But the twins would have little wool to weave before the censor reappeared in 1851. Newtonians called the ensuing decade the “Hungry Forties” as the woolen industry suffered a severe depression. While northern English cities such as Bradford, Rochdale and Leeds produced flannel more cheaply than their Welsh rivals, the wealthy manufacturers in Newtown continued to increase the rent of the weavers’ cottages.
So while the author Samuel Lewis might have been charmed by what he found in Newtown in 1849, he probably saw only what the town’s officials wanted him to see. He made no mention in his book of the poverty, the inequality, the squalid living conditions endured by hundreds of the town’s inhabitants or the regular cholera outbreaks that swept through Newtown.
John Lewis died in the winter of 1850 at the age of seventy-three. He was laid to rest on December 2, and the burial record stated that he had been living with his family above the White Lion public house in Penygloddfa. Perhaps it was cholera that claimed him, or maybe just the ravages of time and toil. Whatever the reason, his demise threw the Lewis family into turmoil. Approximately six miles to the southwest was the Newtown workhouse, dubbed the “Bastille” by locals, who likened its high walls and barred windows to the infamous French prison. It was home to 350 wretched paupers, and Elizabeth Lewis was determined that she and her family wouldn’t add to the numbers. The fifty-year-old mother of six found work as an assistant in a grocer’s store on Commercial Street, took in a lodger and secured a position for seventeen-year-old Thomas as a junior clerk with a Newtown attorney.
When the census taker returned in 1851 he found the Lewis family well situated. One of the twins, twenty-five-year-old George, had emigrated to the United States, and the other, Arthur, had also left home, though he hadn’t headed west with his brother. Richard, twenty-three, was a groom, Thomas a clerk, and fifteen-year-old Matthew a schoolboy. The only one of the six brothers who seemed unsure of what to do with himself was twenty-year-old Pryce. He told the census taker he was a flannel weaver, but Mrs. Lewis must have sighed at the description.
She knew Pryce was the most gifted of her brood. He had excelled at the school he attended in a room above the Green Tavern in Ladywell Street. The teacher, Edward Morgan, was also the innkeeper of the tavern, but he never touched a drop hence his nickname, “the teetotaler.” He was a good teacher, but Pryce was also a good learner, a boy with a boundless curiosity, a robust humor and a love of reading. He could be a little opinionated, but that was offset by his abundance of charm.
The aimless Pryce continued to test his mother’s patience well into the 1850s. At some point Matthew Lewis joined George in America, and Richard headed to London to learn the butcher’s trade, but Pryce remained in Newtown. One can only speculate why he stayed in this remote rural town while one by one his brothers broadened their horizons. Perhaps it was a love affair, or perhaps Pryce was the son who didn’t wish to desert his mother. Elizabeth Lewis was clearly a remarkable woman; tough (not only did she survive six labors, but none of her children died young, a rare accomplishment in working-class Victorian Britain) but intelligent, resourceful and resilient. She was a survivor, and though in some measure she passed on her genes to all her children, it was Pryce who most inherited his mother’s vigorous character.
But in the early summer of 1856 Pryce decided it was time to fly the family nest. He was now twenty-five, and life was passing him by. George and Matthew were well settled in America—both in Connecticut but leading separate lives—and an increasing number of Newtonians were making the trip across the Atlantic in search of a better life. A great many ended up in Blackinton, near North Adams in western Massachusetts, trading an ailing woolen industry for a burgeoning one. But Pryce Lewis had no intention of working in one of Blackinton’s many woolen factories, grinding out long hours for low pay. He saw America as the opportunity to start afresh, create a new identity for himself, one that was more purposeful than the dreary existence he had hitherto led in Newtown.
In May 1856, Pryce Lewis kissed his mother good-bye. Through the tears and the hugs there would have been whispered promises of return, but neither would have been fooled. Elizabeth Lewis was in her late fifties, while her son was embarking on a voyage fraught with peril. In just the first two months of 1856 three ships, each crammed with excited emigrants, had perished in the pitiless Atlantic. The largest of the three, a clipper ship called the Driver, had sailed from Liverpool bound for New York on February 12 with 370 passengers and crew. Somewhere en route it sank to the bottom of the ocean.
