Mark Twain's least known obsession

Most lovers of things Twain are aware of his love of Joan of Arc, her, her legend, the book he wrote about her. His love of women in general. He rarely missed an opportunity to edify women in society. Twain loved to tear down the mighty and encourage the less powerful; to balance the scales of social justice. He loved underdogs. Travel. Adventure, as long as he didn't have to sweat. Obviously, he loved to write. He loved making fun... of people, himself... but he is not famous for his most absurd satires about ... detectives. And there is a reason. It was not his best work.

Still, among this collection, which I believe came from the files of America's most beloved author, were a number of photographic images of the Pinkerton men. Allan Pinkerton founded the predecessor of the Secret Service when Abraham Lincoln was elected and spied for him during the Civil War, and eventually started an independent detective agency, which became famous the world over. 

 Originally named Samuel Clemens, Twain may have learned of them through his brother Orion Clemens, a Lincoln appointee who served as Secretary of the Nevada Territory. A Southerner at heart, Sam stayed aloof of the war, after serving shortly as an officer in the Confederacy when U. S. Grant invaded his station. He immediately sought safer climes when the shooting started.

As a Missourian, he would have followed the adventures of the Pinkertons during their most deadly and frustrating assignment; the pursuit of the Southern outlaw Jesse James and his gang. We have reason today to believe that Mark Twain not only met Jesse James but may have been entrusted to tell his life story. 

So it would not have been strange to find photos of these two groups among this huge collection, even though Mark Twain was consistently sarcastic if not downright cynical about the Pinkertons and their kind. Several lesser known Twain novels made a public mockery of all detectivedom; The Stolen White Elephant; Simon Wheeler: Detective. He even made Tom Sawyer into a detective! He seemed to love heckling the legendary lawmen, even when they were probably tracking him during his bankrupt years- for his exasperated debtors. HOW he obtained such personal images.... of Pinkerton's sons as youths, even Pinkerton's daughter... is a mystery. 

My guess is that if Mark Twain, one of the most famous writers in the world, contacted the Pinkertons, expressing his intention to write a detective novel, or perhaps a biography of the agency's founder, they would have seen the inquiry as a huge public relations opportunity. 

Photographs of the Pinkertons were not available to the public, for obvious reasons. Photographs of their families even less. Only someone of impeccable reputation would have been made privy to such things... only someone like Mark Twain. Twain's closest friend and official handler, Albert Bigelow Paine, later specialized in biographies of the most important contemporary Americans... and even did a bio of the famous Texas Ranger Bill McDonald, and might easily have negotiated with the second or third generation of Pinkertons when the glory days were over, to do a biography of the world's most famous detective. 

However the images found their way to an Ebay auction, along with hundreds of other rare and important Victorian tintypes, we will never know. But the chance to look into a Pinkerton family photo album has never been seen before. Anywhere.

Two tintypes which feature the legendary detective, Allan Pinkerton. The one in the center is a rare image of Pinkerton, after his stroke, I believe because of the frailty in his normally menacing eyes and the unpretentious grimace.  The other, what is sure to be a controversial pose with a young Charlie Siringo, maybe before they were even supposed to have met! I am proposing that Siringo sought out The Pinkerton agency, perhaps as an informant, even before he released his first book. In the book he claimed to have more than casual knowledge about Billy the Kid and his gang. He may have posed with the famous sleuth as a budding writer, never imagining that someday he would be working for him as a detective, in fact one of the agency's most trusted. 

 One of the few large cabinet cards in the collection... in the middle and the face on left enlarged for comparison. William was the bad ass, Robert more the office type.

This seems to be a gathering of ex-Pinkertons. Charlie Siringo wrote a "tell all" after retiring, and then his detective books were systematically blocked by Pinkerton lawyers, who in one case had an entire publication burned, because of non-disclosure clauses in his contract. Siringo became a bit of a Pinkerton critic and skeptic himself. He was finally allowed to release his memoirs, but was forbidden to use real names or reveal real faces of his cohorts. 

 The girl in this center image looked very much like Allan Pinkerton's daughter Joan, who married well, and was protected from all the dangers the Pinkertons thrived on. Yes, she married into the Chalmers of Allis-Chalmers.

The personal nature of several of these tintypes suggests more of a familial relationship between the Pinkertons and the collector of these images. The range from the Civil War to the Turn of the Century, which suggests a longstanding, if not longsuffering connection is a rare glimpse into the first 40 years of the world's most famous detective agency, no matter who was at odds with them!

Connecting the Monolithic Dots- with no help!

 Son of the legendary Allan Pinkerton, it was William who relentlessly pursued Jesse James, and was blamed for the explosion which blew off the arm of the outlaw's mother. My photo of him is a full length portrait on a cabinet card, in the center, closer detail of his face on the left.

It was about a year ago when I became engrossed in the purchase of a lifetime... actually purchases of a lifetime, what you now peruse as “The Stubborn Flame,” which took almost a year to complete. During that time I became so excited and confident about my acquisitions that I began to reach out to some of those whom I presumed were the acknowledged “experts” in the field of American history, some local and some regional, to try to get some verification.

