Pioneer detective Allan Pinkerton began working life on run from the law
He changed the way criminals were caught but Allan Pinkerton had his own brushes with the authorities
The life of a cooper in Illinois in the 19th century would not normally have been full of excitement and danger. But Scottish immigrant barrel maker Allan Pinkerton had certainly seen his share before settling down to the steady, safe business of crafting containers for other people to fill.
He had been forced to flee from arrest for involvement in political agitation in Scotland and had survived a shipwreck in Nova Scotia to steal across Canada’s border into the US where he had taken up making barrels to put bread on the table.
He was making quite a success of it until a dangerous and exciting turn of events in the forest near the town of Dundee sent his career on a new course. While looking for wood to make his containers he stumbled across a band of counterfeiters hard at work. He wasn’t tempted to join them, instead he informed local authorities and lead them to the forgers to arrest them.
He gained a small measure of fame from thwarting the counterfeiters and people assumed he knew a thing or two about finding other criminals. Although he was wary of leaving the steady business of barrel making behind he eventually became a detective, founding a detective agency that still operates today.
Born 200 years ago tomorrow, Pinkerton’s name would become associated with the pursuit of some of the most famous outlaws and the biggest crimes in the Wild West. He was born in Glasgow on August 25, 1819, the son of a policeman who was badly injured in the line of duty and forced to retire. Pinkerton was often in trouble for wagging school and street fighting. His father died while he was still young and Pinkerton had to leave school to support his family, taking on his apprenticeship as a barrel maker.
In the 1830s Glasgow was a hotbed of working-class agitation and a centre for the political and social reform movement known as Chartism. Among other demands Chartists wanted voting rights for all adult men (women were not yet included), regardless of social class or wealth. Pinkerton became an ardent supporter. His agitation, however, got him in trouble with the law and in 1842, not long after marrying Joan Carfrae, he was forced to flee to the US.
On the voyage over Pinkerton’s ship was wrecked on rocks off the coast of Nova Scotia, leaving survivors without anything but the clothes they were wearing and a few small possessions. They were then attacked by natives, leaving them penniless.
Relying on a Scottish contact in Canada, he borrowed money to get a horse and sneaked across the border with Joan to make the journey to Chicago, where he found work as a cooper at a brewery. While Joan stayed in Chicago he later made his way to the town of Dundee where he set up his own cooperage and built a home, before sending a message to Joan to join him. It wasn’t long before his barrel-making business also became his counterfeiter- catching business in about 1846 or 1847 (accounts vary).
At first reluctant to become involved in law enforcement, he was hired by private businesses to look for criminals. The extra money was useful and he found he had a knack for the work. He was later appointed a deputy sheriff but while that meant he was becoming a bastion of the law, he was not above bending some rules in the name of social justice.
Pinkerton was an ardent opponent of slavery and used his connections in law enforcement to hide runaway slaves on the what was known as the “underground railroad”, a network that helped slaves reach freedom in Canada.
His antislavery stance put him off-side with some elements of the Dundee township, which lost him votes when he ran unsuccessfully for public office in 1848. But the electoral loss convinced him that he and his business had grown too big for Dundee and he moved to Chicago where, in 1849, he became a full-time detective for the Chicago Police Force.
In 1850 he joined forces with attorney Edward Rucker to form the northwestern Police Agency, which, despite its name, was a private detective firm. The agency was an immediate success, hunting down bank bandits, train robbers and providing security for some big companies. The agency soon expanded to other cities and was renamed Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. The logo of the company showed a big eye with the caption below “We Never Sleep’’. It is credited with inspiring the term “private eye’’.
He showed himself to be fairly progressive in his detective methods as well as his hiring policies. In 1856, although initially reluctant to hire a woman, he took on Kate Warne, who became one of his best detectives, noted for her ability to go undercover.
As the US headed toward civil war, Pinkerton remained firmly on the side of the Union and the abolitionists. In 1861, before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, Pinkerton discovered intelligence about a possible assassination plot and with Warne as Lincoln’s undercover security detail they were able to thwart it.
During the Civil War, Pinkerton worked with the Union Army as an intelligence adviser, also establishing an intelligence service to spy on the South.
After the war Pinkerton had plenty of work, including chasing outlaws such as Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch and the Reno Gang across the Wild West. While they had success infiltrating the train-robbing Reno gang, James evaded the Pinkerton detectives and even claimed the life of one of his operatives.
Many of Pinkerton’s own adventures and those of his
detectives became the subject of a series of books, partly to promote his agency. In his later years Pinkerton was working on setting up a national database of criminals, it would be decades before government law enforcement agencies created their own databases.
In 1884 while walking his wife’s poodle he slipped on a pavement and bit his tongue. He died several days later from a gangrene infection.
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