Pinkerton’s Great Detective
Page 30
Using the name Lee R. Davis, Siringo worked at Treadwell for three weeks before determining that the robbers were Charlie Hubbard and Hiram Schell, two mill hands who had quit work, bought a schooner, and disappeared in the waterways near Juneau. Siringo was then joined by W. B. Sayers, one of McParland’s most talented and dedicated horseback trackers, whose investigations included many exploits in the badlands and barren, rocky regions of the West. While Siringo was feigning an accident so that he could leave the mill without engendering suspicion, Sayers happened to see a trim schooner come into Juneau. Before she left the next morning he had a conversation with the two men sailing her, who turned out to be Hubbard and Schell. While chatting, he discovered that they had just come from the west coast of Admiralty Island, and although he did not find out exactly where they were heading, he suspected it was the same area.
The two cowboys bought a forty-foot canoe “painted all the colors of the rainbow,” added a sail, and loaded up with Canadian rye whiskey. “The main object in taking the whisky along was to pass ourselves off as whisky peddlers among the Indians, and as bait for Schell and Hubbard in case we found them.”6 One day, while following the route that local Native Americans indicated the thieves had taken, the two detectives decided to take a rest, and they paddled toward a small, black island. Suddenly, they realized the island was actually a whale, and Siringo, ignoring Sayers’s warning, ill-advisedly engaged in big-game hunting. He fired a shot, but it proved ineffective—and worse—as he later acknowledged: “The bullet hadn’t more than struck him when I wished I had taken my partner’s advice. He went around and around with the rapidity of a cyclone, churning the water into a foam, the waves reaching our canoe. Then straight down he went, leaving a hole in the water. This hole filling up again, sucked us toward it, and I imagined I could see Hades at the bottom of the hole.”7
Fortunately they were able to escape and continue with their manhunt. After sailing and paddling about six hundred miles, they found the men. The glib Siringo soon convinced them that he and Sayers were experts on assaying gold and that they had gone there to make their fortune. The liquor enticed Hubbard to visit their camp regularly, and the four soon became, on the surface, the best of friends. After several weeks, desperate to know how to deal with their stolen gold, Hubbard confessed to the crime and offered to pay Siringo and Sayers to melt it down. Not knowing where the gold was hidden, the detectives had to go through a charade of Siringo returning to Juneau to buy clay to build a furnace as well as chemicals and other materials to melt the gold. At the same time, he arranged for a U.S. marshal to station himself not far from the camp.
Before long, the four started melting the gold into ingots, and when the others went to bed one night, Siringo sneaked out of camp to fetch the marshal. They returned the next morning and arrested the thieves. Hubbard, outraged, walked up to Siringo, and, “looking me square in the face said: ‘Davis, how in h—l can you ever face the public again, after the way you have treated me?’ I laughed and told him that . . . my conscience wouldn’t bother me on that score.”8
Siringo also worked again with Doc Shores and relieved Tom Horn on one assignment, but he partnered up with Sayers more than anyone else. At one stage he missed going with Sayers on what he thought would be the trip of a lifetime. Siringo had been working on an ore-stealing case in Salt Lake City, and for three weeks had been receiving letters from McParland telling him to finish quickly, as he was needed in Denver. Fearing he would be assigned to another “tramp operation,” Siringo responded that certain work couldn’t be hurried. He could have finished the job two weeks before he actually did, but “I didn’t believe in dropping a good thing so long as it could be held onto without injuring the Agency.”9 When Siringo finally returned to Denver, “Mr McParland informed me that my friend, W.B. Sayers, had started two days before for New York City, there to ship for London, England, to meet our clients, and from there go to South Africa to work up a big ore-stealing case. . . . Robt A Pinkerton had selected me for the operation and had been waiting on me for nearly a month, but that the clients got tired of waiting, and then Sayers was detailed to go. He was allowed to take along another operative, Harry Akin, to help him. My bones ached for a week on account of losing this trip.”10
