The Private Investigator - Highlighting the Pinkertons

When Jesse James and his Wild Bunch had finally robbed one bank too many, Allan Pinkerton and his son William stepped up to exert a very terrifying pressure upon the outlaws. Intelligent, incredibly tenacious, physically powerful, fearless, and with an almost fanatical devotion for the laws of their land, they were without a doubt two of America’s greatest detectives.

Allan Pinkerton founded his private investigation agency in 1850 and can be described as the nation’s first civilian FBI-like agency. The Pinkertons were pioneers in the field of criminology and pursued Jesse James and his fellow outlaws under the most primitive of conditions.

There was no central fingerprint filing system in Washington, no rogues gallery, no most wanted descriptions being sent to each of the police stations in the fifty states at the touch of a button, no ballistics or modern techniques from which a criminal could be made by his patterns, his left-over fingerprints, or his DNA. Nothing that like existed for the Pinkertons. All they had was a deep desire to uphold the law and an even deeper desire to catch those running loose breaking it.

They also had a great desire to keep pristine records of every account, and as a result, the Pinkerton agency files are legendary themselves. They started the first rogues gallery that included pictures and physical descriptions, as well as laying the foundations for tracking a criminal’s habits.

And the job of a private investigator was not an easy one. For months they were riding horseback, following dead leads (literally), and endlessly questioning bystanders, before finally picking up the trail that led them into hostile territories infested with murderous outlaws and their henchmen.

When the first four bank robberies led by Jesse James and his gang rocked the nation, Allan Pinkerton and his agency were called in to hunt down the bandits once and for all. Pinkerton’s prestige was well-known by this time, but more than that, it was understood that he and his agency were incorruptible to the core. No bribes, liquor, or prostitutes could sway them, and men had tried.

And, in a humorous twist, while the bandits feared and hated the Pinkertons, they grew to respect them for their fair dealings. The Pinkertons would pursue any bandit until captured, but once the criminal was given a chance to repay his debt to society, he was a free man in their eyes.

The Private Investigator - Highlighting the Pinkertons