“A Detective! Me?”
PRYCE LEWIS ARRIVED IN AMERICA with only his leather valise. He was twenty-five years old, a good age to begin again. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, except he knew he wanted nothing to do with the burgeoning community in Massachusetts that was intent on re-creating Welsh life in a little plot of northeast America. He hadn’t crossed an ocean for that. Nor was Lewis particularly attracted by Connecticut and the prospect of building a life alongside his two brothers: thirty-year-old George, who now had a family of his own, and lived in Torrington; and twenty-year-old Matthew, who resided in Litchfield, six miles south of his brother. Matthew was working and living on a farm owned by the Hoig family, James and Eliza and their three young children. Nonetheless Pryce traveled to Connecticut and caught up with George and Matthew. Doubtless there were letters to pass on from their mother, and gossip, too, of dear friends and old sweethearts.
While browsing a Connecticut newspaper one day, Pryce saw an employment notice that took his fancy. The London Printing and Publishing Company was soliciting responsible men to sell its publications across the country. As instructed in the notice, Pryce mailed a letter to Samuel Brain at the company’s headquarters in New York, and received in return further information along with a catalog of its books.
He was asked to attend an interview with Mr. Brain at the company’s office on Dey Street. The well-read Lewis got the job and for nearly two years sold the books of the London Printing and Publishing Company throughout northeastern America. The job entailed a lot of traveling, endless hours on the railroad, so Lewis became intimately acquainted with his employer’s products: he was an expert on the British problems in India thanks to Charles Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny, and he became something of a grammarian after plowing through Thomas Wright’s Universal Pronouncing Dictionary and General Expositor of the English Language: Being a complete literary, classical scientific, biographical, geographical and technological standard. But the book he liked best was the company’s most recent acquisition, Henry Tyrrell’s three volumes of the History of the War with Russia: Giving full details of the operations of the Allied Armies.
The Crimean War of 1854–56 had captured the imagination of the British people, and the Victorians had appropriated the war for themselves. The roles of France and the Ottoman Empire in helping to defeat the Russian forces had been all but dismissed. In their place was Florence Nightingale, “the Lady with the Lamp,” as the Times of London christened the nurse whose devoted care had alleviated the suffering of the wounded British soldiers, along with the glorious and futile cavalry charge during the Battle of Balaclava, immortalized in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Within weeks of the poem’s publication in 1855, there were few people in Britain unable to recite it by heart. Henry Tyrrell’s three volumes might have been less florid than Tennyson’s poem, but running to nearly 1,100 pages they were considerably more substantial. Pryce Lewis devoured them with gusto as he traveled through Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa and as far west as the Mississippi River.
But by the spring of 1859, Lewis had grown tired of this job and its monotonous routine. He quit and moved to Chicago, where he found employment as a clerk in a grocery store run by David Erskine and his wife, Grace. David Erskine was a thirty-six-year-old Scot who, before coming to America, had lived in the West Indies, where two of his three children were born. Lewis lasted a year with Erskine, but by early 1860 his feet were feeling restless. It was nearly four years since he’d left Wales, yet here he was, twenty-nine years old, a grocery clerk in a small Chicago store. Hardly the life he’d imagined when he crossed the ocean.
And yet all around him in Chicago there was tantalizing evidence of what was possible, the rewards on offer for those immigrants who embraced their new home with both hands. Since 1840 the population of Chicago had ballooned from 4,450 to 109,260. In 1842 it had been just a dirty dot on the shores of Lake Michigan, too insignificant for Charles Dickens, whose extensive itinerary had stretched from Lake Erie in the North to Richmond in the South. But by 1860 Chicago was a booming city, the economic epicenter of northwest America. The Illinois and Michigan Canal connected Lake Michigan to the Mississippi and enabled Chicago to overtake St. Louis as the wheat industry’s major transporter, but it was the railroads that transformed the city. The first railroad had arrived in Chicago in 1848 (the Galena & Chicago Union), but twelve years later there were fifteen, and with the trade the companies also brought development. The railroads purchased large tracts of land on which to build their lines, but they also constructed breakwaters and dikes to prevent the routes being flooded by Lake Michigan. Safe from the threat of inundation, more companies constructed factories and warehouses—some as high as six stories—and effluence no longer flowed through the streets of Chicago.
