Tracking Down Legacy of West : While Pinkerton detectives were out getting their men, they also got a lot of memorabiliaabout life during America’s brawling adolescence.
Thanks to Hollywood, most everyone can recall a raucous story or two about the Wild Bunch, led by the infamous Butch Cassidy and his partner, the Sundance Kid.
But few know that Harry Longbaugh, alias Sundance, suffered from chronic indigestion and proselytized about health food.
And even scholars of Western outlaw lore may not be familiar with the case of Bill Carver, a less notorious Wild Bunch associate who got sprayed by a skunk on the way to a bank holdup in Nevada in 1909. During the robbery, witnesses said, “the clerks in the bank kept sniffing and Bill said he could hardly stand it himself.”
Agency Bought Out
These historical nuggets and many, many more, collected by Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency operatives while they tracked criminals, have now found a home at the headquarters of a modern-day security firm in Van Nuys. That firm, California Plant Protection, bought the 137-year-old Pinkerton agency in 1987 for an undisclosed amount.
While the corporate archives will be open to the public by appointment only, plans are being made for a reception for Los Angeles law enforcement officials. Museums, including the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park, have asked to borrow items for exhibits.
Thomas W. Wathen, California Plant Protection’s owner and president, has been interested in Pinkerton folklore since his college days as a police administration major and was thrilled to learn that when he bought the company he also bought the archives.
“They show the Pinkertons were respected worldwide for their integrity and their tenacity and in their chasing of the bad guys, the desperadoes,” Wathen said. “We don’t have that kind of thing available anymore except in the movies.”
As word of Wathen’s interest in the artifacts spreads among CPP/Pinkerton’s 55,000 employees, boxes continue to arrive in Van Nuys from branch offices across the United States, Canada and Britain, filled with items ranging from mug shots to firearms, from wanted posters to investigation reports.
The archives reveal the company’s rich legacy, beginning with founder Allan Pinkerton’s work as a railroad detective, which led him to uncover a plot to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln on the way to his 1861 inauguration.
In later years, when Pinkerton’s sons and grandson ran the company, it gradually emphasized security work over detective work and took the name Pinkerton’s Inc. to reflect that shift.
When Wathen first saw the archives 10 years ago, during a visit to the Pinkerton company president in New York, they were covered with dust and stored in a back room. Now mementoes of the Pinkertons’ most famous jobs are displayed on the Van Nuys’ office walls and in glass cases, while others are stacked in a closet and a nearby warehouse. Gold Pinkerton family watches are stored in a safe.
One felt-lined case contains a small loose-leaf binder filled with code words that Pinkerton employees once used to camouflage investigations in letters or telegrams. Sundance was “sand,” Cassidy--whose real name was George Parker--was “primer,” a Texas sheriff who tried to keep track of their movements in his area was “spur.”
But mostly the archives consist of stacks of papers--80 file boxes full, according to CPP/Pinkerton marketing coordinator Jeannie Kihm, who is in charge of sorting through them.
Many of the most valuable documents from the early years--such as a letter from Lincoln and correspondence from a Pinkerton agent spying on unions in the Pennsylvania coal mines--are copies, Kihm said. The originals were given or sold to the National Archives in Washington by the last Pinkerton, Robert Allan Pinkerton II, who died in 1967.
A book about the Pinkertons, written in 1967 by James D. Horan, explained that the archives contained “dead files,” literally.
“Only death closed the Pinkerton file on an outlaw, but there were occasions when even that didn’t satisfy the agency, who had the corpse disinterred and extensively photographed, with an operative putting on and taking off the dead man’s hat. . . . Only when the dead man was positively identified did William or Robert (Pinkerton) dispatch a round-robin telegram to all branches, ordering the file of that outlaw transferred from the ‘active file’ to the ‘dead and removal file.’ ”
Before the first national fingerprint clearinghouse was established in 1924, identifying criminals in death and life was quite a challenge.
In 1893, for example, a man was arrested and charged with stealing $15,000 in loose diamonds from a bank official. In a letter filed in the archives, Michigan police wrote to tell the Pinkertons that they had arrested Frank Shercliffe, alias Kid McCoy, known to have committed that robbery. But Pinkerton mug files showed that the man in custody was Frank Bruce--a thief, but not the right thief. Shercliffe was later caught in Denver.
Many items in the archives do not tell complete stories, but merely offer clues to more complicated sagas of jewel heists and jail escapes, of fearless witnesses and tireless sleuths.
An ornate citation hangs in Wathen’s conference room. It applauds the Pinkertons for recovering $39,515 of $40,000 stolen from the Adams Express Co. of Philadelphia in 1859. The money was returned by Pinkerton in the “original sealed package in which it had been buried in the cellar of a dwelling house,” the citation reports.
Over the years, the voluminous archives were mined by several Pinkerton detectives-turned-authors, most notably Dashiell Hammett, who wrote “The Maltese Falcon.” They weren’t open to a non-agency writer until the late 1940s, when Robert Allan Pinkerton II decided to let journalist Horan peruse the files to dispel the public’s perception that Jesse James was the West’s Robin Hood.
After reviewing agents’ accounts, eyewitness testimony and photographs contained in the archives, Horan wrote a book that defended the Pinkertons’ efforts to capture James for nearly a decade. In it, Horan described the 19th-Century outlaw as “a ruthless killer” and “a whining criminal.”
One of the first members of the public to view the archives in Van Nuys will be Paul Ernst of Pennsylvania, who plans a visit in March. Ernst’s interest is personal: He is the great-grand nephew of the Sundance Kid. His wife, Donna, is writing a family genealogy.
Donna Ernst saw the archives cited in footnotes of books. Through the former New York headquarters of Pinkerton’s, she learned that the documents had been moved to California.
“Every time you turn around in reading anything about Sundance, you find out that the Pinkertons were doing all the chasing around,” she said. “They have the information we need.”
