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The Pinks: The First Women Detectives, Operatives, and Spies with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency


President-elect Abraham Lincoln showed no sign of being nervous or apprehensive about the late night ride Pinkerton operatives arranged for him to take on February 23, 1861. Kate Warne noted in her records of the events surrounding Mr. Lincoln leaving Pennsylvania that he was cooperative and congenial.

When the politician arrived at the depot in Baltimore with his colleagues and confidants, Ward Hill Lamon and Allan Pinkerton, he was focused and quiet. He was stooped over and leaning on Pinkerton’s arm. The posture helped disguise his height, and when Kate greeted with a slight hug and called him “brother,” no one outside the small group thought anything of the exchange. For all anyone knew, Kate and Mr. Lincoln were siblings embarking on a trip together. Neither the porter nor the train’s brakeman noticed Mr. Lincoln as the president-elect. Kate made it clear to the limited, railroad staff on board that her brother was not well and in need of solitude.

It took a mere two minutes from the time the distinguished orator reached the depot until he and his companions were comfortably on board the special train. The conductor was instructed to leave the station only after he was handed a package Pinkerton had told him to expect. The conductor was informed the package contained important government documents that needed to be kept secret and delivered to Washington with “great haste.” In truth the documents were a bundle of newspapers wrapped and sealed.

The bell on the engine clanged, and the train lurched forward. The gas lamps in the sleeping berths in Mr. Lincoln’s car were not lit, and the shades were pulled. Kate and Pinkerton agreed it would be best to prevent curious passengers waiting at various stops from seeing in and possibly recognizing the president-elect. No one spoke as the train slowly pulled away from the station. All hoped the journey would be uneventful and were hesitant to make a sound for fear any conversation might jeopardize what had been done to get Mr. Lincoln to this point. It was Mr. Lincoln who broke the silence with an amusing story he had shared with Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtain the previous evening.
“I used to know an old farmer out in Illinois,” Mr. Lincoln told the three around him. “He took it into his head to venture into raising hogs. So he sent out to Europe and imported the finest breed of hogs that he could buy. The prize hog was put in a pen and the farmer’s two mischievous boys, James and John, were told to be sure not to let it out. But James let the brute out the very next day. The hog went straight for the boys and drove John up a tree. Then it went for the seat of James’ trousers and the only way the boy could save himself was by holding onto the porker’s tail. The hog would not give up his hunt or the boy his hold. After they had made a good many circles around the tree, the boy’s courage began to give out, and he shouted to his brother: ‘I say, John, come down quick and help me let go of this hog.’

Mr. Lincoln’s traveling companions smiled politely and stifled a chuckle. Had the circumstances been different, perhaps they would have laughed aloud. Undaunted by the trio’s subdued response, the president-elect continued to regale them with amusing tales of the people he’d met and experiences they shared. The train gained speed and soon Philadelphia was disappearing behind them.


To learn more about Operative Ellen, the cases she worked, and the other women Pinkerton agents read
The Pinks: The First Women Detectives, Operatives, and Spies with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

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Her smile could be shy; her glance at times demure, but her ears never missed a secret. A master of disguises, she changed her accent at will, infiltrated social gatherings and collected information no man was able to obtain. She cried on command, yet was stoic while interrogating a suspect. She never, ever slept on the job. She was a detective working for the nation’s first security service—the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the organization and pioneer in the field, had dared to hire women as agents.

Recognized by many historians as America’s first female detective, Kate Warne persuaded Pinkerton to take a chance on her sleuthing skills in 1856. Prior to her being hired at the agency, the company’s only female employees fulfilled secretarial duties.
Born on August 25, 1819, in Glasgow, a port city in Scotland, Pinkerton followed the trade of a cooper until the age of 33. Ending up in the Chicago area, he uncovered a ring of counterfeiters. The fame of catching those criminals, together with his success in capturing horse thieves, gave Pinkerton a wide, local reputation; he was made deputy sheriff of Kane County, in which capacity he became the terror of cattle thieves, horse thieves, counterfeiters and mail robbers all over Illinois. The born detective leapt out of obscurity, parlaying his talent into a company he established in 1850. His excellent instinct for selecting the right people to work for him extended to Warne, who proved herself to be one of his finest agents.