Lewis was anxious to accomplish something in Chicago, not just for the financial enrichment, but because he yearned for a little adventure in his life. Then one day he read in one of the city’s seven daily newspapers of the Pike’s Peak gold rush of 1859; not long after, the city began swelling with returning “Fifty-Niners,” who brought back tales of the riches to be had in the gold regions of Pike’s Peak country, a hostile expanse of territory that stretched from southwestern Nebraska to western Kansas.
Lewis listened to their stories and decided he’d try his luck in the summer of 1860. He gave his notice at Erskine’s grocery store, and to all his friends who asked, he told them he was heading west to mine for gold. “Pike’s Peak or bust!” he boomed, repeating the slogan of the day.
Shortly before he was due to leave Chicago Lewis encountered a man he had met during his days as a traveling salesman. The last time he’d seen Mr. Charlton was in Detroit, where they’d passed an agreeable few hours discussing literature, the Crimea, America and a host of other topics. Charlton never forgot a face, and when he passed Pryce Lewis in the street he pumped his hand and asked how he was doing. When Lewis told him of his intention, Charlton looked aghast.
Don’t believe the miners’ stories, he advised Lewis, they were nothing more than fiction fueled by a combination of powerful liquor and wounded pride. There was barely any gold to be had in Pike’s Peak, and what little there was had long since been mined. Disease and deprivation were all that lay out West, said Charlton, who then invited Lewis for a drink.
For a while they swapped small talk, until Charlton leaned in a little closer and told Lewis his boss was on the lookout for good men. Lewis realized that Charlton had never revealed what line of work he was in. Now he did. Charlton lowered his voice and told Lewis he was a detective. What’s more, he reckoned Lewis could be one too. Lewis laughed. “A detective! Me?”
Charlton nodded, and explained that not only was it an easy profession to master, but the pay was pretty good. Lewis balked at the idea. He couldn’t imagine himself as a detective. Charlton persisted, and a couple of hours later Lewis was standing before Charlton’s superior, George Henry Bangs.
Bangs was the deputy head of the detective agency, and like Lewis he was twenty-nine. They also shared a similar prepossessing physique, but Bangs sported an abundant salt and pepper beard that compensated for the hair he lacked on top. He invited Lewis to take a seat, offered him a coffee, then asked to hear a little bit of his background. As Lewis talked Bangs scrutinized his face and head as he did with every potential employee. It was orders from the boss, the head of the agency, who was a firm believer in the science of phrenology.
In the mid-nineteenth century it was widely believed that a person’s intelligence and character could be deduced from the examination of the shape and size of the skull. The larger the head, so the phrenologists believed, the more intelligent the person, while the stouter the torso, the more stupid one was. When Bangs’s boss underwent a “Phrenological Description” in Chicago by Professor O. S. Fowler, the good professor concluded in his expensive report that the detective chief’s dominant characteristics were “earnestness, enthusiasm, heartiness, whole-souledness, impetuosity and excitability … your name ought to be ‘whole soul’ because you throw so much soul into everything you do.”
In fact the chief’s name was Allan Pinkerton, and it was he who had the final say on whether Pryce Lewis became the latest recruit to the detective agency he’d established ten years earlier. Bangs would have given Pinkerton a detailed physical account of Lewis, as well as describing his intelligence, his deportment and his initiative. He would also have mentioned something of Lewis’s life in Wales, and this was probably as important to Pinkerton as anything else in deciding whether or not to hire Lewis.
Allan Pinkerton was an exceptional man with many admirable qualities. He was brave, physically and morally; he was loyal, diligent and hardworking. He could be generous, thoughtful, and to the oppressed he was a staunch supporter. But Pinkerton also had his flaws. He was insecure, dogmatic, humorless and authoritarian, a man who saw the world through a narrow prism. People were either good or bad; he lacked the nuance of mind to grasp the complexities of human nature. So his munificence extended only to those who yielded to his iron will; to those who crossed him—even if they were justified in doing so—he bore a lifetime of malice. Allan Pinkerton had another outstanding trait: his moral ambiguity. He told the truth only when it suited him; when it didn’t, he lied.
