McParland tended to give his operatives more freedom—particularly those he trusted the most, like Siringo and Sayers—than some of the other superintendents did. He was also not averse, like other superintendents, to jumping into an investigation himself or taking it over totally if it interested him. He also was happy to delegate a certain amount of responsibility and didn’t feel the need to micromanage, such as chasing his men for daily reports. This is probably something he learned from his own experiences with the Molly Maguires, when safely sending reports was not always possible. An examination of several intensive operations gives a fuller view not only of McParland’s leadership but of the tasks that, as superintendent, he carried out.
• • •
The events leading to one of his major cases as a superintendent began on a frigid evening in February 1891, in Santa Fe, the capital of the New Mexico Territory. Two men, armed with a rifle and a shotgun, fired through a window of the law offices of Thomas B. Catron, a member of the Territorial Council, or upper legislative house. Joseph Ancheta, another councilor and a powerful figure in the local Republican Party, was severely wounded by the shotgun blast, while Catron was saved only by the stack of legal books and papers that happened to be between him and the window. Meanwhile, a rifle bullet just missed Elias Stover, another high-ranking political figure.
After the Territorial Council offered a reward for bringing in the assassins,9 Governor L. Bradford Prince contacted William Pinkerton, who referred him to McParland. Shortly thereafter McParland assigned Siringo to the case.10 Again using the name Charles T. Leon, the cowboy detective soon found the case featured a remarkably complex set of political, social, religious, and ethnic issues.11 He also learned that no one knew if the target was Ancheta, Catron, or Stover, each of whom had numerous enemies.
The investigation was further complicated by the presence of a secret Hispanic society known as Las Gorras Blancas, or White Caps, for the hoods worn over their faces and their horses’ heads during night raids. Organized by Juan José Herrera, the group was struggling against the expansion of Texas ranchers and other English-speaking settlers, who were claiming pasture lands and water rights long considered common property. The White Caps cut stock fences, burned barns and haystacks, and damaged railway tracks.12 Some also believed that the White Caps were a subset of the Knights of Labor, who had opposed land speculation and fencing in New Mexico.13
Despite not being fluent in Spanish, Siringo was assigned to infiltrate the White Caps. Seeking a way into their group, he built a relationship with Herrera’s brother Pablo and entertained the White Cap leaders with frequent meals, drinks, and cigars.14 His plan worked, and in early April Pablo successfully pushed for his “Gringo friend” to be inducted into the secret order.
Meanwhile, McParland’s role was to maintain a regular correspondence with Prince, in which he kept him informed of Siringo’s movements and findings, explained away any difficulties the operative was facing, badgered the governor for payments, and soothed any worries Prince might have about the operation (so that the lucrative payments would continue).15
Siringo’s admittance to the White Caps did not help him identify a guilty party, however, and when he reported that the group had had nothing to do with the assassination attempt, Prince became unsettled by the lack of return for the high costs.16 This fear was exacerbated when John Gray, the marshal in Santa Fe, found evidence suggesting that the shooters were Victoriano and Felipe Garcia from the mountain village of Cow Springs.17
Siringo headed to Cow Springs and cultivated the friendship of the Garcia brothers, but his investigation slowed to a crawl when he contracted smallpox. “I was swelled up like a barrel, and every inch of my body even to the soles of my feet and the inside of my throat was covered with soars,” he wrote. “In lying so long on my back, these sores had become calloused, but on undertaking to turn over on to the fresh sores so as to try to get up, I would scream with pain and fall over on my back again.”18 He lay at death’s door for two weeks before recovering and then, after confirming the Garcias’ participation, he was suddenly called back to Santa Fe.
