be rid of the nuisance.”63

  Further: “McPartland’s principal business was to shield . . . McLaughlin from punishment for innumerable crimes and misdemeanors ranging in import from gambling, counterfeiting and violation of the state liquor laws to wholesale robbery and cold-blooded murder. In manufacturing evidence to clear McLaughlin from one charge of murder, McPartland was the direct cause of ruining E.C. Ward . . . and, as a result of McPartland’s bribery, two brothers, Frank and George Davis, were sent to the penitentiary . . . But McPartland’s manufactured evidence cleared McLaughlin.”64

  What a story! But it went strictly against the evidence of W. B. Glass and Albert A. Osgood—two of the three members of the committee appointed to investigate. They interviewed Ward, George Davis, Kate McLaughlin, and others, and found that “said testimony, which said Davis said he would and agreed to give was then written down by Ward in the form of an affidavit, which was subscribed by said Davis, and was sworn to by him before R.D. Talbot, a justice of the peace of this county, which affidavit said E.C. Ward retained in his possession.” They concluded that Ward was primarily at fault for the situation and that “information [should] be filed against him for practices unbecoming a gentleman and unworthy of an attorney, with a view of disbarring him from the practice of the profession.”65 Nowhere did their report mention—or hint at—McParland.

  Nor did Shoaf truly address the most obvious questions his story raised: Why would McParland be involved with McLaughlin in the first place? And wasn’t he actually in Parsons to investigate aspects of the railroad strike? But Shoaf would have just laughed, and answered that all one needed to know about McParland was in his other articles. “It is known that he has been instrumental in doing away with heirs-apparent to large fortunes,” he had written, for example. “He has put women beneath the ground at the instigation of their paramours. It is whispered that he has officiated at the birth of several still-born babes in the city of Denver, and that today he levies tribute upon the sons of wealthy men as the price of keeping their secrets . . . amidst all this holocaust of crime and murder, in which he has been an active participant, enough evidence . . . has leaked through his guarded bounds of secrecy to stamp him the greatest and most horrible Gorgon of this monster-bearing age.”66

  Those who believed such things of McParland would have been doubly horrified to know that he was soon to be joined at Pinkerton’s by—according to Shoaf’s term—“Satan’s spawn,” the man who, for the next two decades, would be the Great Detective’s chief troubleshooter.

  CHAPTER 13

  A NEW DETECTIVE IN TOWN

  When McParland returned to Chicago from Kansas, his move was mirrored by that of a small, wiry, extremely confident young Texan. His name was Charles Angelo Siringo, and it would not be long before he crossed paths with McParland. Siringo—whom William Pinkerton once claimed “is as tough as a pine knot and I never knew a man of his size who can endure as much hardship as he does”1—would become McParland’s closest associate, as their careers were intertwined for more than twenty years.

  Charlie Siringo was born on the Matagorda Peninsula on the east coast of Texas on February 7, 1855.2 His father, an Italian immigrant, died when young Siringo was only a year old, leaving him and his two-ye
ar-old sister Catherine to be raised by their Irish mother, Bridgit. He grew up in the region of the Texas coastal plain, with many of his early memories coming from the hard times of the Civil War, including an occupation by the Union army. In 1867, age twelve, Siringo took a job on a ranch as an apprentice cowboy. It was a fateful move, because he was becoming part of a new epoch in American history—that of the cowboy of the Old West.

  At the end of the Civil War, much of Texas was impoverished, with few economic assets other than a seemingly endless supply of longhorn cattle. Despite the growing demand for beef, it was extremely expensive to transport cattle by rail from Texas, and Missouri and Kansas had issued quarantine closures to prevent Texas cattle from bringing in ticks that carried the disease known as Texas fever, which was fatal for Midwestern cattle.3

  It took the vision of Joseph G. McCoy of Illinois to resolve the problem and create a marketing revolution. In the spring of 1867 he convinced officials of the Kansas Pacific Railroad to build a spur to the tiny town of Abilene, Kansas—west of the quarantine area—where he built stockyards, loading stations, and other facilities, thus creating a “cattle hub”: a station to receive Texas cattle and send them east far more cheaply than had hitherto been possible. McCoy advertised widely in Texas, and soon cattle were driven north to Abilene, up what would become known as the Chisholm Trail. By the end of the year McCoy had shipped thirty-five thousand head to eastern markets, and that number doubled each year until 1871, when it reached six hundred thousand.4

  The new procedure was a financial bonanza for ranchers, trailing contractors, cowboys, and shippers, particularly because when longhorns were able to graze and drink their fill while traveling ten to twelve miles a day, they actually gained weight on the trail. Equally as important, it “spawned a new, distinct type of American character—a strong, resourceful man on horseback who took trouble in his stride and changed the face of the prairie.”5