Siringo was link between cowboy reality and myth
So, when’s the last time you thought about Edna? Or Louise?
No, not the maiden aunts who helped raise you. I have in mind the two towns along U.S. 59 between El Campo and Victoria — both of them pleasant little communities that you rarely hear about. (You can say the same for nearby Inez and Lolita.)
Despite the area’s happy anonymity, I keep coming across tales to tell, as well as a number of “firsts,” from this historic swath of coastal South Texas. You’ve got Shanghai Pierce, the first Texas cattleman to drive cattle herds east to New Orleans (see the Jan. 14 column). There’s Pudge Heffelfinger, America’s first professional football player (Feb. 4). And, there’s Edna-born Candy Barr, Jack Ruby’s favorite stripper and the first … well, she’s said to have made the first pornographic film in America, shot in a Dallas hotel when she was 16. (Legendary Houston lawyer Percy Foreman represented her in court.)
Charlie Siringo is another. Born on Matagorda Peninsula in 1855, Siringo was 30 when he wrote “A Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony,” a memoir that would become a classic. Howard R. Lamar, history professor emeritus at Yale, calls Siringo’s book “the first autobiography of a cowboy to be published.”
This “small, thin but fearless Texan” — Lamar’s description — is a bridge between the reallife world of working cowboys and the cowboy saga produced and perpetuated by countless Hollywood horse operas, “Gunsmoke”-style TV westerns, country and western songs, even fashion. You could argue that Texas politicians wear boots beneath their business suits, not because they ride a horse to work but because of Charlie Siringo’s recollections. He’s the link between cowboy reality and cowboy myth.
“The cowboy’s Bible” — Will Rogers’ descrip-
tion of “A Texas Cowboy” — was merely an opening chapter for Siringo. He wrote more books, seven in all; chased after his pal Billy the Kid with Sheriff Pat Garrett; worked as a Pinkerton detective for more than two decades; was a union-buster in Colorado and Idaho, and, living in Los Angeles toward the end of his life, consulted on the earliest Hollywood westerns. In the words of J.P. Bryan, Texana collector and founder of Galveston’s Bryan Museum, “just one segment of his life would be someone else’s entire career.”
Born at a time when every Texan was an immigrant (except for the nearby Karankawa and other Native American tribes), Charles Angelo Siringo was the son of an Italian father and an Irish mother. “Am I not a queer conglomerate,” he wrote, “a sweet-scented mixture indeed!”
The family lived on the peninsula in a storm-exposed huddle of 12 cabins called Dutch Settlement. When Siringo was 1 year old, his father died, leaving the boy’s mother, Bridgit, to care for him and his older sister. As a teenager he worked for the Pierce brothers, Abel (Shanghai) and Jonathan, on their El Rancho Grande and in 1876 drove a herd of 2,500 longhorns from Austin to Dodge City, Kan. He hit the trail again in 1877.
Meets Billy the Kid
In Dodge City, Siringo agreed to drive a herd into the Panhandle to establish the LX Ranch near Tascosa. He stayed on as a cowhand and in the fall of 1878 got acquainted with a young man named William Bonney. Billy the Kid, 19 at the time, had ventured into the Panhandle to dispose of a herd of ponies he had rustled in Lincoln County, New Mexico. During the three or four weeks the Kid and his gang camped near the LX, Siringo got to know him well and seemed to be intrigued by the budding outlaw. Nevertheless, he joined up with a posse a few years later to help track him down.
In 1884, Siringo quit the cowboy life, married and opened a cigar, ice cream and oyster parlor in Caldwell, Kan. He also finished “A Texas Cowboy,” opening his preface with, “MY EXCUSE FOR WRITING THIS BOOK is money — and lots of it.”
Siringo apparently got bored with the quiet life (or maybe his menu mix didn’t catch on in Caldwell). He moved to Chicago in 1886 and signed on as an “operative” with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, already famous — and feared — for its investigators’ relentlessness and ruthlessness. For the next 22 years, Siringo was a cowboy detective on cases that ranged from the Alaska Territory to Mexico City. His frequent companion for a number of years was a Russian wolfhound Siringo called Eat-em-up-Jake.
In 1892, Pinkerton dispatched its cowboy detective to the Idaho mine fields where he went undercover to infiltrate union organizers. Although the Pinkerton agency was notorious for its unionbusting tactics, Siringo claimed to be pro-union initially but detested the violence perpetrated by labor-movement radicals. Whatever his views, he helped protect labor boss “Big Bill” Haywood and his lawyer Clarence Darrow from a lynch mob after Haywood was found not guilty of murdering a former Idaho governor.
From 1899 to 1903, Siringo was in dogged pursuit of Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall Gang, a criminal syndicate of bank, payroll and train robbers also known as the Wild Bunch. He claimed to have traveled more than 25,000 miles throughout the West and into Mexico. “Who are those guys?,” Paul Newman’s famous line, could have been referring to Siringo.
Infiltrated ‘Wild Bunch’
Toward the end of his life, an article Siringo read about Cassidy and the Sundance Kid prompted him to write the author: “It might interest you to know that I hid my identity and was a member of the ‘Wild Bunch’ for four years, joining them under an assumed name. While visiting in Circleville, Utah, the birthplace of George Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, I became attached to his pretty black-eyed sister, who was deputy postmistress at Circleville. From her I gained many important secrets of the Wild Bunch. She told me that as her brother was growing up he was known as ‘Sally’ Parker.”
Siringo never caught Sally — er, Butch — and the Kid, although he once got so close he was arrested on suspicion of actually being Cassidy. The notorious outlaws fled to Argentina in 1901 and are thought to have died in Bolivia in 1908.
Siringo’s longtime employer turned on him when he tried to publish a book about his adventures as a cowboy detective, suing him for breaching a confidentiality agreement. When an embittered Siringo later published a book entitled “Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism,” Pinkerton tried to extradite him from his Santa Fe ranch to Chicago to face charges of criminal libel. The New Mexico governor refused the extradition request.
Slipped into history
Impoverished and in failing health, the old cowboy had slipped into history during the last decade or so of his life. On Oct. 21, 1928, an L.A. newspaper ran the following item: “In a little Hollywood cottage where he kept alive his memories of the western plains with thrilling tales of old-time cowboys and outlaws, Charles A. Siringo died Friday. He was 77 years of age.”
Matagorda Peninsula and Texas rangeland, not to mention Edna and Louise, were far away by then, but an old Texas cowboy, long forgotten himself, remembered till the end.