Prince had complained about excessive charges by Pinkerton’s ever since Siringo spent forty dollars on a horse and saddle, although McParland assured him that “when the horse is disposed of you will be credited with the amount received.”19 Then, in July, Prince objected to being billed eight dollars per day for the time Siringo was incapacitated with smallpox. McParland responded
I am sorry that I cannot take the same view of this matter that you do. It is true that the Opt has been sick and it is equally true that in the discharge of his duty, in order to obtain the necessary information, it became necessary for him to go into a hot bed of small pox—something that few men would do except Mexicans—: it is also a fact that the very circumstances of his sickness has in my opinion . . . been the cause of his obtaining a great deal of information. . . . There is a doctor’s and druggist’s bill amounting to $51, which has not been charged and as the case is one in which the Opt, through no choice of his own nor choice of the Agency but in discharge of his duty, was forced into a neighborhood where he contracted this loathsome disease, I think that it certainly is right that the Agency is paid for his services during that time and also his expenses. Besides, it is not a case where the Opt, although sick, was lying there idle but . . . was attending to his business even at that time when, from the nature of his disease, almost anyone else would have been thinking of taking a trip to another world.20
Nevertheless, a week later Prince discontinued the investigation. Siringo recommended that the Garcia brothers be arrested, but nothing was done, and the case was closed. To this day it is uncertain whether Prince abandoned the investigation because he believed the Territory was being overcharged or because he was concerned that the Garcia brothers had indeed carried out the attempted assassination, and, as self-proclaimed Republicans, their prosecution would cause problems for the party. Either way, the crime officially remained unsolved, and the identity of the target was never determined with certainty.
An intriguing point about the investigation is what it showed about how McParland’s mind worked. In response to Prince closing the investigation, he replied:
I am sorry, as I do not think it would take much to bring this to a satisfactory conclusion. . . . The circumstances point plainly to who committed the deed and also to the parties who actually instigated it: however, under the condition of affairs, with Knights of Labor and White Caps, it would be difficult to convict anyone of this crowd but I want to say that the time is not far distant when the Territory of New Mexico will be confronted with even graver questions than the attempt to assassinate Senator Ancheta and when this illegal organization of White Caps and of Knights of Labor who claim to be legal, will have to be exposed to the public. . . . The country is certainly in a bad state, although it may not appear so upon the surface, but we have the inside facts. It is true that in all such cases there are a lot of blow hards, who never do anything but talk, but at the same time, they excite other people to commit crime. This was just the case in the Mollie Maguire regime in Pennsylvania: the men who did the most talking and blowing never did anything themselves but they incited others to show the utmost disregard for human life and property and the authorities were almost powerless until it came to the time they had to be annihilated. I consider that the secret society of White Caps is traveling in the same direction.21
One can understand on a basic level why and how McParland would link the White Caps to the Molly Maguires—the use of hoods to mask the identities of violent men conducting “outrages” against agrarian expansion would naturally have smacked of the Irish organization. But beyond that, his past experiences clearly helped dictate how he viewed the present, mainly in making this connection between the White Caps and the Knights of Labor to the Molly Maguires and the AOH. There were also other examples that linked the anthracite region to New Mex
ico: the perceived inability to convict people brought to trial, the attempted assassinations of men due to political or financial differences, and probably even the way that Siringo’s investigation forced him to drink vast amounts of alcohol.
Perhaps most important, McParland’s response showed that there remained indelibly sketched in his mind the notion that there were those who “incited others” to do their dirty work, so that they would not be caught themselves. Once again, here was an inner circle. It would not be the last time he would see organizations and individuals in such a light, and at various points during the rest of his career he would direct his operatives in such a way as to find the small group of villains whom he believed were really pulling the strings.
• • •
Coincidentally, a man notorious for doing others’ dirty work had come under McParland’s own direction in 1890. Born near Memphis, Missouri, in 1860, Tom Horn left home at the age of thirteen. By 1875, he was driving a stagecoach in the New Mexico and Arizona territories, and the next year he became a civilian scout for the Fifth Cavalry.22 In 1885, he was named chief scout for the U.S. Army operation to capture the Apache chief Geronimo, and around 1887 he served as a hired gun in the Pleasant Valley War, an Arizona range conflict. He thereafter bought into a mine and became a star rodeo performer.
