After a nomadic childhood, Charles Siringo signed on as a teenage cowboy for the noted Texas cattle king, Shanghai Pierce, and began a life that embraced all the hard work, excitement, and adventure readers today associate with the cowboy era. He "rid the Chisholm trail," driving 2,500 heads of cattle from Austin to Kansas; knew Tascosa--now a historic monument--when it was home to raucous saloons, red light districts, and a fair share of violence; and led a posse of cowboys in pursuit of Billy the Kid and his gang.

First published in 1885, Siringo's chronicle of his life as a...

After years of cowboying, Charles A. Siringo had settled down to store-keeping in Caldwell, Kansas, when a blind phrenologist, traveling through, took the measure of his "mule head" and told him that he was "cut out" for detective work. Thereupon, Siringo joined the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1886. A Cowboy Detective chronicles his twenty-two years as an undercover operative in wilder parts of the West, where he rode with the lawless, using more stratagems and guises than Sherlock Holmes to bring them to justice and escaping violent death more often than Dick Tracy. He survived...

Charles Angelo Siringo (1855-1928) was a cowboy, author and detective. He worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency for 22 years.

The true life of the most daring young outlaw of the age. He was the leading spirit in the bloody Lincoln County, New Mexico war. When a bullet from Sheriff Pat Garrett's pistol pierced his breast he was only twenty-one years of age and had killed twenty-one men, not counting Indians. His six years of daring outlawry has never been equaled in the annals of criminal history. The facts set down in this narrative were gotten from the lips of "Billy the Kid," himself, and from such men as Pat Garrett, John W. Poe, Kip McKinnie, Charlie Wall, the Coe brothers, Tom O'Folliard, Henry Brown, John...