Wild West Outlaws from the Pinkerton Files
Adam Worth (1844-1902)
Adam Worth
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
In the late 19th century, American born Adam Worth began his long and accomplished criminal career as a bounty jumper during the Civil War. Bounty jumpers were men who had been paid a sum of money—bounty—by those individuals that were drafted into the Union Army but did not want to fight. Those draftees could pay someone else a bounty to fight in their place; however, bounty jumpers would enlist in the Union, take the money and then bail on their obligation.
Many bounty jumpers repeated this scam many times over. Being a most elusive and wealthy criminal, Adam Worth was the mastermind of diamond heists, bank thefts, and forgery operations throughout Europe, spending most of his career living large in a luxurious flat in London and sailing his yacht on the Mediterranean. The authorities were never able to obtain a conviction on Worth except for a mail robbery in Belgium.
In 1876, Worth stole a priceless portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire, painted by Thomas Gainsborough, for the purpose of using it as collateral for freeing a close friend from jail. However, before being able to use it, his friend was released. Instead of returning the portrait, Worth wound up shipping the canvas to an American warehouse for fear of being connected to its theft. There it remained for over twenty years until Worth, of elderly age and in need of money, traveled to Chicago and surrendered the painting to William Pinkerton in exchange for a hefty sum of money.
After consummating this arrangement, William Pinkerton received an unexpected bonus, which he probably relished more than recovering the painting. Pinkerton sat back, and for the next few hours, the great Adam Worth recounted the details of his biggest exploits and confessed to crimes of which no one had ever suspected him.
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Charles Becker (1847-1916)
Charles Becker aka "Scratch"
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
After thirty years of crime and three years behind bars, Charles Becker (nicknamed “Scratch”) was released from San Quentin prison in 1903 and greeted by a crowd of reporters waiting to hear about his many exploits and recent prison life. The “Scratch” did not disappoint them while being clearly unapologetic claiming, “I am what you call an artist.” Elaborating, Scratch added that in many respects he was quite like the famed sculptor-goldsmith of the Italian Renaissance, Benvenuto Cellini.
William Pinkerton, who had known Charles Becker for years, once candidly admitted that a bogus banknote drawn with Becker’s steady hand could undergo “microscopic scrutiny” and still remain undetected.
For several years following his discharge from San Quentin, Charles Becker devoted his creative ingenuity to selling bankers an ineradicable ink that would defy any counterfeiter’s attempt to tamper with it. Perhaps this was his last try at ensuring that his fame as America’s Cellini would never be challenged. In any case, the bankers, whom he had been defrauding for years, did not buy; and Becker’s last years were spent running a Brooklyn saloon.
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Maximillian Shinburn (1840-1917)
Maximillian Shinburn
Photographer: Richie
Photograph, circa 1894
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
Being dapper, intelligent, and well spoken, Maximillian Shinburn had the makings of a great inventor. Soon after arriving in the United States from his native Germany in 1860, he decided to apply his mechanical genius towards cracking safes for profit. By his early thirties, having devised a set of tools uniquely tailored for opening vaults and a method of using calibrated paper to discover lock combinations, Shinburn was the acknowledged leader of his trade. It was estimated that by the early 1870’s his bank-robbing enterprises along the Eastern Seaboard had netted him $3 million.
Now with his identity known and the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency hot on his trail, Shinburn fled to Belgium where he changed his name to Baron Shindle, a silk dealer. Living lavishly and respectably, and due to some failed investments, the money didn’t last long. Soon Shinburn was back to his old craft of safecracking. However in 1892, after a foiled bank robbery and a stint in prison, he came back to America where the Pinkertons caught him for a theft in New York.
After serving his time, Max Shinburn fell into impoverished obscurity. Nonetheless, before Shinburn died in 1917, William Pinkerton found him and asked Shinburn about the methods he had engineered for opening vaults. The result was a meticulously diagrammed written account on the art of safecracking.
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George M. White (1837-1909)
George M. White
Photographer: Boyd
Photograph, circa 1907, from the frontispiece of
George M. White’s book, "The Penalty and Redemption"
Library of Congress
The favorite modus operandi of bank thief George M. White, his Pinkerton file stated, consisted of entering an unsuspecting banker’s home, asking for the combinations to his vaults, and applying torture until he got it. This crude tactic, however, was not always White’s way—at least according to him.
Until he was wrongly convicted for a bank job in New Hampshire, he later claimed, he had been a law-abiding citizen, quite content with his humble lot as an innkeeper. But, once labeled a criminal, White apparently asked himself, “why not?” So, taking his lessons from the best bank robbers of the day, he was quickly outpacing some of his mentors. It was later said that in the course of his long career White had “stolen more money than any other living man.”
For many years, repeated captures and convictions could never convince White of the wisdom of going straight. Finally, during his stay behind bars in the 1890’s, he embraced religion and confessed the errors of his ways. White’s final years found him zealously reciting his book while lecture his sad-happy story of “penalty and redemption.”
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James Dunlap (1840-?)