I soon found out how hard it was to get anyone to even look at my finds, much less agree about their importance. So many frauds were floating around in the stream of historical imagery that everyone I contacted reacted with ambivalence or skepticism. I have to add, that my earliest guess was that these tintypes were the remnants of some kind of law enforcement rogues gallery, probably of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Over time I learned that the images were formal portraits, and thus not the correct type to be “rogues.” Sadly, this incorrect assumption alone was enough of a red flag to distance my skeptics.

 Courageous and cunning Robert McParland, the undercover Pinkerton detective who ensnared a whole gang of terrorists in Pennsylvania. Mine is the tintype in the center.

I contacted some of the history authors whom I had met during my career as an artist, those whom I knew at least respected me as competent in my chosen field of historical illustration. Surely one of them could use some the images in their various projects... but again, aloofness and disbelief. I would have become discouraged, except the images just kept coming. There was no time to let my feelings interfere with the amazing collection gathering on my living room table. Soon I transported them to a safety deposit box, so sure was I about their value.

One of the authors I contacted was Max McCoy, by email. Mr. McCoy's name may not ring a bell, but his most famous creation will: Indiana Jones. I was not acquainted enough with him at the time to even know that! I approached him because he had published an article about Albert Bigelow Paine (Mark Twain's biographer) in The New Territory magazine, perhaps the first of its kind, which shed light into Paine's darker personal and literary secrets. Through the historical persons appearing in my collection, I had begun to deduct that my collection was possibly the combination of Paine's and Twain's life stories. It seemed unlikely at the time that either of the men might have known all of the famous individuals whose images were piling up each week. And I suspected that McCoy could help orient me to what I had discovered so far.

IF I am right, a very rare tintype, (center) probably made from

 an earlier Ambrotype, of the beautiful mother of outlaws

 Jesse and Frank James.

McCoy was fairly underwhelmed with my project, did not see what I saw, and our correspondence went no further. It kind of disappointed me, because Max McCoy was a treasure trove of knowledge about the pond I was wading in, and could have saved me a lot of time...and since his recusal I have learned just how much. There were several families or groups which the tintypes seemed to be representing, the Samuel Clemenses, the Pinkerton Detectives, and bizarrely, the Jesse Jameses... whom McCoy would have recognized immediately- what I have just recently figured out, that they were all ASSOCIATED in someway.

A tintype and a carte de visit of Jesse James
(numbered) as a boy and as an adolescent.
His ears made his visage unique.

It turns out Max McCoy had also written a book based on papers probably typed by Albert Bigelow Paine, which suggested that Mark Twain and Jesse James were actually known to one another, and Twain had considered writing the life story of the famous outlaw. This was not known to me until recently. McCoy took a charred and tattered old manuscript and finished what Twain or Paine had started. According to his account, rumors of Jesse James's death had also been greatly exaggerated, and he tracked down Mark Twain as an old man... long after he was supposedly dead, and proposed that the beloved folklorist interview him and tell the true story of his life and crimes.

Frank James and (Half) Sisters

The tintype on the far right (enlarged in the middle) is mine, 

now digitally restored- as are most of the images you see.

 They were so dingy that it took some enhancement for the 

average viewer to even consider the similarities that I saw. 

Three of the four individuals in the photo are very 

believably members of the James family.  These were such 

rare and personal photos, it means whoever was given 

custody had paramount access to the Jameses. They are 

evidence of a more than casual acquaintance with the 

most clandestine of clans.

Knowing this fact, that even Max McCoy thought that Twain and James were solidly connected, sure would have lit a fire under my dampened ashes... but I had to relocate to Bell County and other more urgent distractions, and the find of the century and the facts to substantiate it would have to wait for almost a year. 

Not only could McCoy have told me that Mark Twain was very interested in Jesse James, even invested in him, and might easily have compiled a stash of James family photographs, but that he also was a huge fan of detective stories, and wrote at least two lampoons of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The dots were begging to be connected.

It is also easy to imagine that the Pinkertons gladly submitted materials for Twain's books, after their patriarch Allan Pinkerton had passed away and no longer published his detective mysteries... at least until they saw with great angst that he had aimed his merciless sword of satire at them and their reputation. 

Jim Younger, the bruiser of the James-Younger gang. He was wounded but survived the "Great Northfield Raid" and was captured.
 

Now, after all of this time, I am connecting the dots. The major groups I had randomly purchased were all legitimately associated through Mark Twain! The rare if not impossible discovery that McCoy and others would not, could not believe, has grown geometrically, in size and importance. And even they would have to wonder, if I was going to imagine or fabricate a find of antique tintypes, that I would find, little by little, images of individuals who were not only related, but groups of people which were amazingly associated with one another... so much so that history has provided me the unmistakable provenance of the whole collection.

