("Two Evil Isms is the rarest of all of Siringo's books, w...)
"Two Evil Isms is the rarest of all of Siringo's books, with the possible exception of the first edition of A Texas Cowboy in paper wrappers. Of the eleven hundred copies that were printed, most were handed to the Pinkertons by court order, thereby assuring their destruction. Only those copies that Siringo had sold to Chicago bookstores and newsstand dealers, plus the copies he carried with him to Santa Fe, got into circulation; and the Pinkertons bought up many of the former. When the Steck-Vaughn Company reprinted the book in 1967, the Library of Congress copyright copy was used as a model"
A Lone Star Cowboy: Being Fifty Years’ Experience in the Saddle as Cowboy, Detective and New Mexico Ranger, on Every Cow Trail in the Wooly Old West
(This story includes not only his career as a cowboy but a...)
This story includes not only his career as a cowboy but also a western detective cleaning up the Wild West and much cattle history which had never before been published.
The Song Companion of a Lone Star Cowboy: Old Favorite Cow-camp Songs
(In this book Siringo writes:
"These old favorite trail s...)
In this book Siringo writes:
"These old favorite trail songs have caused the blood to stampede with joy through the veins of thousands of cowboys; and at the same time have put many long-horn herds to sleep on a dark and stormy night."
Charlie Siringo was an American lawman and detective. He also was the first authentic cowboy autobiographer. His books helped popularize the romantic image of the American cowboy.
Background
Charles Angelo Siringo was born on February 7, 1855, in Matagorda, Texas. His parents were immigrants - his father was from Italy and his mother was from Ireland - who had few comforts to offer their children. Siringo’s father died during the Civil War, and in those early years, Siringo himself was put to work rounding up war- frighted cattle.
In 1868 Siringo’s mother married a man named Carrier, who carried the family to Illinois and dropped them there, relieved of their entire life savings. Siringo earned what money he could in odd jobs, but he wound up on the street, lost to his mother and unable to support himself.
From St. Louis he wandered to New Orleans, where he was briefly adopted by a couple named Myers, but by that time Siringo was wild, unsuited to a schoolchild’s civilizing life. He fought with knives, ran away from home several times, and in 1870 eventually headed for Texas as a steamer stow-away.
Education
Charlie Siringo attended public school until the beginning of the American Civil War, then took his first cowpuncher lessons in 1867, before moving to St. Louis after his mother remarried. Siringo attended Fisk public school for a time while in New Orleans.
Career
In Texas, Siringo’s roughened, survivor ways suited him perfectly to the life of a cowboy. He soon found work on various slaughterhouses at first, and by 1871 he was a cowboy on Able H. “Shanghai” Pierce’s Rancho Grande. This tough brush-country cowboying called for hands who really knew how to ride and rope. Siringo and his companions spent most of their time rounding up nearly wild longhorn cattle that spent their days in dense thickets, venturing onto the small open prairies only at night and in the early morning. When not employed by Pierce, Siringo made his living by breaking wild horses and working in the quasi-legal trade of branding mavericks and skinning dead cattle. Such experiences helped the young man perfect his cowboy skills and toughened him for whatever hardships his future life might bring.
Indeed, according to Siringo’s memoirs of his cowboy days, life was tough already. Siringo had to do whatever would keep the cattle in hand: shoot them, sew their eyes shut, bleed them slowly with a dull blade. Siringo’s narration of the life of a cowboy seems staunchly blase because the tough-guy of the American West could not afford cheap sniveling. While on the trail, too, Siringo pursued various outlaws of the West: Billy the Kid, Pat Coghlan, and others. But Siringo often sided with the outlaws he hunted. He claims to have met Billy the Kid while working on the LX Ranch, and indeed Siringo looked so much like Billy the Kid that the two were often mistaken for one another. Siringo became more famous for tracking Butch Cassidy and his wild bunch. Fed up with the inability of state and local authorities to apprehend the train robbers, railroad officials hired Pinkerton, who in turn, assigned Siringo to the case, Siringo later reported that he pursued the bandits over 25,000 miles, ultimately causing them to flee to South America.