• • •
Throughout this period, McParland and his wife, Mary, led quiet lives, focusing on work, church, and family. Once lean and muscular, McParland could now better be described as “stocky,” and he sported a heavy mustache, but was otherwise clean-shaven, with a complete lack of sideburns. His health was not particularly good. His assistant superintendent, J. C. Fraser, wrote years later: “Mr McParland is anything but a strong man. Ever since he had the typhoid fever [in 1892], he is easily alarmed over any spell of illness he may have.”11 One thing that certainly was problematic was his eyesight, which had been poor even during his time in Schuylkill County. In 1895, he suffered from what was diagnosed at the time as choroiditis, and he had an operation that seemed to improve the condition.12 It has also been claimed that he was a very heavy drinker, but—although certainly a distinct possibility since he had been during his Molly Maguire days and the supplement to his History of Detectives form suggests his drinking issues had continued—there is no firm proof that it was the dominant feature that it has been portrayed to be.13
Although lacking children of his own, McParland remained close to his brothers and their families, most notably Charles, who went into the real estate business and long remained in the house on Menomonee Street. Not long after Charles’s wife, Mary Ann, died, the widower rediscovered Emma Schoepple, an old flame from his time in Schuylkill County. In September 1893, they were married, the same year that Edward married his wife, Frances, in Colorado, shortly after she had immigrated from Ireland. Within the next few years Charles and Emma had two children—Charles’s fifth and sixth—John and Kittie, the latter of whom would become an important part of McParland’s life in Denver. Sadly, Emma died of cardiac collapse in May 1898, at the age of only thirty-eight.14
In 1897, James and Mary acquired, in a sense, another family member, when Eneas McParland, the second son of James’s older brother Frank, moved in with them. Born in 1872 in Charleston on the South Island of New Zealand, Eneas worked at an early age as a storeman at his father’s store and bakery in the nearby town of Cobden. He moved with the family to Wellington in 1895, where he worked as a baker.15 But he was a bit of a wild lad, and, hoping to calm him and instill a sense of responsibility, Frank sent him to live with his uncle James. The two hit it off famously, giving McParland the closest he would ever have to a son. Eneas soon found a good job as a mail agent for the Globe Express Company, and he lived with his uncle and aunt until 1899, the year that, after living at seven different addresses since he had moved to Denver, McParland bought a house at 1256 Columbine, where he and Mary would remain the rest of his life.16
McParland seemed to have had an instinctive understanding of how to use the popular press, and in the days before such things as regular press conferences were held, he would still call together the reporters from the newspapers that he thought would be most helpful (and positive) and give “a little something to the press” in order to make sure they distributed the information that he wanted made known.17 He was also known to leak developments to friendly reporters on a more personal level, sometimes doing so on the condition that he could go over the story before it was submitted.18 This meant that he essentially was able to vet numerous newspaper articles that mentioned ongoing developments in his investigations, and also that he was presented positively in regard to assessments of cases, views on crime, financial donations to charities, and contributions to other good causes.
Among those good causes or associations, McParland was “a strong advocate of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks”—the highly respected American fraternal organization—and was extremely active in “any undertaking to further the interests of the Church.”19 M
ary also participated in many charitable causes, particularly Church-related ones.