The name of the ship on which Lewis sailed from Liverpool in May 1856, is unknown but it wasn’t the Thornton, which departed the same month and arrived safely six weeks later. But as there was a rich diversity of emigrants on board the Thornton, so there would have been on Lewis’s vessel. Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English, a few Scandinavians, the odd German. They were young and old, male and female, mainly poor. The Thornton’s passengers included farmers and masons, carpenters and clerks, makers of dresses and makers of shoes, a confectioner, a milliner and a dozen or more laborers. Different trades but the same dream: a new life in America.
In the final hours before their ship sailed, passengers would spend the last of their pence on a hot meal of the best possible quality, for during the next few weeks they would have to survive on a diet of stale bread, bad meat and a foul, watery soup.
Then came the harrowing moment of departure, in many cases the eternal severance of a familial bond. A reporter for the Illustrated London News witnessed one such moment in 1850. “As the ship is towed out, hats are raised, handkerchiefs are waved, and a loud and long-continued shout of farewell is raised from the shore, and cordially responded to from the ship. It is then, if at any time, that the eyes of the emigrants begin to moisten … the most callous and indifferent can scarcely fail, at such a moment, to form cordial wishes for their pleasant voyage and safe arrival.”
The last link to be severed between the emigrants and their previous life was the tow boat’s rope. Once that was gone, it was out into the open sea and a voyage of discomfort and, more often than not, rank terror. Sixteen years before Pryce Lewis sailed for New York, a thirty-year-old Charles Dickens had undergone a similar journey. Dickens was then at the height of his powers, but when he found himself in a mid-Atlantic storm he would have willingly traded all his fame and wealth for the security of dry land. “The laboring of the ship in the troubled sea on this night I shall never forget,” he wrote in his account of his American odyssey. “Thunder, lightning, hail and rain, and wind, are all in fierce contention for the mastery … every plank has its groan, every nail its shriek, and every drop of water in the great ocean its howling voice … Words cannot express it, thoughts cannot convey it. Only a dream can call it up again, in all its fury, rage and passion.”
But Dickens survived, as did Lewis, who must have stood on deck and witnessed his new home take shape before his eyes. Perhaps Lewis had read Dickens’s American Notes and was familiar with the author’s description of his first glimpse of America resembling “little molehills from the green sea.” But perhaps Lewis’s memory failed him at such a fantastic moment, and instead he just gawked with his fellow passengers. There before them was the United States of America, a young and dynamic country with so much more to offer than jaded, bitter, played-out Britain. There one needed money and influence to succeed, but in America all men were created equal.
*Parish records show that Pryce Lewis was baptized on February 13, 1831, and although his exact birth date was not recorded, his birth year in the 1841 census was given as 1831.
C H A P T E R T W O
“A Detective! Me?”
PRYCE LEWIS ARRIVED IN AMERICA with only his leather valise. He was twenty-five years old, a good age to begin again. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, except he knew he wanted nothing to do with the burgeoning community in Massachusetts that was intent on re-creating Welsh life in a little plot of northeast America. He hadn’t crossed an ocean for
that. Nor was Lewis particularly attracted by Connecticut and the prospect of building a life alongside his two brothers: thirty-year-old George, who now had a family of his own, and lived in Torrington; and twenty-year-old Matthew, who resided in Litchfield, six miles south of his brother. Matthew was working and living on a farm owned by the Hoig family, James and Eliza and their three young children. Nonetheless Pryce traveled to Connecticut and caught up with George and Matthew. Doubtless there were letters to pass on from their mother, and gossip, too, of dear friends and old sweethearts.
