It’s not an easy history to recite, given that at one time the Pinkertons were the cause of a great amount of heartache in American history. But the fact is, there’s a interesting and admirable past to America’s first detective agency.
Few folk
s know that the privately-owned Pinkerton Detective Agency was the only law in some some parts of the American West. Take California for instance, after the Mexican-American war when it was hardly an American territory and a still a long way from becoming a state.
Even fewer people are aware that at one point the Pinkerton Agency employed more agents than there were individuals in America’s standing army. So much it’s said that Ohio at one point outlawed the Pinkertons over fears that it might be hired as a standing Army.
Fact is, with everything said and done, the Pinkerton’s served a solid purpose. Providing security to gold shipments and stage coaches, investigating kidnappings and robberies, serving as rail road agents, town sheriffs, posses and policemen, the Pinkerton years are a rich part of American history.
In the third book in the Ronin series of Westerns, we’ll read the stirring history of the Pinkertons, and hear how a former Episcopal priest developed the necessarily skills and fortitude to become the man he was meant to be.
Interested? Ronin: the Pinkerton Years is expected to be finished by spring 2013. Hang in there, there are two books in the series to read before hand, and it’s only a few months away…
How were the Pinkertons noble? I thought they were just muscle for the bosses.
Thanks for your interest, Julie. That’s a piece of the heartache of course. But there are some stirring pieces of the Pinkerton years–the agency as it was is no more–that bear repetition. Their investigative methods, security actions and interdiction against early counterfeiters, kidnappers and thieves. It’s all pretty interesting and the third book in the Ronin series will tell a piece of the history that’s worth repeating.