Historians have never quite determined what happened in those long chases, where outlaw and rancher were alone and intimately connected. Nevertheless, whatever the facts of Siringo’s adventures in New Mexico maybe, his time there was significant because it provided him with his first taste of detective work, the career that would occupy more than twenty years of his life. Soon after this period of Siringo’s life, in fact, he settled down with fifteen-year-old Mamie Lloyd and opened a cigar, ice-cream and oyster parlor in Caldwell, Oklahoma. As a storekeeper, Siringo began to write down the wild tales of his ranch hand days. He published these reminiscences in A Texas Cow Boy (1885). The memoir was wildly successful. Though the book is structured episodically, “campfire tales rather than a crafted work of literature” as Barclay described it, the work seemed to bear the brand of authenticity for its readers.
Despite Siringo’s poor spelling and grammar, his stories are as much a representation of the cowboy life as Will Rogers’ portrayals are. Siringo created for America the image of the tough-guy - the cowboy, the hard-boiled detective - and readers fondly crowed over the true grit of Siringo’s experiences. After working as a storekeeper, Siringo began to work for the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, helping to infiltrate various organizations to detect corruption. Typically, he posed as an ordinary cowboy or miner, befriended suspected criminals, and stayed with them until they confided to him enough information to win a conviction. In one case, Siringo traveled with a suspect for seven months before the man finally admitted his role in a dynamiting case, and during his time in the Coeur D’Alene mining district in 1891-1892 Siringo so successfully infiltrated the miners’ union that he was elected recording secretary of the organization.
Unfortunately, Siringo’s ability to write about his adventures as a detective was curtailed by the Pinkerton Agency, which forbade Siringo to write about his experiences among them. This led to lawsuit after lawsuit, and ultimately bankrupted the old cowboy detective. In Siringo’s later life, after having failed to write other books that would strike the public imagination in the same way, he moved to California to become a Hollywood extra. As the epitome of a cowboy - as the man who had created the legend of the cowboy - Siringo seemed to add a measure of authenticity to Hollywood westerns. While in Hollywood, he also found help in publishing another treatment of his life stories, Riata and Spurs (1927). The book, a cleaned-up version of Siringo’s other writing, was the most popular of Siringo’s memoirs, and after his death it solidified him in the image as the real American cowboy.
All Siringo’s writings show an insensitivity to animal suffering that seems incongruous with the apparent joy he took in his many pet horses and dogs. But Siringo, if he is to be believed, was living amid animals in a way that precluded too much sensitivity. Dangerous events could not, and did not, upset him much.
Siringo’s memoirs are poignant creations of American mythology. Nevertheless, his mythology was one of the most important to later conceptions of the American West.
Quotations:
“Everything went on lovely with the exception of swimming swollen streams, fighting now and then among ourselves and a stampede every stormy night, until we arrived on the Canadian river in the Indian territory; there we had a little Indian scare.”
“The author is not a literary man, but has written as he speaks, and it is thought that the simplicity thus resulting will not detract from the substantial merit of the tales, which are recitals of facts and not of fiction.”
Personality
Siringo was described as 'a small wiry man, cold and steady as a rock,' and 'as being born without fear.' Though many of his retellings were accurately recorded, Siringo’s own identity, which forms the core of many Western’s portrayals of the tough guy, was as slippery as it was rough-hewn.
Taken all together the contradictions that make up Siringo’s life show that the West itself was not the land of clearly defined right and wrong - of white hats and black hats - that is described by popular history. Siringo’s own life suggests that the character of the “tough guy” is itself a contradictory image: a man with strong feelings who is nonetheless cool and unemotional, a plain-spoken, honest man who can nonetheless slyly lead others to believe what he wishes them to believe.
Quotes from others about the person
“Siringo is significant because A Texas Cowboy and his later books on his experiences as a cowboy and cowboy detective helped to shape the national mythology of the cowboy.” - Donald A. Barclay
“Siringo was a real cowboy.” - О. P. White
Connections
In 1883, Siringo married Mamie Lloyd, but she died in 1889. Charles married Lillie Thomas in 1893, but their marriage ended and Siringo married Grace in 1907. Their marriage also ended, and Charles married Ellen Partain in 1913. Siringo had two daughters and one son.
DLB 186: Nineteenth-Century Western American Writers
This award-winning multi-volume series is dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, while satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers and scholars.
1997
The New Encyclopedia of the American West
The American West is an evocative term that conjures up images of cowboys and Indians, covered wagons, sheriffs and outlaws, and endless prairies as well as contemporary images ranging from national parks to the oil, aerospace, and film industries.