Charlie Siringo: The Texas Cowboy Who Wrote the First Cowboy Memoir

Who was Charlie Siringo?

Charles Angelo Siringo was a Texas cowboy, author and detective born on February 7, 1855, in Matagorda County, Texas. The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains entry credits him with writing the first cowboy autobiography, and a Wyoming History essay calls it one of the best books ever written about cowboy life.

He died on October 28, 1928, in Altadena, California, near Los Angeles. The Haymarket bombing in Chicago in May 1886, which killed six police officers and four civilians, came just after his first book, and four days later he joined the Pinkerton agency. He was married four times.

Early life and the trail

Siringo was born to an Italian father and an Irish mother, and his father died while he was small. By age 11 he was working on Texas ranches. In the 1870s he drove cattle north on the Chisholm Trail to Abilene and Dodge City, Kansas.

The Oklahoma Historical Society notes that the Abilene Cattle Trail was named for the trader Jesse Chisholm at least by 1870 and is estimated to have carried six million cattle in its life. Siringo's trips were part of that flow of Texas herds to Kansas railheads, where buyers shipped them east.

In the late 1870s he helped establish the LX Ranch in the Texas Panhandle, where by 1878 he was 23 and working as a cowhand.

Billy the Kid and the LX cattle

His LX boss sent him to New Mexico Territory to recover cattle stolen by Billy the Kid and his associates. After about seven months, a posse returned to Texas with a herd of a few thousand head, according to the Wyoming History essay. The article calls this his first taste of undercover work.

Siringo later wrote about the outlaw, publishing a History of Billy the Kid in 1920.

What is A Texas Cowboy?

In 1885 Siringo published A Texas Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony. The title is sometimes spelled A Texas Cow Boy, as on Project Gutenberg. The first edition sold out quickly, and the Great Plains encyclopedia calls it a best-seller.

By then he had left ranching to run a store in Caldwell, Kansas, where he married Mamie Lloyd. The family later moved to Chicago.

Pinkerton years and later books

Siringo worked for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency for about two decades. In 1891 he infiltrated striking miners near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and after the 1899 and 1900 robberies in Wyoming he followed leads on Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch for about four years. In 1906 he guarded the confessed bomber Harry Orchard, and he resigned after the Haywood trial.

His later books included A Cowboy Detective (1912), A Lone Star Cowboy (1919) and Riata and Spurs (1927). In 1922 he sold his ranch near Santa Fe and moved to California because of lung trouble.

Further reading

For more on trail driving and range life, see the ranching section of farm.FM, and a farm.FM story about trail driving. A Texas Cow Boy is free to read online at Project Gutenberg.