Over the course of Warne’s 12-year career as an agent, she assumed numerous aliases. In her various months-long stints undercover, in roles that ranged from a benevolent neighbor to an eccentric fortune teller, Warne, just as the other female investigators did, willingly put herself in harm’s way to resolve a case. Whether they were searching the home of a suspected murderer for clues or transporting classified material past armed soldiers, Lady Pinkerton agents, or Pinks, demonstrated they were fearless and capable.
After a little more than four years, Warne had so impressed Pinkerton with her aptitude for investigation and observation that he made her the head of all the female detectives at the agency. In 1861, he placed her in charge of the Union Intelligence Service, a forerunner of our nation’s Secret Service. The function of the agency was to obtain information about the Confederacy’s resources and plans, and to prevent said news from reaching the Rebel army. Warne and the other lady operatives excelled at this duty.
Warne had come by her job at the Pinkerton National Detective Agency when she walked in off the street, introduced herself and suggested Pinkerton hire her, not as a secretary, but as a detective.

“Women could be most useful in worming out secrets in many places which would be impossible for a male detective,” Warne told Pinkerton, as he recalled years later in his memoirs.

The idea of a female detective intrigued him, and he hired her. One of the most important cases she worked on while employed with the company involved President-elect Abraham Lincoln. After a plot to assassinate the politician was discovered, Warne helped secret the future president to Washington, D.C. for the inauguration into office.
The Mixed-Race Agent
Hattie Lewis, another notable Pinkerton agent, was hired in 1860. She was not only the second woman employed at the world-famous detective agency, but historians believe she was also the agency’s first mixed-race female employee.
Pinkerton looked beyond gender and race, as few did at the time. In the late 1840s, he had been active on the Underground Railroad and helped many runaway slaves escape to Canada. He spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in September 1850, which penalized officials who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave and subjected them to a fine of $1,000. Since suspected fugitive slaves were ineligible for a trial, and therefore could not defend themselves against accusations, the law resulted in the kidnapping and conscription of free blacks into slavery.

Chicago became a clearinghouse for runaway slaves. In the rural area of Dundee where Pinkerton resided, some enterprising young men hunted fugitive slaves for the rewards. Outraged by these “blood hounds,” Pinkerton sought ways to defy them. In 1857, he was a member of a delegation called on to investigate a slave catcher passing through town. This investigation may have been where he met Lawton. Some of her family was suspected of being among a party of slaves Pinkerton sheltered to disperse to Canada.
Born in 1837, Lawton, a widow, was described by Pinkerton as “delicate and driven.” He wrote that “her complexion was fresh and rose-like in the morning. Her hair fell in flowing tresses. She appeared careless and entirely at ease, but a close observer would have noticed a compression of the small lips, and a fixedness in the sparkling eyes that told of a purpose to be accomplished.”

Lawton played a key role at the detective agency for many years, assuming various identities and ferreting out information that aided in solving numerous cases. (Her years of service are unclear because the majority of Pinkerton records were destroyed in a fire in Chicago in 1931.) In one of her most dangerous assignments, she gathered intelligence about Confederate troop movements. In 1862, Lawton and Pinkerton operative Timothy W. Webster were dispatched to Richmond, Virginia, posing as a wealthy married couple. Their primary objective was to gain acceptance from Southern sympathizers in the area and learn their plans to thwart the Union’s military efforts.

The “Genteel Woman Agent”
In late 1861, Pinkerton sent another eager female detective, Elizabeth H. Baker, to the Confederate capital to acquire information about the Rebel navy. Baker had been working as an operative for Pinkerton’s detective agency since late 1857, sometimes traveling outside of Chicago to team with other agents on robbery and missing person cases.
Prior to moving to the Midwest, she had lived in Virginia, so she was well acquainted with the customs and the people of the region. Pinkerton called her a “genteel woman agent,” and when the Civil War broke out, he considered her a “more than suitable” candidate for the assignment.