At times McParland even was able to link charity and crime. In January 1898, he was the guest speaker at a “conference of charities and corrections” in Colorado Springs. “After a number of discussions along the line of caring for discharged convicts,” a newspaper account summarized, “Governor Adams arose and stated that he would give $100 toward the starting of a Prisoners’ Aid Society. . . . Among those who spoke in favor of the Prisoners’ Aid Society were . . . W. H. Conley, warden of Arapahoe county jail, and Superintendent McParland of the Pinkerton detective agency. The latter gentleman . . . said that convict labor should be employed and that they must also be given instruction. He was opposed to the system of contract labor.”20
It was somewhat ironic that proposing such a society thereafter led Colorado governor Alva Adams to be portrayed as “soft on crime,” because less than two months later, on March 14, 1898, he, Wyoming governor William A. Richards, and Utah governor Heber Wells decided to pull out all stops to exterminate outlaws in the region. The three agreed on “a concerted action by the three states . . . to break up the infamous ‘Robber’s Roost’ gang which has been terrorizing portions of the three states for the past two years. In all probabilities the work will be done by special officers.”21 The original thinking was that those “special officers” would be men sworn in for this particular purpose, or would be bounty hunters paid to curtail the criminal activity. Ultimately, however, the efforts focused on the members of one gang, and many of those seeking them would be McParland’s operatives, including Siringo, Sayers, and Shores. Their quarry: the violent gang of bank and train robbers most often known as the Wild Bunch and led by Butch Cassidy.
• • •
It was in 1866, the year before McParland moved to the United States, that Robert LeRoy Parker was born to a hardworking Mormon family in the remote Circle Valley of Utah’s southwest quadrant.22 As the oldest of fourteen children, Parker went to work early, being hired at the age of thirteen at a nearby ranch, where he began his lifelong relationship with horses: “stealing them, raising them, racing them, and selling them—and eventually escaping on them with other people’s money.”23 He also fell under the spell of a hand named Mike Cassidy, who taught the youngster how to shoot and rebrand stray cattle, and whose last name Parker would eventually take on.
It wasn’t long before Parker had his first brush with the law, although it appears to have been more of a misunderstanding than anything else. Having ridden into town to buy a pair of overalls, he found the general store closed, and not wanting to have come so far for nothing, he searched out a way into the building. He went through the shelves and found the clothing he wanted, then wrote a note to the store owner, leaving his name, telling him what he had done, and promising to be back soon to pay him. The owner did not take this arrangement in the best of spirits, however, and reported Parker to the town marshal, although the matter was eventually settled without Parker receiving any jail time.
At the age of eighteen Parker moved to the mining town of Telluride in southwest Colorado, taking along twenty horses that likely had been stolen by a friend and he had been paid to drive over the border, where they would fetch a good price. He had started down the path he would follow the rest of his life.
Parker seems to have drifted through Wyoming and Montana during the next three years. At some point in 1887 he returned to Telluride, where he met Matt Warner, another Mormon cowboy who had proven adept at both stealing horses and racing them. There was an instant rapport between the two, and that summer, after a horse race in Cortez, Colorado, Warner introduced Parker to Tom McCarty, an experienced horse thief. The three were looking for easy ways to make money, and although Parker and Warner both worked occasionally as cowboys and horsebreakers, they knew they were never going to get rich that way, so they turned their eyes toward other folks’ property. There are stories that the three were involved in the robbery of the eastbound Denver & Rio Grande passenger train near Grand Junction, Colorado, in November 1887, but nothing was ever proved. What does seem certain, however, is that in March 1889, either Warner and McCarty or Warner and Parker robbed the First National Bank of Denver, taking twenty-one thousand dollars after having threatened to blow the building up with nitroglycerin.
That was just the start. Three months later the trio and a fourth man held up the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride. They rode out of town shooting their revolvers to intimidate anyone who might be about. That did not stop the local sheriff from forming a posse and following them, but the bandits managed to evade capture due to having organized in advance a relay of horses along their route. Eventually they reached Brown’s Park, the thirty-five-mile-long valley on the Utah-Colorado border through which the Green River runs. That it was exceptionally isolated made the park “a popular hiding place for stolen stock” and it “became a general hangout for rustlers and eventually outlaws of all kinds.”24
Thinking they were safe, the outlaws settled down to rest at a mountain cabin belonging to a friend of Warner’s. But within days they discovered that they had been followed as far as the friend’s nearby ranch, so, according to Warner, they raced down to a new hideout in record time, riding by night and hiding by day.25 The new place was Robbers Roost—a location even more remote than Brown’s Park. Located in the high desert of southeast Utah, Robbers Roost was a desolate, barren region of deep canyons, sheer cliff walls, and countless mesas. The extreme summer heat, general dearth of water, and twisting gorges that ended in unassailable rock faces made it nearly impossible for lawmen to hunt down their prey. And here Parker and his friends waited out their pursuers.
