![]() ![]() Pinkerton tracked them down and shot one of the kidnappers. He was hired on two different occasions by the local branch of the Treasury Department to pursue counterfeiters and once by the Cook County Sheriff’s department to help rescue two Michigan girls who had been abducted. Running for local office, Pinkerton came in dead last in a field of nine, when his own minister branded him a drunkard.ĭiscouraged, and tired of the pettiness of small town politics, Pinkerton moved back to Chicago, where his politics and his growing reputation as a “terror to evil-doers” were more appreciated. The town of Dundee was deeply divided over the abolition issue, and Pinkerton, a staunch and vocal supporter, was known to frequently help fugitive slaves on the Underground Railway to Canada (a few years later, he would assist John Brown in doing the same). At first Pinkerton was leery of entering such a “wil-o’-the-wisp” business,” but a few subsequent successes led to his becoming a part-time deputy for the county.īut politics would rear their ugly head once again. Impressed with his honesty and courage, two local merchants hired the Scot to watch for more counterfeiters. Pinkerton notified the local sheriff and returned with him to make the arrest. It was there, the story goes, that while wandering the forests near Dundee looking for wood for barrel staves, he stumbled across a band of rural counterfeiters hard at work. He slipped across the border and worked there for a few years, before relocating to the small, rural settlement of Scottish immigrants in nearby Dundee, with hopes of establishing his own business. A shipwreck off the coast of Nova Scotia left them virtually penniless, and so Pinkerton eagerly accepted the invitation of a Scottish friend to come work as a cooper for Lill’s Brewery in Chicago. One step ahead of the law, a price on his head, Pinkerton and his young bride Joan fled to Canada in 1842. Eventually, an arrest warrant was issed for Pinkerton–he had ran afoul of local authorities over his membership in the Chartist movement, a reformist political organization dedicated to universal suffrage and better working conditions for the poor. When his father passed away, it was up to the young Allan, still in his teens, to support his family, and he became an apprentice cooper, making and selling barrels. PINKERTON was born into poverty in the Gorbals, a slum area of Glasgow, in 1819, the son of a policeman who could no longer work, due to injuries sustained on the job. Even the phrase “private eye” can find its roots in the agency’s trademark: a large, unblinking eye with the slogan “We Never Sleep.”ĪLLAN J. He was also a prolific author, one of the first private eye writers of them all. He was responsible for the apprehension of counterfeiters and kidnappers, train robbers and embezzlers and radicals. He and his operatives foiled assassination attempts on presidents and chased outlaws and desperadoes back and forth across the American West. He founded the detective agency that still bears his name, arguably the most famous private detective agency in the world. In his long and varied career he was called a traitor and a patriot, an outlaw and a police officer, a thug and an idealist, a left-leaning political activist fighting for the plight of the workers and a hired goon for bosses, a defender of liberty and a trampler of rights, an immigrant and a drunkard, a rogue, an adventurer and a barrel maker. Pinkerton (1819-1884) lead a colorful life is a little bit of an understatement. ![]()
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