|
|
|
Book Review
| Charlie Siringo's West: An Interpretive Biography. By Howard R. Lamar. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xiii + 370 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
|
|
In 1927, the year before Charlie Siringo's death, novelist Eugene Manlove Rhodes commented on Siringo to editor Ira Kent: "No man alive—and few dead—with such wealth of experience" (p. 296). Howard R. Lamar's thoughtful, beautifully researched account of Siringo's life lends considerable support to Rhodes's assessment. Whether Siringo was engaging in shooting contests with Billy the Kid or chasing kidnappers in backwoods Kentucky, running an ice cream and oyster parlor in a Kansas cow town or witnessing the trial of labor-organizer Big Bill Haywood, tracking Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or advising movie actor and producer William S. Hart on a western scene, he seemed to have a knack for meeting up with key people and getting involved in key events in the turbulent and often violent political, economic, and social milieu of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America. |
1
|
|
Born on the Matagorda Peninsula of South Texas in 1855, Siringo was barely twelve years old when he hired on as a cowhand for a Texas rancher. He went on to participate in a dizzying array of activities in the cattle trade, including repeat trips up the cow trails and work for such fabled cattlemen as "Shanghai" Pearce, George Littlefield, and "Deacon" Bates and David T. Beals of the LX Ranch in the Texas Panhandle. His 1885 account of these adventures, A Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony—Taken from Real Life was, as Lamar points out, "the first full autobiography of a cowboy ever to be published" (p. 3). |
2
|
|
After the book's publication, Siringo moved with his wife and young daughter to Chicago, locating close to Haymarket Square shortly before the 1886 Haymarket Riot. This event, the resulting antipathy he felt toward anarchists, and his own sense of adventure led him to join the Pinkerton Detective Agency. He spent most of his twenty-two years with the agency working out of the Denver office, including as an undercover operative in the labor unrest of the Couer d'Alene Strike, 1891–1893. |
3
|
|
It appears that Siringo approached his undercover roles with relish and skill, but not without some ambivalence as he came to know the people involved and to sympathize with the reasons some of them had for their actions and beliefs. One of the most interesting aspects of Siringo's story is how he came to repudiate the Pinkerton Agency in many ways. Apparently he was compelled in part as a result of hearing Clarence Darrow, who was defending Big Bill Haywood, attack the agency's tactics and champion the working man against corporate powers. |
4
|
|
Lamar does a fine job of contextualizing Siringo's life, from a small mid-century settlement on Matagorda Peninsula to the Hollywood of the 1920s. He makes good use of primary and secondary materials throughout and leaves the reader with a compelling picture of the life of a man who as a youth witnessed buffalo "so thick on the plains that the country would look black just as far as the eye could reach," then lived to retell the Old West stories as a writer and a valued member of the Hollywood community. |
5
|
| Paula Marks
|
| St. Edward's University, Austin, Texas |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
ISSN 1939-8603
|