The Rise and Fall of the Pinkertons

On a cold January night in 1875, a group of men surrounded a farmhouse near Kearney, Missouri, and threw an incendiary device through the window. The device was meant to illuminate the interior so the agents outside could identify their targets. Instead, it detonated. The blast tore through the kitchen, killing a nine-year-old boy named Archie Samuel and destroying the arm of his grandmother, Zerelda Samuel. The men the agents were hunting—Jesse and Frank James—were not even in the house. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency had just committed the worst operational disaster of its existence, and the public outrage that followed would transform the James brothers from wanted outlaws into American folk heroes.

The Scottish Cooper Who Built an Empire

The man behind the agency was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1819, the son of a police sergeant who died after being struck in the head during a Chartist demonstration. Young Allan Pinkerton was pulled from school at ten, apprenticed to a barrel maker, and became involved in the same Chartist movement that had killed his father. When rumors circulated that he had been passing information to authorities, he fled with his new wife Joan to America in 1842.