Now a wanted man, some time the next year Parker started using the alias George Cassidy. He also spent some of his ill-gotten gains on a ranch in the dry, sagebrush region near Dubois, Wyoming. An honest living did not hold his attention for long, however, and eventually he moved north to Johnson County, a center for both cattle ranching and cattle and horse rustling. As the large ranchers had difficulty getting court judgments against stock thieves, it was just the place for Cassidy, and he purchased about six hundred acres on Blue Creek, some ten miles from another favorite hiding place for criminals, called Hole-in-the-Wall.
For a while, Cassidy ran a round-trip transportation business in which he took horses stolen in South Dakota to Utah. After selling them he used part of the proceeds to buy horses stolen in Utah, which he drove back to the Dakotas. In 1891, he met up again with Warner and McCarty, and that summer the three only just escaped after being seen by a party of range riders armed with Winchester repeating rifles and hired to put an end to rustling. Leaving behind the fifty or so head they had gathered, they split up and somehow managed to outrun the larger party and avoid the potshots taken at them. Things could have been worse, as it was only the next year that the Wyoming Stock Growers Association brought in a party of forty-six ranch owners, stock detectives, and hired gunmen to kill rustlers and other “undesirables,” in what became known as the Johnson County War.26
In 1892, Cassidy, by this time going by the nickname “Butch,”27 was arrested for possession of a stolen horse, one of three that he claimed he had purchased from a cowboy named Billy Nutcher. The trial was postponed, and a year later he was acquitted. But that same week a second complaint was registered, alleging the theft of another of those three horses. Again the trial was delayed, and Cassidy left the state. But in 1894 he returned for the trial; he was convicted and sentenced to two years in the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Laramie. He served about eighteen months before being released in the middle of winter, January 1896. The first thing he did was head straight to Brown’s Park to find Warner. There Cassidy fell in with two other minor criminals: Elzy Lay, an Ohio-born counterfeiter,28 and Henry “Bub” Meeks, a Wyoming Mormon looking for excitement. They were going to get more than any of them bargained for.
• • •
The event that started a new phase in Cassidy’s career of crime was the arrest of Matt Warner and two other men for the murder of a pair of prospectors who they had tried to frighten off a claim. Warner had no money for a lawyer and asked Cassidy for help. In response, on a hot afternoon in August 1896, Butch, Lay, and Meeks robbed the bank in Montpelier, Idaho, of an amount estimated between $5,000 and $16,500.
It was a classic job. Shortly before closing time, the three robbers rode up to the bank, and while Meeks watched over the horses, Cassidy and Lay pulled their bandannas over their faces, drew their pistols, and entered the bank. Ordering everyone against the wall, Butch stood near the door and covered them while Lay told A. N. McIntosh, the assistant cashier, to give him all the money. When McIntosh said there were no bills, Lay smacked him on the forehead with his pistol, which angered Cassidy, who ordered him not to hit the clerk again. McIntosh then forked the cash over, little realizing that Cassidy’s comments were the first noted instance of an attitude that would—years later—contribute to his portrayal as a Robin Hood–type figure. He was, it would be said, a happy-go-lucky rogue who stole from banks and railroads, but not from common people, and one who chose not to engage in violence—including not killing anyone until late in his career.29
Whether that assessment is accurate or not, for the time being, Cassidy waited inside the bank, allowing Lay to walk calmly outside and tie the sacks with the money onto the horses. Butch then warned everyone not to leave the bank for 10 minutes, and the three men rode off. Quickly pursued, they again made an effective escape due to having stashed fresh horses partway to the Wyoming state line. They then headed to Robbers Roost, where they spent the autumn and winter. Warner, meanwhile, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to five years in the Utah Penitentiary.