In 1890, Doc Shores entered Arizona on the trail of cattle rustlers, and the owner of a ranch where Horn was foreman recommended him as a deputy. Shores described Horn as “a tall, dark-complected man with a mustache . . . an imposing figure of a man—deep chested, lean loined, and arrow straight,” with “black, shifty eyes.”23
The two initially got along very well, and after they caught the cattle thieves, Shores said, “Tom, you ought to go into the law enforcement business. You sure have done a good job for me, and with your background as an Indian scout and understanding of the Mexican lingo, I believe I could get you a job with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. I’m pretty well acquainted with Jim McParland, the superintendent of the Denver office.”24 Horn was enthusiastic about the possibility, so Shores wrote to McParland, who offered Horn a job. However, it did not take Horn long to realize that the Pinkerton’s way was not his own. “My work for them was not the kind that exactly suited my disposition; too tame for me,” he wrote. “There were a good many instructions and a good deal of talk given to the operative regarding the thing to do.”25 Horn took a simpler approach—and even though it was outside the normal protocols, McParland must have appreciated his no-nonsense style, and his unquestioned results.
Before long he had the opportunity to show both, as he and Shores again paired up after the Denver & Rio Grande Railway was robbed. They chased two men from Colorado into New Mexico, Texas, and the Indian Territory, where they caught one in a house in which they had been hiding out. Shores took him back to Denver, while Horn waited for the other to return.26 A few days later, “as he came riding up to the house I stepped out. . . . He was ‘Peg Leg’ Watson, and considered by every one in Colorado as a very desperate character.” Even men as tough as Watson knew Horn’s reputation, however, and “I had no trouble with him.”27
For a couple of years, Horn was engaged in “running down robbers and roping in gangs of toughs . . . to rope in some train wreckers . . . eating, sleeping, drinking, and gambling with ‘tinhorn gamblers’ for the purpose of catching crooked men.”28 He was obviously valued by the agency, because when he was arrested in Nevada for robbing a faro dealer, William Pinkerton himself came to Reno to testify on his behalf, as did McParland’s assistant superintendent, John C. Fraser.29 Horn was found not guilty.
Although Horn claimed he left Pinkerton’s in 1894, it’s more likely that he did so in 1892, when he moved to Wyoming. There he found work as a “stock detective” for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, which was trying to end widespread cattle theft. Horn developed his own style of dealing with rustlers—he killed them. “Killing is my specialty,” he remarked. “I look at it as a business proposition, and I think I have a corner on the market.”30
Siringo worked with Horn more than once and later mentioned that “he had a contract with wealthy cattlemen of Wyoming to murder suspected cattle rustlers. . . . It was understood that whenever a corpse was found with a stone under its head for a pillow, Horn was to be paid six hundred dollars and no questions asked. Horn claimed the stone under the corpse’s head as his ‘private’ brand.”31
Horn continued to work occasionally for Pinkerton’s, which suggests that McParland was willing to look the other way if the right results came in.32 This, of course, followed Allan Pinkerton’s old notion of the ends justifying the means—although Horn apparently took this concept to an extreme.
Even when he was not working for Pinkerton’s, Horn received recommendations from them. In April 1895, for example, Frank Canton, an undersheriff in Pawnee County, Indian Territory, sought help from the agency in finding an escapee from the Wyoming State Penitentiary. William Pinkerton told Canton that he was forwarding his letter to McParland, but noted that, “Tom Horn who used to be with our Denver office would be a good man.” McParland did not mention Horn by name, but wrote: “I know of a man although not working for me but I could recommend him as he formerly did work for me. . . . I can guarantee the man. If he undertakes this matter no better man could be found for the work.”33 Particularly if that work was killing, because, as Siringo noted: “It is said that Horn killed seventeen men since first going to work for the Pinkerton agency.”34
However, that reputation eventually caught up with him, and Horn was arrested and tried for the July 1901 murder of fourteen-year-old Willie Nickell. It has been cogently argued that he was actually innocent of that particular murder but was condemned to death because of a dubious “confession,” unfair trial procedures, and his bragging on the stand, which not only connected him with other crimes but left many of his former employers wondering whom he might implicate next.35 About three years later, McParland said that if Horn had kept his mouth shut, he would have been able to save him.36 Instead, Horn was hanged in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on November 20, 1903.