Baker not only managed to finagle an invitation to the home of a Confederate Navy officer and his wife living in Richmond, but also an invitation to a demonstration of Rebel submarine vessels equipped with torpedoes. Baker sketched all she had seen during the demonstration of the submarine, Merrimack, designed to battle against Union blockade ships, which included a drawing of the submarine and the people it took to man the vessel.

The Navy Spy
While Baker monitored the Merrimack’s military capabilities, another operative was acquiring a set of the submarine plans.

During her employment as a seamstress and housekeeper for a Rebel engineer who was restoring the steam-powered frigate, free slave Mary Touvestre (or Louvestre) overheard the engineer discussing the importance of the vessel as a weapon against the Union. She offered this information to her country and came to meet Pinkerton through the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles.

Since the engineer brought the plans for the ship home with him nightly, Touvestre plotted to steal the plans and turn them over to Union forces. In late September 1861, she sewed the vital information into the hem of her dress.

She set out, on foot, from Portsmith, Virginia, to the nation’s capital on a nearly 200-mile journey. Secreting the plans out of Virginia past enemy lines was difficult enough, but gaining an audience with a high-ranking military official also proved challenging; Touvestre had to talk her way around members of Secretary Welles’s staff in order to see him.

When she finally spoke with Welles, she explained her mission and presented him with the plans for the vessel. The secretary commended her bravery and dedication to her country; had she been captured by the Confederates, they surely would have killed her.

The Southern Belle

Elizabeth Van Lew masqueraded as a nurse at the Libby Prison near Richmond, Virginia, but in truth, the Southern belle was one of Pinkerton’s agents.

Federal prisoners in and out of the hospital furnished Van Lew with information vital to the North’s fight against the South. From the multi-windowed prison, they accurately estimated the strength of the passing troops and supply trains, and the destinations they were headed when they left town. They shared with her conversations about planned attacks and casualties that they overheard between surgeons, orderlies and guards. Van Lew dispatched the coded communication to secret service officials in Washington, D.C.

Loyal to His Pinks

Time and time again, the Lady Pinks proved their value to the agency. “It has been my principle to use females for the detection of crime where it has been useful and necessary,” Pinkerton noted in his memoirs. “…I intend to still use females whenever it can be done judiciously. I must do it or sacrifice my theory, practice and truth. I think I am right and if that is the case, female detectives must be allowed in my agency.”
Pinkerton was loyal to the women in his employ. The first one, Warne, inspired his company’s slogan, in 1861. While on assignment to protect President-elect Lincoln, Warne refused to close her eyes and rest until the politician was out of danger. Thus was born, “We Never Sleep,” scrawled below an all-seeing eye.

Although women were not admitted to any of America’s police forces until 1891 nor widely accepted as detectives until 1903, Warne and the Lady Pinks she trained paved the way for future female officers and investigators, and are regarded as trailblazers in the private eye industry.

Enter for a chance to win a copy of
The Pinks: The First Women Detectives, Operatives, and Spies with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency


Jack Zahran, president of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, wrote the foreword for The Pinks. I’m honored he contributed to the book.