While browsing a Connecticut newspaper one day, Pryce saw an employment notice that took his fancy. The London Printing and Publishing Company was soliciting responsible men to sell its publications across the country. As instructed in the notice, Pryce mailed a letter to Samuel Brain at the company’s headquarters in New York, and received in return further information along with a catalog of its books.
He was asked to attend an interview with Mr. Brain at the company’s office on Dey Street. The well-read Lewis got the job and for nearly two years sold the books of the London Printing and Publishing Company throughout northeastern America. The job entailed a lot of traveling, endless hours on the railroad, so Lewis became intimately acquainted with his employer’s products: he was an expert on the British problems in India thanks to Charles Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny, and he became something of a grammarian after plowing through Thomas Wright’s Universal Pronouncing Dictionary and General Expositor of the English Language: Being a complete literary, classical scientific, biographical, geographical and technological standard. But the book he liked best was the company’s most recent acquisition, Henry Tyrrell’s three volumes of the History of the War with Russia: Giving full details of the operations of the Allied Armies.
The Crimean War of 1854–56 had captured the imagination of the British people, and the Victorians had appropriated the war for themselves. The roles of France and the Ottoman Empire in helping to defeat the Russian forces had been all but dismissed. In their place was Florence Nightingale, “the Lady with the Lamp,” as the Times of London christened the nurse whose devoted care had alleviated the suffering of the wounded British soldiers, along with the glorious and futile cavalry charge during the Battle of Balaclava, immortalized in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Within weeks of the poem’s publication in 1855, there were few people in Britain unable to recite it by heart. Henry Tyrrell’s three volumes might have been less florid than Tennyson’s poem, but running to nearly 1,100 pages they were considerably more substantial. Pryce Lewis devoured them with gusto as he traveled through Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa and as far west as the Mississippi River.
But by the spring of 1859, Lewis had grown tired of this job and its monotonous routine. He quit and moved to Chicago, where he found employment as a clerk in a grocery store run by David Erskine and his wife, Grace. David Erskine was a thirty-six-year-old Scot who, before coming to America, had lived in the West Indies, where two of his three children were born. Lewis lasted a year with Erskine, but by early 1860 his feet were feeling restless. It was nearly four years since he’d left Wales, yet here he was, twenty-nine years old, a grocery clerk in a small Chicago store. Hardly the life he’d imagined when he crossed the ocean.
And yet all around him in Chicago there was tantalizing evidence of what was possible, the rewards on offer for those immigrants who embraced their new home with both hands. Since 1840 the population of Chicago had ballooned from 4,450 to 109,260. In 1842 it had been just a dirty dot on the shores of Lake Michigan, too insignificant for Charles Dickens, whose extensive itinerary had stretched from Lake Erie in the North to Richmond in the South. But by 1860 Chicago was a booming city, the economic epicenter of northwest America. The Illinois and Michigan Canal connected Lake Michigan to the Mississippi and enabled Chicago to overtake St. Louis as the wheat industry’s major transporter, but it was the railroads that transformed the city. The first railroad had arrived in Chicago in 1848 (the Galena & Chicago Union), but twelve years later there were fifteen, and with the trade the companies also brought development. The railroads purchased large tracts of land on which to build their lines, but they also constructed breakwaters and dikes to prevent the routes being flooded by Lake Michigan. Safe from the threat of inundation, more companies constructed factories and warehouses—some as high as six stories—and effluence no longer flowed through the streets of Chicago.
Lewis was anxious to accomplish something in Chicago, not just for the financial enrichment, but because he yearned for a little adventure in his life. Then one day he read in one of the city’s seven daily newspapers of the Pike’s Peak gold rush of 1859; not long after, the city began swelling with returning “Fifty-Niners,” who brought back tales of the riches to be had in the gold regions of Pike’s Peak country, a hostile expanse of territory that stretched from southwestern Nebraska to western Kansas.
Lewis listened to their stories and decided he’d try his luck in the summer of 1860. He gave his notice at Erskine’s grocery store, and to all his friends who asked, he told them he was heading west to mine for gold. “Pike’s Peak or bust!” he boomed, repeating the slogan of the day.
