Charles A. Siringo by Orlan Sawey

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76 Western American Literature Not that this slight book is worth worrying much about, but it is an insult to all serious scholars. I know that we have trouble with narratives and coming to conclusions. But we do raise questions and are most reluctant to settle for easy, formulaic answers. I would have been much happier with Ms. Lennon if she had abandoned the scholarly pretense and had written the picturesque novel about Clemens in California that she so clearly could have done. PATRICK D. MORROW Auburn University Charles A. Siringo. By Orlan Sawey. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981. 161 pages.) Charles A. Siringo was a Texas cowboy, a Kansas merchant, a Chicagoand later Denver-based Pinkerton detective, and a writer of autobiography. Born February 7, 1855, his cowboy life coincided with the development of the open range cattle industry. With the fencing of the staked plains, Siringo quit cowboying to become an ice-cream and cigar store owner in Caldwell, Kansas, and to write what in 1885 became the first cowboy autobiography. Ayear later he became a detective for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, working mostly in the West as the “cowboy detective.” He infiltrated everything from early day miner’s unions to gangs of outlaws. He spent four years helping to hunt down members of the “Wild Bunch.” By 1907, when he quit Pinkerton’s, the era of the cowboy outlaw was almost over. For the next 21 years until his death in 1928, Siringo was a rancher, free-lance detective and author of six more books. Orlan Sawey’s Charles A. Siringo is a review of the man’s life as gleaned from the books, with some clarification from other sources and some general remarks to help the reader put the life into historical and social context. It is biography rather than literary or social analysis, but it is not very ambitious biography. Sawey counts so much on his notion that Siringo’s life will “illus­ trate vividly the events of an important era in the development of the West” that he never gives the reader anything more. Hence the book is mostly all biographical fact with little criticism, inquiry or analysis, which finally makes for flat reading. The questions implicit in Siringo’s life, had Savvey been willing to tackle them, would have made for a better book. Three important ones follow. Why did Siringo become a writer, and who was he as a writer, a literary man? Though uneducated, Siringo persisted in writing books despite limited publication, censorship by the Pinkerton Agency, and heavy publisher editing. He spent his final 20 years writing six of his seven books. Yet Sawey’s book is much more the biography of a cowboy and detective than of a writer. Sawey never speculates on Siringo’s writing career beyond the motives of money (he never made much), a desire to create “a monument to the passing of the Reviews 77 open range” with A Texas Cow Boy, and, finally, a personal vendetta against the Pinkerton Agency. But these things are not enough to explain a 43-year literary career. A better exploration of Siringo asliterary man might have shed light on the whole genre of the cowboy autobiography and the place of “uneducated” writers in western American literature. What explains Siringo’s attitude toward anarchy? He joined Pinkerton’s in 1886 right after the Haymarket riot in Chicago, and stayed with them for 22 years, in spite of reservations about their methods. His reason: he was fighting anarchy and its infusion into America by foreigners. Sawey points out the irony of Siringo’s attitudes towards foreigners, as his mother was Irish and his father Italian. But he does not point out the apparent contradiction in a Siringo who condemned anarchy while a detective yet celebrated it as a cowboy by slaughtering other’s cattle, shooting up trail’s end towns and by obviously enjoying the lawlessness and violence of open range life. This contradiction might point to larger social currents in American life, in that w'e tend to respect individual, but not social, rebellion in this country, but Sawey doesn’t take the reader any further than Siringo does...