Twelve Facts about Charlie Siringo.

 

Q: How big was he?

A: By all accounts, he was an appealing little guy around 5 foot four and 130 pounds, whose lifelong habit of lashing out against what he called “bullies” may be traced to growing up a relatively runty frontier kid. As a cowboy, he wore a size 5 boot. William Pinkerton would note, admiringly, that his scrappy detective was “as tough as a pine knot and I never knew a man of his size who can endure as much hardship as he does.”

 

Q: Where did he grow up?

A: On the middle Texas coast, on Matagorda peninsula. Matagorda was where his immigrant parents met, while Charlie’s first job running cattle came when he was twelve, in the spring of 1867, with a man named Faldien. The cattle trails established during this time would eventually bring Charlie to Kansas, where the developing train line would take him to Chicago, “punching” up steers with a long rod from the top of crowded cattle cars.  

 

Q: Being a cowboy with very little schooling, what made him write a book?

A: A combination of factors: barbed wire was ending the cattle trail life he had known; he met a woman in Caldwell, Kansas who inspired him to put on an apron and try working as a merchant; he was about to turn 30 and already missed the cowboy life terribly; and he saw writing a book as a way to make money for his young family. 

 

Q: Was his the very first memoir of the ranching West?

A: No. Before Siringo’s classic A Texas Cowboy, gentleman ranchers and newspaper reporters had written the story of the West. Siringo’s was the first published account seen from the cowboy’s saddle, or “from the hurricane deck of a Spanish pony.”

 

Q: Did he know Billy the Kid?

A: They were acquaintances, from when Billy and some fellow rustlers camped on the ranch where Siringo worked on the Texas panhandle in 1878. The two were close in age and, according to Charlie, played cards, traded Siringo’s new cigar holder for a signed book the Kid was carrying, and may have had a shooting contest, before the outlaws moved on. (There is an appealing but unproven theory that the book the Kid gave Charlie was Don Quixote.) 

 

Q: Was he a gunfighter?

A: No, although he makes frequent reference to his sidearm “Old Colts 45” in his writings, shooting snakes or putting down an old horse. While he was said to be good with a gun –could plug a coyote from the top of a moving stagecoach--he probably never shot anybody, or he would surely have put it in his books. He often escaped from brawls by using his pistol as a club, which was common in the West. 

 

Q: Did a phrenologist actually predict he would become a detective?

A: Charlie tells in several books that a “blind phrenologist” came to Caldwell, Kansas, and declared a bump on Charlie’s head indicated he was too stubborn to be anything but a newspaperman, stock rancher, or detective. According to old newspapers, there were actually two men known as “the blind phrenologist” touring Kansas at this time, so it likely did happen.

 

Q: How did he really become a cowboy detective?

A: After his first book came out, he moved his family to Chicago, possibly to oversee an imagined literary career. Money may have been slow, and, according to him, the Haymarket bombing in that city convinced him to offer his services to the Pinkerton agency to fight anarchists. Charlie had just the skills William Pinkerton was looking for in a cowboy detective for his new Denver offices, where he would send him. 

 

Q: What kind of detective was he?

A: Siringo was a superb tracker and actor, able to infiltrate criminal gangs by “playing outlaw,” and, if necessary, to seduce the sister or common-law wife of the man he was seeking, learning information from their letters. He could make friends in the roughest saloon by buying rounds and telling stories, or befriend bank robbers in a jail cell by posing as a chatty murderer; after several nights, he would leave the jail with his new friends’ confessions. He followed the Wild Bunch for four years and 25,000 miles, romancing Butch Cassidy’s Mormon sister along the way. 

 

 

Q: How reliable are his books as history?

A: His books are superb works of witness, but he is also a storyteller whose writings should be read alongside each other. Surprisingly, they are less reliable when he is telling a story he did not witness than when it is his own first-hand experience: He’ll improve stories that don’t need gilding, such as the lynching of Henry Brown, who failed to rob the Medicine Lodge (Kansas) bank in April 1884. But Charlie tells it straight when it comes to the story of his own shooting, fired upon by a gunman sent by an angry Texas rancher, in 1875. A number of his Pinkerton case histories were also delivered under oath in court. His life of Billy the Kid is his weakest work, since their acquaintance was brief.

 

Q: Why so many autobiographies?

A: Once he retired from detecting, he attempted to write his memoirs of his undercover career, feeling his life was his own, no matter what agreements he’d once signed. After two years in court, he published his redacted but highly enjoyable A Cowboy Detective. But three more autobiographies would follow, drawing more lawsuits, and requiring extra mortgages to enable him to keep fighting to tell his story. He was buried in Hollywood in 1928. 

 

Q: Did he ever appear in a movie?

A: Yes and no. He advised on a couple, one of which is lost. But he does briefly appear in a simulated saloon in William S. Hart’s Tumbleweeds. Old and tanned in a large hat, seeing him seems a flickery miracle.