James Dunlap
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
Although James Dunlap was a battlefield Sergeant and war hero during the Civil War, his heroic devotion to his country did not necessarily inspire similar devotion to peacetime law and order. By the early 1870’s, Dunlap had become the brains behind one of the most prosperous bank-robbing rings in the country. In the morning hours of January 25th, 1876, he and his cohorts walked out of a bank in Northampton, Massachusetts with one of the largest takes in history, a tidy $1,250,000 in cash and securities.
However, soon the Pinkertons caught up with Dunlap and his chief partner at the end of 1877. A few years later, they also captured the conspirator to whom Dunlap and company had entrusted their plunder while they were serving prison terms.
Even in jail, however, Dunlap was not forgotten. Women adored this red-bearded, handsome scoundrel-war hero. It was said that prisoner Dunlap did quite the brisk business, sending to feminine admirers pictures and locks of his wavy hair for a quarter.
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Sophie Lyons (1850-1924)
Sophie Lyons
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
In her memoirs, published in 1913, Sophie Lyons unabashedly described herself as a “thief from the cradle.” Although a trifle exaggerated, the description was apt enough. At age six, while other little girls were taking their first embroidery lessons, young Sophie was being schooled in the art of picking pockets—a skill for which she seemed to have a natural bent.
Marriage in her teens to one Ned Lyons—a bank thief of wide notoriety—expanded Sophie’s horizons, and she was soon gaining experience in everything from bank theft to blackmail. By the late 1880’s, with two prison terms under her belt, she lived in Paris, posing as a socially prominent lady of leisure while stealing the jewels and gold from the city’s elite. It was said that before her activities won her a deportation order, her take had totaled more than $200,000.
Whatever her crimes, her obituary in 1924 stated, “she may have sold some gold bricks and picked some pockets in her day, but whatever her sins, Sophie Lyons never went back on a friend.”
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Ben Chilson (1860-19?)
Ben Chilson
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
Ben Chilson was a makeup artist; however it was not on humans that he practiced his skill, but racehorses. With a few daubs of paint and some cosmetic alterations of the teeth, Chilson could easily make a winning horse look like an established loser. Then, after entering the disguised horse in a race, he and his colleagues would proceed to the betting window and put their money on the twenty-to-one long shot. When the supposed nag crossed the finish line in the lead, Chilson and company would happily collect their winnings.
Although “horse ringing,” as Chilson’s enterprise was called, was not illegal in many states, the Pinkertons circulated photographs of Chilson and urged tracks to ban his presence at races. In the end that was enough and Chilson apparently retired from his former business.
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Fred Wittrock (1858-1921)
Fred Wittrock aka “Terrible Fred”
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
Chicago storekeeper Fred Wittrock was in the habit of seeking escape from his rather humdrum existence by reading about crime in dime novels. After awhile he began to wonder if he, too, might be capable of some of the daring feats of thievery about which he read. One day in November 1886, masked in a black bandanna, he finally put his criminal mettle to the test and, in minutes, was walking out of an express office near St. Louis with a small fortune in cash and securities.
Wittrock, however, wanted notoriety more than money. Within twenty-four hours, he had sent the inside story of his exploit, as well as a few pertinent clues, to the newspapers. Thanks to these helpful hints, Pinkerton agents and police were soon knocking at his door. As they led him away, the mild mannered Wittrock quietly asked if, henceforth, they would please refer to him as “Terrible Fred.” What a narcissistic moron.
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Bill Rudolph (?-1905)
Bill Rudolph
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
Perhaps more than any other criminal they tracked, the Pinkertons wanted Bill Rudolph. A bank robber with few inhibitions about killing, this Missouri outlaw and his partner, George Collins, committed the ultimate sin of shooting and killing a Pinkerton operative.
“The world is not big enough to hide Bill Rudolph,” William Pinkerton told reporters, and with that, an unremitting two-year search after the two men began.
At their respective trials, Rudolph and Collins were both sentenced to hang and off to the gallows they went. Rudolph tried to plea for his life in the name of his “dear old mother,” but it was to no avail. These two murdering outlaws had an appointment with the gallows, and grinning, the hangman followed.
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The Wild Bunch
Wanted Circular for the Wild Bunch, 1902
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
Members of the Wild Bunch
Standing, left to right,
William Carver, Harvey Logan;
seated, left to right,
Harry Longbaugh (Sundance Kid 1802-1909),
Ben Kilpatrick, George Parker (Butch Cassidy 1865-1909)
Photographer: John Swartz
Photograph, circa 1901
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
Harry Longbaugh (Sundance Kid) and his Sweetheart, Etta Place
Photographer: Bliss Brothers
Photograph, circa 1901
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the American West had lost much of its wildness. Westerners had already begun to fence off the prairies with barbed wire, use telephones, and ride bicycles. One aspect of old frontier life, however, remained the same: trains still crisscrossed the land and bandits still followed their smoky trails. Nonetheless, as long as outlaws continued to roam free, the Pinkertons found plenty to do on the plains and in the boomtowns west of the Mississippi.
