The Proof! A Random Identification

Perhaps a year after this incredible tintype cascade began, I finally got a tangible clue, a fact which could prove everything. A tintype was offered for sale which actually had an I.D.... and a whopper of one.

 Master James G. Blaine Jr. and Pinkerton Supervisor Robert Linden.

Offered on ebay, by the same seller from whom I had purchased hundreds of images, was an intriguing photo of a bearded man and a little boy. I had already been studying the Pinkerton detectives because of a number of old photographs already acquired from this person, so I immediately recognized Robert J. Linden, Pinkerton Supervisor who was based in Philadelphia. It was Linden who was in charge of the the famous investigation of the “Molly Maguires,” an Irish terrorist group who had made life hard for the Pennsylvanian “Captains of Industry” in the 1870's. Linden and his men brought the terrorists to Justice. It was his face, but unfortunately he was not the person identified on the back of the photo.

Written on the photo was the name of James G. Blaine Jr.. He was the namesake of “Blaine of Maine,” U.S. Congressman, Speaker of the House, and Secretary of State and even 1884 Presidential candidate James G. Blaine. Junior was born in 1868 and appears in this photo to be around eight or nine years of age... placing the time of the pose sometime around 1877.

This was when the Molly Maguires were captured and prosecuted under Robert Linden's leadership around 1877 and 1878. The connection here is that the crimes perpetrated by the Irish- American miners were done against two companies, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad and the Philadelphia & Reading Coal and Mining Company, in which James G. Blaine possibly had interests, if only political. Blaine had invested in Railroad stocks and was so compromised in these activities that he was even accused of taking bribes from the Union Pacific Railroad. These accusations and their veracity nearly cost him the Republican nomination for the presidency, and probably cost him the election.

But before all of that happening, It would have been considered a great honor for Linden and this little boy, the son of the congressman and railroad advocate and investor to be allowed to pose with the famous Pinkerton man, and especially after twenty men were hung for murders and terrorism against the mines and railroads of Pennsylvania.

Of course, I knew little of this when I purchased the image, only that James G. Blaine was someone concrete whose life paths might then prove my identification of Linden, a truly famous lawman. That Blaine and Linden might have known each other is a safe presumption, and given the name of Blaine Jr. on a tintype which very likely includes Robert J. Linden, this was the first assurance that I had been correct in the other Pinkerton identifications of previous purchases.

This one tintype suggested many things. If it were related to the others, and from the same collection, it suggested that I had stumbled into a photograph collection which very possibly belonged to an influential person, or at least someone akin to one. Someone who at the very least knew the Blaines and perhaps this famous Pinkerton man.

My own experience and reasoning told me that people are more likely to label a photo with the name of someone less familiar, someone who might be significant, but not a name common among them. Someone they or others might be less likely to recognize. People notoriously failed to label individuals everyone in their immediate circle were assumed to recognize.

So then I launched my theory forward... that this was just one of a batch of photos related to other Pinkerton men, collected by a Pinkerton man or Pinkerton staff person or someone interested in or associated with Pinkerton men. Posing with the Blaine boy was a minor honor for the Pinkerton men, who protected and prosecuted the most famous people in the Country. The photo fit well with a dozen or so others I had purchased which featured various famous Pinkerton detectives, and in fact many members of the Pinkerton family.

Comparing the others, which featured the most noted Pinkerton operatives known to the public, I concluded that it might have been a collection made by one of their fans, a person influential enough to ask for and attain these rare tintypes. It was a clever strategy, as tintypes had fallen out of favor, were considered to be of inferior quality, and anyone who had been photographed would part with them, having had better photographs made. These images might easily have been requested by someone like Speaker Blaine, or Linden, but also someone like Mark Twain, of whom I had also acquired images as well of his family and friends.

The circle of possibilities was tightening. Almost all of the images could have been of persons known to Mark Twain, if not people he had actually met, and perhaps even traded photos with him. Mark Twain lived conveniently in New York, and regularly entertained the most famous, most influential persons of the Victorian age, right in his living room. Once he combined his legacy with his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, that circle widened to encompass the most important personalities known to Western Culture. Paine wrote biographies of the most prominent people Twain knew, including Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist who had his own private and public war with... James G. Blaine. In fact it was Nast's cartoons which were credited to have destroyed Blaine's candidacy.

Now it was about this time that I had to really ask myself some hard questions. I was either having some incredible luck, or this tintype “treasure trove” was unfolding like a bizarre delusion in some kind of parallel universe. What were the chances of my identifying scores of photographs, without any ID's, which were believable look-alikes of very famous people, who, and this was important, knew or were in some way related to one another?

This became a maddening investigation of those popular “degrees of separation.” Truly the Victorian era was a “small world.” And now it was swallowing me.

The odds were almost impossible. It became hard to believe that these images were NOT what they appeared to be! I had spent most of my adulthood scanning Ebay for rare images. You find a rare image of a historical person about one in 5000. In the meantime, there are hundreds of look-alikes. Old photographs which look like somebody you recognize, but which do not stand the test of close scrutiny. I had found that first one, totally by accident while killing time, and since then had become addicted to daily scanning the auctions with the hunch that there were probably more. And I was right. Eventually it became almost commonplace to discover the uncommon.

Finally, after so many purchases and educated guesses, all without any authentication, I had an image that claimed, somewhat obscurely, to be of someone plucked from the ashes of history. James G. Baine Jr.. A young solemn-faced lad who grew up under the shadow of one the most powerful men in the United States; Who as the son of such would have grown up around the most important and recognizable individuals to ever be captured on a tintype... the persons staring up at me from hundreds of tintypes...and little James G. Blaine was telling me that he and many of the others were unknown visages lost to history, and that I was not in some kind of self-delusional odyssey.

Little James G. Blaine Jr. had become my historical link to a fabulous find, of epic importance, and the doorkeeper to obscure or unknown histories and mysteries. They would emerge as I researched the images, and at least for me, would not just bring history alive, but would fill my life as if I had stepped into Alice's Wonderland of oddball historical oddities. The faces were familiar, but the stories they told were as original as the tintypes they slept in.

It was huge and yet it was a microcosm of extraneous history, which nobody would care to exhume after all these years. Little details about giants in our American story, details that only their children would remember or cherish... now resurrected for my- and your edification.

Somehow I think, or at least I fantasize that these images were entrusted to me because I could see them, enter into them, and ultimately glean one last morsel of wisdom from each them. And primarily because I was able and willing to share them with you.

So here you are.