Shortly before he was due to leave Chicago Lewis encountered a man he had met during his days as a traveling salesman. The last time he’d seen Mr. Charlton was in Detroit, where they’d passed an agreeable few hours discussing literature, the Crimea, America and a host of other topics. Charlton never forgot a face, and when he passed Pryce Lewis in the street he pumped his hand and asked how he was doing. When Lewis told him of his intention, Charlton looked aghast.
Don’t believe the miners’ stories, he advised Lewis, they were nothing more than fiction fueled by a combination of powerful liquor and wounded pride. There was barely any gold to be had in Pike’s Peak, and what little there was had long since been mined. Disease and deprivation were all that lay out West, said Charlton, who then invited Lewis for a drink.
For a while they swapped small talk, until Charlton leaned in a little closer and told Lewis his boss was on the lookout for good men. Lewis realized that Charlton had never revealed what line of work he was in. Now he did. Charlton lowered his voice and told Lewis he was a detective. What’s more, he reckoned Lewis could be one too. Lewis laughed. “A detective! Me?”
Charlton nodded, and explained that not only was it an easy profession to master, but the pay was pretty good. Lewis balked at the idea. He couldn’t imagine himself as a detective. Charlton persisted, and a couple of hours later Lewis was standing before Charlton’s superior, George Henry Bangs.
Bangs was the deputy head of the detective agency, and like Lewis he was twenty-nine. They also shared a similar prepossessing physique, but Bangs sported an abundant salt and pepper beard that compensated for the hair he lacked on top. He invited Lewis to take a seat, offered him a coffee, then asked to hear a little bit of his background. As Lewis talked Bangs scrutinized his face and head as he did with every potential employee. It was orders from the boss, the head of the agency, who was a firm believer in the science of phrenology.
In the mid-nineteenth century it was widely believed that a person’s intelligence and character could be deduced from the examination of the shape and size of the skull. The larger the head, so the phrenologists believed, the more intelligent the person, while the stouter the torso, the more stupid one was. When Bangs’s boss underwent a “Phrenological Description” in Chicago by Professor O. S. Fowler, the good professor concluded in his expensive report that the detective chief’s dominant characteristics were “earnestness, enthusiasm, heartiness, whole-souledness, impetuosity and excitability … your name ought to be ‘whole soul’ because you throw so much soul into everything you do.”
In fact the chief’s name was Allan Pinkerton, and it was he who had the final say on whether Pryce Lewis became the latest recruit to the detective agency he’d established ten years earlier. Bangs would have given Pinkerton a detail
ed physical account of Lewis, as well as describing his intelligence, his deportment and his initiative. He would also have mentioned something of Lewis’s life in Wales, and this was probably as important to Pinkerton as anything else in deciding whether or not to hire Lewis.
Allan Pinkerton was an exceptional man with many admirable qualities. He was brave, physically and morally; he was loyal, diligent and hardworking. He could be generous, thoughtful, and to the oppressed he was a staunch supporter. But Pinkerton also had his flaws. He was insecure, dogmatic, humorless and authoritarian, a man who saw the world through a narrow prism. People were either good or bad; he lacked the nuance of mind to grasp the complexities of human nature. So his munificence extended only to those who yielded to his iron will; to those who crossed him—even if they were justified in doing so—he bore a lifetime of malice. Allan Pinkerton had another outstanding trait: his moral ambiguity. He told the truth only when it suited him; when it didn’t, he lied.
Pinkerton was born in the Gorbals district of Glasgow on July 21, 1819, the fourth (though second surviving) son of fifty-two-year-old William and his second wife, Isabella. Allan later claimed his father had been a policeman, but he was nothing of the sort; William Pinkerton made his living as a handloom weaver until he lost his job not long after Allan’s birth. Unlike many of his former workmates, William found further employment as a warder in a Glasgow jail, a position he held until his death in the early 1830s.
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