They guarded trains, hunted outlaws and robbers, and acted as strikebreakers. The Pinkertons are possibly the most famous private detective company in history. So who were they? Why did they get so famous? And was it right for Red Dead Redemption to make them the villains?

Ryan talks about what he learned while researching the Pinkertons, from their successful career in train protection to their disastrous attempts to hunt Jesse James and everything in between. Tune in to see what he learned.

Sources:

S. Paul O’Hara, Inventing the Pinkertons; or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs: Being a Story of the Nation’s Most Famous (and Infamous) Detective Agency (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 15-18.

Jay Bonansinga, Pinkerton’s War: The Civil War’s Greatest Spy and the Birth of the U.S. Secret Service (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2011), 65-67.

“Secret Departure of the President Elect from Harrisburgh,” New York Times (1857-1922) (New York, N.Y.), February 25, 1861,

 https://www.nytimes.com/1861/02/25/archives/highly-important-news-secret-departure-of-the-president-elect-from.html.

Haygood, Wil, “A Story of Myth, Fame, Jesse James,” The Seattle Times (Seattle, W.A.), September 17, 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20081229061215/http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2003885037_jessejames17.html

Charles Siringo, A Cowboy Detective: A True Story of Twenty-Two Years with a World Famous Detective Agency (Arcadia Press, 1912), 138-39.

Charles Siringo, Two Evil Isms, Pinkertonism and Anarchism: By a Cowboy Detective Who Knows, as He Spent Twenty-Two Years in the Inner Circle of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency (1915).