 

 Of "Dr. Livingston, I presume" fame, Sir Henry Stanley

 and his wife were often guests at the Clemens home.

The odds of finding so many related people, most of which I had never seen or heard of before, is actually less than the minute odds of finding hundreds of amazing and convincing look-alikes of the same people, all from one source, and all in a fairly short period of time. The odds of reality are slim, the odds of a parallel universe are much less.

 A very young Albert Einstein.

So I concede, this is a mountain of suggestive material... so I will no doubt be wrong about some of my identifications. But I will be right about hundreds of them... and so I propose to you that this collection is the most exciting, the most rare and probably the most revealing Victorian image gallery offered in modern times. Many of the persons you will see here, as famous as they are, may have never been photographed but a few times... In some case the photos here of them are better than any extant. I know that is a mouthful, and it sounds arrogant to me.. but after checking and re-checking, (because I hate rejection and I hate embarrassment even worse), I am sure they are what they are. I welcome your assessments and reactions. Just be courteous in your observations!

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.

The REST of the Story!

When I started this blog (actually a book! See the chapters over on  the right) four months ago, I had waited until I had scrounged up a little perspective on the photographs featured here. Some chance purchases evolved into an adventure, and I was sharing it play-by-play with my readers. I had no idea it was only just beginning. I thought I understood what was unfolding in front of me... if you read the entries below you will see that a zillion things were swimming in my head...

 This RARE antique image kept showing up in a collection where I had been purchasing tintypes... I wondered if they might be Pinkerton Detectives, as the elderly man in the middle on the front row looked hauntingly like an elderly Charlie Siringo, the famous "Cowboy Detective."

About the time that I was kicking back and getting mentally (and financially!) fatigued with this whole saga, hoping it was winding down... I turned another page into THE REAL STORY.  A single tintype was SCREAMING, trying to tell me what it was all about... and I was dubious... but I am now convinced that this entire collection of extraordinary antique images was originally in the files of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. What I have here, now over a hundred tintypes, are the remnants of their HUGE, famous rogues gallery. And that explains why I had found so many images of Civil War spies early on ...

 I have managed to identify, to my satisfaction, four of the six Pinkerton men in the photo.

Perhaps the most famous of all Pinkerton detectives, Charlie Siringo was ready to leap out of the pile and ride right into my collection!  Back in the day, the obsolete Pinkerton photo-files were occasionally cleared out to make room, and they disposed of many decades of images, unscrupulously collected in the worlds largest criminal file... No doubt somebody made a haul around a half-century ago, when such things were only dark curiosities... and acquired this huge image file, or at least part of it, and then they failed to provide an index to the present owner...

I had been pondering one tintype of a group of derby'd men-  and thought one was very possibly a famous Pinkerton agent from Texas. I did not buy it, as I could not identify any of the others, and it would have been hard to authenticate... The Pinkertons were not that high-profile, in fact they forbade any literary profiteering by agents, (except by the owners) retired or otherwise, from writing their memoirs. Few photographs of their active agents were ever put into circulation, for obvious reasons.  The tintype above of Charlie Siringo (known well only because he disregarded the Pinkerton's rule!) and his associates, was quite possibly the rarest of them all, but there was no way to compare it to try and validate it. 

THEN, I encountered another intriguing tintype in this same collection, this time with Siringo and one of his bosses, probably Robert Pinkerton, and then another, and another... I have since acquired perhaps a dozen Pinkerton images, including one of Allan Pinkerton, William Pinkerton, James McParland, "the Great Detective," and Robert Linden.

 James McParland, "the Great Detective" who exposed the "Mollie Maguires."

 

 Three of my Pinkerton images...

Then came a shower of images of the true rogues, outlaws and gunslingers and a few more lawmen came marching by, and THIS was my favorite subject... and I just quit blogging for awhile and concentrated on the find of lifetime! 

My image of "Black Bart" (on the left) is perhaps the only known image of him as a 

mid-aged man when he committed his robberies. Before now we have only seen him after his prison term.

Nuff said... mine is the large sepia-toned one in the middle... incredible find.

 Actually Henry Starr was far more successful than most other train robbers...

What I have acquired, among all the various suspicious and nefarious characters, is an astonishing collection, unpublished, never-before seen images of the men and some women who were the most wanted criminals in the world... and a few "lawmen" who may have worked on both sides of the law... Here are just a smattering of my purchases with comparisons offered of known likenesses of them.  OMG!

 Before "Wild Bill" went Hollywood...

One of the very first Train robbers

VERY RARE! Bob Dalton's paramour and accomplice...

O. Henry- My favorite short story writer... started out as a convicted embezzler... Three images!

Just two of twenty Irishmen hung for a rash murders in the Pennsylvania coal region.

 Once a lawyer, Jennings turned to a life of crime and after being paroled from prison by President Roosevelt, tried preaching and acting in western movies...

Oliver Perry was a cunning and daring train robber... His mistake was committing his crimes in the east... so he never got much attention and died in prison...

There are a bunch more...