In the early 1900’s, a bandit gang known as the “Wild Bunch” fell under the watchful eye of the Pinkertons, who chased them from Montana to Texas to New York City and then into the jungles of South America. The members met and banded together at a mountainous hideout for desperadoes in Wyoming called the Hole-in-the-Wall. Although numerous men rode with the Wild Bunch at one time or another, the ringleaders and most-wanted characters were George Parker, alias “Butch Cassidy,” and Harry Longbaugh, alias “The Sundance Kid.”
On June 2nd, 1899, near Wilcox, Wyoming, the Wild Bunch held up the Union Pacific Railroad’s Overland Flyer and made off with $30,000 in unsigned banknotes. After a man hunt by a local posse had failed to bring results, the Pinkertons took up the chase. Other robberies followed.
Two especially lucrative holdups occurred in 1900 and 1901, when the Wild Bunch robbed the First National Bank of Winnemucca, Nevada, of $32,640 and stole $41,500 in banknotes from a Great Northern Railway train near Wagner, Montana—which set a posse of a hundred men on their trail. The gang escaped to Fort Worth, Texas, and disbanded. Some members returned north to continue robbing and ultimately face justice.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid concluded that outlawry in the United States had become too risky. After a brief spree in New York City, the two, with Etta Place, the dark-haired beauty with whom Sundance had fallen in love in Texas, eventually fled to Argentina and began robbing banks there. In 1909, they supposedly met their deaths in a bloody shootout with a troop of Bolivian cavalry at San Vicente, Bolivia. And that was the last that anyone ever heard of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
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The James Gang
Wanted circular for James Gang, 1881
The State Historical Society of Missouri
Frank (1843-1915) and Jesse (1847-1882) James
Tintype, circa 1870
The Amon Carter Museum of Western Art
Jesse James, the notorious Missouri bank and train robber, proved to be one man Pinkerton never got—but then neither did any other officers of the law. For more than a decade, beginning in 1866, Jesse, his brother Frank, and a dozen other companions terrorized the Midwest, looting bank safes, holding up trains, and leaving numerous dead along the way.
After briefly pursuing the James Gang in 1871, Allan Pinkerton launched a bolder search three years later; and the Gang promptly killed two operatives. In 1875 a desperate attempt was made to capture the James brothers at their family homestead in Clay County, Missouri. Under the veil of a frigid January night, a local posse surrounded the house and ordered Jesse and Frank to surrender.
Intended to stir life within the darkened abode, a flare bomb was pitched in through a window. Inside, the startled family watched Jesse’s stepfather nudge the flammable missile into the glowing embers of the fireplace. Instantly an explosion shattered the stillness. The posse rushed in only to find Jesse’s mother, Zerelda Samuel, and his eight-year-old half brother lying seriously wounded. Jesse’s mother eventually lost her right arm, and his bleeding half brother died that night. Jesse and Frank James, however, were nowhere to be found. Apparently friends had forewarned them, as so often happened, of the surprise visit.
The Pinkertons received bad press for their involvement in this bungled episode. The agency vigorously denied that one of its operatives had thrown the “Greek Fire.” Afterwards, the Pinkertons quickly lost track of the James brothers. It wasn’t until April 1882 that they learned that Robert Ford, a former member of the Gang, had just shot and killed Jesse at his home in St. Joseph, Missouri. That following October, Frank James surrendered and was eventually tried for murder but was miraculously acquitted.
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The Reno Brother’s Gang
Frank Reno (died 1868)
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
Miles Ogle, Member of the Reno Gang
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
In the late 1860s, the Reno Brother’s Gang earned the dubious distinction of being the first organized band of train robbers in the United States. The four brothers, John aka “Sim,” Frank, Simon, and William Reno, all former Civil War bounty jumpers, operated in Indiana and Missouri. Joined by several cohorts, they frequently preyed upon the baggage cars of the Adams Express Company running between Indianapolis and New Albany, Indiana.
The Reno Gang succeeded in this business of robbing trains and banks by careful planning and good organization. To reduce the chances of arrest, they courted corrupt politicians and invoked fear throughout the countryside by burning crops and buildings and crippling the cattle of persons suspected of being unfriendly.
The Pinkertons, hired by the victimized Adams Express Company, pursued them to the end. In 1868, Pinkerton agents arrested John Reno at a train station in Seymour, Indiana. For his lead role in the $20,000 burglary of the county treasurer’s office in Gallatin, Missouri, he received a twenty-five-year prison sentence.
Left under the leadership of Frank Reno, the gang struck again and again. On May 22nd, 1868, six members, amply armed, boarded an Ohio & Mississippi Railroad train at Marshfield, Indiana, and robbed it of $97,000 in bonds and securities.
After adding two more detectives to his staff, Allan Pinkerton concentrated his efforts on the Renos and promptly arrested William and Simon in Indianapolis. Later, the Pinkertons arrested Frank Reno and Charles Anderson in Canada for their part in the Marshfield holdup; the other participants, Miles Ogle and Mike Rogers, temporarily went free before eventually being apprehended.
After a tedious extradition process that required President Andrew Johnson’s signature, Frank and Charles were brought from Canada and reunited with William and John Reno in a prison at New Albany, Indiana. In December 1868, before the four could be brought to trial, about two hundred vigilantes stormed the jail and hanged the three brothers from the prison rafters.
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