This is a strange, arresting real life narrative and I for one shall be surprised if it is not made eventually into a film, or even - grim fate - a TV serial. In 1704 a young Puritan girl, Eunice Williams, was taken prisoner along with her clergyman father and family from a village, in, Massachusetts, by a raiding party of Frenchmen and Red Indians. Other members of the family either died or were freed from captivity; she alone was not, and stayed with the Indians for the rest of her long life, marrying a Mohawk brave and becoming a Catholic convert. This last act, in the eyes of the New England settlers, was perhaps the mob unforgivable thing she could have done.
The man with the wide-open eye
Allan Pinkerton The Eye Who Never Slept by James Mackay Mainstream 256pp, £20 in UK
By PATRICK SKENE CATLING
ALLAN PINKERTON (1819-1884) was the original private eye. When he founded the North West Detective Agency in Chicago in 1850 his trademark was a picture of a wide open eye with the slogan "We Never Sleep". In the local. underworld, he was soon nicknamed "The Eye".
James Mackay, a Scottish historian best known for his biography of Robert Burns, has spent ten years investigating the pioneer detectives legendary career, and has written an interesting, admirably thorough account of it.
Dr Mackay tells the whole extraordinary story of Pinkerton's rise from apprenticeship as a cooper in the Gorbals, Glasgow's mediaeval leper colony and notorious 19th century slum, and of his chance discovery as a young immigrant in Illinois that he was one of nature's born policemen, and his subsequent development of the techniques of surveillance, infiltration, detection, espionage and international law enforcement.
It was while cutting saplings on a wooded island near Chicago, for his small, independent barrel making business, that his curiosity was aroused by "a blackened patch indicating that someone had been camping there". Further surreptitious visits revealed that a gang of counterfeiters were using the hiding place to manufacture bogus dimes.
Pinkerton led the local sheriff and a posse to the island by moonlight. The gang were arrested, tried and convicted. "To this day," Mackay relates, "the islet is known locally as Bogus Island." Shortly afterwards, the Sheriff of Cook County invited. Pinkerton to move to Chicago as Deputy. He immediately sold his cooperage and took his Scottish wife and their baby son to the big city. Pinkerton served as Chicago's sole police detective only briefly before setting up shop as The Eye.
In the 1850s, "the corrupt practices of the official police had given detectives an unenviable reputation for venality," Mackay, writes. Pinkerton was exceptional. "The agency was extremely strict about the business it would take on, and all prospective clients were thoroughly vetted before a case was accepted."
Pinkerton's code of ethics and his successes in the field won him a national reputation, and lucrative contracts to provide security services for railroads, banks and industrial and commercial institutions from coast to coast.
Pinkerton men bore arms against outlaws such as the Reno gang and the James Brothers. The agency was efficiently methodical, filing photographs and detailed descriptions of known criminals in its archives and systematically distributing posters and circulars in every state.
Mackay reproduces a circular broadcasting the likenesses, descriptions and case histories of fugitives from justice by the names of George Parker and Harry Longbaugh, celebrated in the mythology of the Old West as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Portrayed in bowler hats and business suits, they look absurdly unheroic, nothing like movie stars. The Sundance Kid's hair "may be dyed combs it pomadour", and his posture is described unromantically as "bow legged and his feet far apart". While glorifying Pinkerton, Mackay effectively debunks western folklore.
Pinkerton's achievements included insinuating an agent into the Molly Maguires, an illegal Irish American organisation that terrorised Pennsylvanian coal miners of other ethnic groups. He also succeeded in infiltrating Confederate forces during the Civil War and countering their espionage activities in Washington. Once he saved President Lincoln from assassination, but, unfortunately was not present to protect him that fatal evening in, Ford's Theatre.
By the end of his life, Pinkerton had established branches in foreign countries, anticipating the international intelligence gathering of Interpol. By then, he was a. rich man. He designed a mansion like a fortress in the country south of Chicago. He called his, estate "The Larches", and imported 85,000 larches from Scotland to justify the name. When they were disembarked in New York and allowed to perish in freezing weather, he sent a telegram "Fire the agent. Send to Scotland for another boatload of trees."
President Grant was one of, Pinkerton's many important guests. Since then, the agency, now known simply as Pinkertons, has continued to grow and flourish. With its world headquarters in Encino, California, it has 250 offices in twenty countries. There is now a veritable army of Pinkerton men, 50,000 of them, and none of them in the least way resembles Raymond Chandler's seedy, bourbon swilling Sam Spade or any other private eyes of fiction.