Pinkerton was born in the Gorbals district of Glasgow on July 21, 1819, the fourth (though second surviving) son of fifty-two-year-old William and his second wife, Isabella. Allan later claimed his father had been a policeman, but he was nothing of the sort; William Pinkerton made his living as a handloom weaver until he lost his job not long after Allan’s birth. Unlike many of his former workmates, William found further employment as a warder in a Glasgow jail, a position he held until his death in the early 1830s.
Years later, when Allan Pinkerton was well established in America, he let it be known that his father, the “policeman,” had been murdered while on duty. It was another lie, though he told the truth about his seven-year apprenticeship as a cooper. His role with the Glasgow Chartists, however, he bent like a stave of one of his barrels to fit his own ends
Pinkerton had joined the Chartist movement following the end of his apprenticeship in 1838 when his master, William McAulay, gave the job of cooper to his own unqualified son.
Pinkerton set out to find work elsewhere in Scotland, and during his travels the impressionable nineteen-year-old attended his first Chartist meetings. Here he listened to the impassioned arguments between those Scottish Chartists who favored action through peaceful means, “Moral Force” Chartists, and those who favored more robust methods, the “Physical Force” Chartists.
Pinkerton supported the latter, as did most Glaswegian Chartists, and such was the fervor with which Pinkerton embraced the movement that in September 1839 he was elected one of six members of the Glasgow Universal Suffrage Association. That same month, at the Chartist National Convention, it was decided that the time had come for a national uprising. The catalyst for the insurrection was the arrest and incarceration the previous May of four Welsh Chartists, and it was intended that Chartists from around Britain would descend on Newport in south Wales and demand their release. The date chosen for the attack was the first week of November, but what had been envisaged as a nationwide uprising dwindled to a regional protest. Men’s ardor cooled as the day approached and the realization dawned that this was revolution, and everyone knew the penalty for that. The tens of thousands of Chartists expected to converge on Newport was in reality no more than five thousand, the majority from south Wales, and armed only with pikes and clubs.
The Newport Rising of November 4, 1839, was a bloody fiasco for the Chartists. Five hundred special constables and a regiment of soldiers waited for the rebels, and in the ensuing violence twenty-two Chartists were killed. The ringleaders were hunted down and sixty-two of their number transported to Australia. Never again would the Chartists rise up in such force. In later life Pinkerton claimed he’d been present at the Newport Rising, but in all probability this was another distortion of the truth. Contemporary reports made no mention of a contingent of Glasgow Chartists, and none of those wounded or transported came from the city.
For the next two and a half years Pinkerton continued to work for the Chartist cause, but it was more a hobby than a belief. There were rallies and meetings and assemblies, all opportunities to rattle the Chartist tail, but the government had drawn the movement’s venom. Nevertheless it was at a Chartist fund-raising concert in the summer of 1841 that Pinkerton’s life turned upside down. There on stage, a vision in white, was Joan Carfrae, whose voice and beauty and whole being captivated the twenty-two-year-old Pinkerton. But he wasn’t one of life’s romantics, nor was he physically attractive. The young Allan Pinkerton was five foot eight with an upper body that resembled one of his barrels. He had the face of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, cold blue-gray eyes, a crude dark beard and a mouth that rarely smiled.
But Pinkerton was nothing if not persistent, and he “got to sort of hanging around her, clinging to her, so to speak,” during the months that followed. Eventually Joan succumbed, and the courtship resulted in marriage, along with another Pinkerton fabrication. The legend he promulgated in America was that he had fled Glasgow because he “had become an outlaw with a price on his head” and that he’d married Joan in a secret ceremony hours before friends spirited them onto a vessel bound for North America. The truth, as was often the case with Pinkerton, was more prosaic. He and Joan married on March 13, 1842, in one of Glasgow’s most prominent churches, and it wasn’t until April 3 that they boarded the Kent bound for Montreal. Allan Pinkerton was one of 63,852 Britons who emigrated to the United States in 1842, the highest annual total to that point. He might have told his fellow passengers, in hushed tones, that he was running from the law, but in reality the only thing he was fleeing was the powerlessness of the British workingman.