Son of the Old West: The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier

by Nathan Ward

An epic narrative of the Old West told through the vivid, outsized life of cowboy, detective, and chronicler Charlie Siringo

No figure in the Old West lived or shaped its history more fully than Charlie Siringo, as Nathan Ward reveals in his colorful portrait of this epic era and one of its primary protagonists. 

Born in Matagorda, Texas in 1855, Charlie went on his first cattle drive at age twelve and spent two decades living his boyhood dream as a cowboy. As the dangerous, lucrative “beeves” business boomed, Siringo drove longhorn steers north to the burgeoning Midwest Plains states’ cattle and railroad towns, inevitably crossing paths with such legendary figures as Billy the Kid, Bat Masterson, and Shanghai Pierce. In his early thirties he joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s Denver office, using a variety of aliases to investigate violent labor disputes and infiltrate outlaw gangs such as Butch Cassidy’s train robbing Wild Bunch. As brave as he was clever, he was often saved by his cowboy training as he traveled to places the law had not yet reached.

Siringo’s bestselling, landmark 1885 autobiography, A Texas Cowboy, helped make the lowly cowboy a heroic symbol of the American West. His later memoir, A Cowboy Detective, influenced early hard-boiled crime novelists for whom the detective story was really the cowboy story in an urban setting. Sadly sued into debt by the Pinkertons determined to prevent their sources and methods from being revealed, Siringo eventually sold his beloved New Mexico ranch and moved to Los Angeles, where he advised Hollywood filmmakers, and especially actor William S. Hart, on their early 1920s Westerns, watching the frontier history he had known first-hand turned into romantic legend on the screen.

In old age, Charlie Siringo was called “Ulysses of the Wild West” for the long journey he took across the western frontier. Son of the Old West brings him and his legendary world vividly to life.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction

350 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 5, 2023

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good solid biography about a man who often appears on the fringes of many books written about the Old West. Charlie Siringo is a cowboy turned detective who tracked cattle thieves and bank robbers including members of the famed Wild Bunch after joining the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Siringo also helped track bombers and assassins tied to the early labor movement at western mining establishments. This is a good book if one wants to understand the man who appears in so many histories about the Old West.

I highly recommend this book to fans of histories of the American West.

[Ronald Koltnow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coming from Grove, Atlantic on on 5 September 2023
Most of what we know about the Old West is purely fictional, mythology if you will. The exception to this rule is Charles Siringo, cowboy/detective/writer. Siringo did it all; he was a one-man western legend. Siringo raised cattle, worked as a drover on the Chisholm Trail, was a small town shop-owner, and became a Pinkerton operative, all while writing memoirs about his experiences. Although not as well known as many of his contemporaries (he befriended Billy the Kid before he joined the hunt to bring him to justice), Siringo's books have inspired many. His A TEXAS COWBOY, OR FIFTEEN YEARS ON THE HURRICANE DECK OF A SPANISH PONY is now available in a Viking Classic edition.

Nathan Ward has done an amazing job of tracing Siringo's ups and downs. Using the legend's own writings and other sources, Ward makes Siringo live again; a small, gentlemanly tough guy has found his ideal chronicler. The narrative is episodic, but there are so many episodes to relate. Siringo ended his days, as many western giants did, in Hollywood, working as a technical adviser to William S. Hart (a devoted Siringo admirer). How much of that mythology of the Old West came directly from Siringo's books? Hard to say, but we lovers of cowboy lore owe him a huge debt of gratitude. We owe a debt to Ward too for sharing Siringo with us.

[Melinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by my favorite librarian, and was an excellent choice!

Charlie Siringo was born in 1855 and died in 1928. His varied occupations included a cattle drive cowboy, a Pinkerton detective, and a consultant and actor in Hollywood westerns. This book explores each of those jobs, plus the dozens of other jobs he held while making a living.

Just fascinating to see the span of history held within his lifetime. I am now interested in reading Siringo's own books, "A Cowboy Detective" and "Lone Star Cowboy".

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent history of the old west, cattle rustlers, and guys , Marshall’s and women of ill repute. Especially interesting was the section on Siringo and the Hollywood cowboys. Recommended.

[patrick Lorelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

A true story of a man named Charlie Siringo. Went on his first cattle drive at twelve and then did the cowboy thing for a few decades until he began working for the Pinkertons. The story from there has him infiltrating different gangs to make arrests from Mexico to Alaska. By different disguises he he would take on a whole new person to get information to make the arrests. At times I felt like he was the character from the old T.V. show Wild, Wild West Artemus Gilmore who would come up with different designs and disguises. This man was the real thing. Later he would wright a book and be sued by the Pinkertons who were not all that upright themselves by the early 1900’s, but that is another story. Here is a book about a real man whom I had never heard of before and I am glad I read this book.

[Lou Chodosh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry; the author merely sums up others’ research, and Siringo‘s own writing .Worse, the writing style is atrocious: timelines are mixed up, and the syntax is awful. Some of the stories were almost impossible to follow. I gave up at about 100 pages. Love learning about the old west, but this was not worth the effort .

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early biographical section was weak as was his final years but in between was riveting. The undercover work for the Pinkertons took up much of his adult life and included some of their biggest cases involving The Hole in the Wall gang and Big Bill Hayward. All in all, it was entertaining but of little historical value.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting and very readable.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed Son of the Old West: The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier by Nathan Ward. This is an interesting and intriguing biography of a man who lived larger than life in his own time and seems to have been mostly forgotten today. Though some of Siringo's adventures seem more like fiction than fact, the author does a good job of separating the exaggerated tall tale from the verifiable truth.

I knew nothing about Charlie Siringo before reading this book, I just had a vague recollection of the name - actually I mistakenly thought he was a member of the "super posse" that sent outlaw Butch Cassidy fleeing out of the country. Pretty sure I had confused him with Joe Lafors another lawman of the era who Charlie Siringo worked with a time or two (FYI: Siringo didn't think too much of Lafors's abilities as a lawman).

If you're old enough to remember the old TV show The Wild Wild West, imagine someone who is the embodiment of both man of action James West and master of disguise Artimus Gordon; obviously that's an exaggerated example but not by all that much.

Siringo was really a remarkable person who, in many ways, personified what we tend to think of as that indomitable Old West spirit; Nowhere is that more evident than in his long-standing legal battles with The Pinkerton Detective Agency over the right of Siringo to publish his memoirs. That's an entirely different glimpse of history.

I found this book to be a fascinating read. Recommended for anyone with a love of history, particularly those who enjoy learning about America's Old West.

[spencer wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a bit sad. You read about the larger than life adventures of someone who ultimately ends up broke and penniless in a world that largely would never know of the things he did. It takes a strong person to continue without stopping, and the man covered in the book was one. Despite being sued into debt, he never backed down from sharing his knowledge of criminal science (to use a modern term) to help others. Part western, part slice of life, part corporate greed, this book is very multi-faceted.