When Allan Pinkerton founded the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1850, he not only became the world’s first “private eye,” he also established an organization that would set the global standard for investigative and security excellence for generations to come.
But the agency had only just begun the process of setting that standard when Kate Warne walked into Allan Pinkerton’s office six years later and asked for a job. Her request was well timed. Pinkerton was keenly focused on new opportunities and was consciously looking to make bold choices that reinforced his vision of Pinkerton as an innovator and a disruptor.
Warne’s confidence and persuasive skills were impressive, and Pinkerton’s flexibility and willingness to “defy convention” perhaps equally so. It is to his credit, and to the enduring credit of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, that it took Pinkerton less than twenty-four hours to inform Warne that he would hire her—a decision that made her the nation’s first female detective. It was a remarkable turn of events at a time when only 15 percent of women held jobs outside of the home, and contemporary ideas about what constituted “women’s work” severely limited employment opportunities for women.
Kate Warne, and the accomplished women who played such an important role in building the Pinkerton Detective Agency into an iconic global security and law enforcement institution, made it abundantly clear that the prevailing definition of “women’s work” was not just inadequate, but wholly obsolete.
Kate’s story, and the stories of all of these remarkable female operatives—presented so beautifully and in such rich detail here in this fascinating and important book—are not just a moving reminder of the achievements of a handful of bold pioneers, they are also a remarkable testament to the exemplary tradition of innovation that has distinguished the Pinkerton name over the course of more than a century and a half of dedicated service.
Allan Pinkerton was very clear about the fact that he wanted his company to be fearless and to have a “reputation for using innovative methods to achieve its goals.” What is remarkable is not just the aspiration, but the execution: This founding vision would grow into a long-standing tradition of innovation and a commitment to inspired service that became intricately woven into Pinkerton’s organizational DNA.
Pinkerton’s enduring legacy of bold moves, brave choices, and the relentless pursuit of excellence is much more than just an aging résumé—it is the foundation for an organization that remains on the cutting edge. Today, the company that predates the Civil War not only remains relevant, but has continued to establish itself as a dynamic and innovative presence on the world stage. Pinkerton is a recognized industry leader in developing forward-looking security and risk management solutions for national and international corporations. Remarkably, an organization that once protected Midwestern railways and pursued famous outlaws like Jesse James and Butch Cassidy is now providing sophisticated corporate risk management strategies and high-level security services for clients across the globe, setting a twenty-first-century standard for corporate risk management.
Now, as then, Pinkerton understands that combating new and emerging threats and serving its clients requires a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom, and embrace new assets and new ideas—whether they are the world’s first female detectives or new cybersecurity protocols. From investigative and private detective work to security and corporate risk consulting, Pinkerton prides itself on doing whatever it takes to keep its clients safe and to protect their assets and their interests. That resolve is one of the biggest reasons why an agency that was protecting Abraham Lincoln was also on the ground in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and why the principles and practices that were in place almost eighty years before the discovery of penicillin still apply to an organization that provides risk management services to some of the world’s most innovative enterprises in 2016.
As you read and enjoy these fascinating profiles of gifted Pinkerton operatives, you will readily see how their work and their character exemplified the agency’s values of Integrity, Vigilance, and Excellence. Ultimately, those attributes are at the heart of these tales, and at the heart of the larger Pinkerton story. It’s a history that spans three centuries, with compelling new chapters still being written each and every day.


To learn more about Kate Warne, the cases she worked, and the other women Pinkerton agents read
The Pinks: The First Women Detectives, Operatives, and Spies with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency

Enter now to win a copy of Mochi’s War: Tragedy of Sand Creek

Review of Mochi’s War from Library Journal

Historian Enss and Kanzanjian (coauthors, None Wounded, None Missing, All Dead) succeed in personalizing one of America’s most troubling memories, the brutal and unprovoked massacre of a sleeping village of Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples at Sand Creek (present-day Colorado) by troops of the Colorado Volunteers in November 1864. This still controversial military engagement (see Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre) sets the background in which Mochi, a Cheyenne woman, lost her entire family and barely survived herself, by killing a soldier and then fleeing her camp. She reinvented herself as a Dog Soldier and member of the Bowstring Society, one of the few females to claim association in these elite Cheyenne warrior groups. She remarried, to Medicine Water, himself a military leader, and they in turn brutally raided and avenged themselves on American soldiers and settlers alike for over a decade. The authors have again collaborated to write Western history in an accurate yet accessible manner for mainstream readers. They provide a graphic account of the Plains Indian Wars from 1864 to 1875. VERDICT Highly recommended for adult readers of Western and Native American history, this biographical account provides a counterpoint to the many works that have mythologized such women as Pocahontas and Sacajawea.
—Nathan Bender, Albany Cty. P.L., Laramie, WY

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