Son of the Old West

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

No figure in the Old West lived orshaped 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, Texasin 1855, Charlie went on his first cattle drive at age twelve and spent two decadesliving his boyhood dream as a cowboy. As the dangerous, lucrative “beeves”business boomed, Siringo drove longhorn steers north to the burgeoning MidwestPlains states’ cattle and railroad towns, inevitably crossing paths with suchlegendary figures as Billy the Kid, Bat Masterson, and Shanghai Pierce. In hisearly thirties he joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s Denver office, usinga variety of aliases to investigate violent labor disputes and infiltrateoutlaw gangs such as Butch Cassidy’s train robbing Wild Bunch. As brave as hewas clever, he was often saved by his cowboy training as he traveled to placesthe law had not yet reached.

Siringo’sbestselling, landmark 1885 autobiography, A Texas Cowboy, helpedmake the lowly cowboy a heroic symbol of the American West. His latermemoir, A Cowboy Detective, influenced early hard-boiled crimenovelists for whom the detective story was really the cowboy story in an urbansetting. Sadly sued into debt by the Pinkertons determined to prevent theirsources and methods from being revealed, Siringo eventually sold his beloved New Mexicoranch and moved to Los Angeles, where he advised Hollywood filmmakers, andespecially actor William S. Hart, on their early 1920s Westerns, watching thefrontier history he had known first-hand turned into romantic legend on thescreen.

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