• • •
Despite his power and reputation—and a strong ego—McParland could also be effective as part of a team rather than having to be the leader. At no time was this better demonstrated than his involvement in one of the most unusual murders of the era.37 On Monday, April 13, 1891, Josephine Barnaby, the widow of a wealthy Providence, Rhode Island, clothier, was visiting Denver with her friend Florence Worrell. That evening, while staying at the home of Mrs. Worrell’s son Ed, they broke open a bottle that had arrived for Mrs. Barnaby through the post several days earlier. The bottle had come in a wooden box with a sliding top on which was stamped LIEBIG’S EXTRACT OF MEAT, and attached to the bottle was a label that read: “Wish you a Happy New Year. Please accept this fine old Whiskey from your friend in the woods.” Thinking it must be from Edward Bennett, a guide they had met in the Adirondacks, the women had a drink. Within ten minutes they were both feeling extremely sick, and it soon became apparent they had been poisoned. Although Mrs. Worrell recovered, Mrs. Barnaby died on April 19 after days of intense pain.
Mrs. Barnaby’s son-in-law was the wealthy Montana mining magnate John Howard Conrad, and he swore that he would spare no expense in hunting down the killer. Virtually immediately he determined that man was Thomas Thatcher Graves, Mrs. Barnaby’s physician and business adviser. Conrad had no love for Graves, who a few years before had convinced Mrs. Barnaby to contest her husband’s will, which had left her very little but large amounts to her two estranged daughters. She gained a huge settlement in the resulting litigation, in part at the expense of the Conrads. Although Conrad’s own wealth made the loss insignificant, he had not forgiven either her or Graves.
Conrad approached Pinkerton’s about investigating the murder, which it did “commencing at Denver and extending East throughout the New England States.”38 Eventually, both
the Denver and Boston offices were involved, although the eastern press tended to lay the success of the investigation at the door of John Cornish, the superintendent in Boston, and his assistant superintendent, Orinton M. Hanscom.39 Much of this credit was due to Cornish’s unabashed self-promotion, the extent of which is shown by Robert Pinkerton’s response to one publication: “[Y]ou will note from this article that J.C. is throwing a few bouquets at himself.”40
It is unclear whether Conrad asked Pinkerton’s to investigate the murder or to investigate Graves, but he was the prime suspect from the beginning, particularly as he received twenty-five thousand dollars in Mrs Barnaby’s will. He was tall, distinguished, and charming, and had risen to the rank of major during the Civil War, when he had been a staff officer under Major General Godfrey Weitzel, whose XXV Corps first occupied Richmond. Graves was selected to be in the party accompanying Abraham Lincoln when he entered the fallen capital in April 1865, and he became known for his elegant written description of the president’s visit.41 After the war, Graves graduated from Harvard’s medical school, and later settled in Providence, where he met Mrs. Barnaby and eventually progressed from physician to confidant and adviser.
An autopsy showed that Mrs. Barnaby had died from poisoning by arsenite of potassium. According to J. A. Sewall, who led the postmortem, a chemical study of the bottle’s contents indicated “it contained arsenic, alcohol and other ingredients. Twenty-one per cent about was alcohol. Nearly 2 ½ per cent was arsenic. . . . The entire bottle contained 132 grains of this poison, about 11 grains to the ounce.” Two grains would have been a fatal dose. “I may also add that the person who mixed the solution was no novice,” Sewall stated. “He, or she, knew how to prepare it so that the largest amount of arsenic could be kept in solution.”42
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