360: The Pinkertons Part 1 with Rob Hilliard

Dan LeFebvre  02:22

Before we dig into the details of each episode in the series, let’s start with some setup of the entire series overall. So if you were to give the Pinkertons a grade based on its overall historical accuracy, what would it get?

Rob Hilliard  02:38

I’ll answer that question by saying I really, really wanted to like this show. I’m sure you can kind of see where I’m headed. It was and for entertainment value, you know, that was pretty good. We my wife and I sat down and watched it. You know, we run through a couple episodes in the evening, sort of semi binge watching, watching it. So, you know, entertainment value, I think it’s probably in the in the C/B range, but historical accuracy, it’s like a, D, maybe. And that might even be me being a little bit charitable, just because, like I said, I really wanted to like it. They I thought at the beginning, like, especially with the first episode, it seemed like they were going to take kind of, I mean, the Pinkertons are well known, not maybe as well known as I once were. But I thought they were going to take a little bit of an unknown aspect of it, which was the Kate Warren, you know, female division. Which, of course, we’ll talk about a lot more later, but and then William Pinkerton. You hear people talking about the Pinkertons. You always hear him talking about Alan Pinkerton, who’s the founder. They called him will in the show. I guess I’ll call him will, but I never saw him referred to as anything other than William, you know, and we’ll do research, but regardless. But I thought, Oh, this is kind of neat. They’re going to take a different tack on this, and, you know, really tell a different story about the Pinkertons. And they did, certainly called a different tack and tell a different story. But unfortunately, from an accuracy standpoint. It was one that was, you know, almost completely fabricated, and it was kind of episode after episode and, and there were a couple, you know, as we’ll of course, talk about here. There were a couple where there were grains of truth and, but they were,

Dan LeFebvre  04:39

you know, they just fell apart. Well, you mentioned some of the characters, and a common thing a lot of movies TV shows do is to change the characters. And we’re talking about TV series today, and there are some main characters, there’s some secondary characters that we’ll see periodically throughout. We’ll talk about some of those later. Let’s get a quick fact check of whether or not the main characters were real people. And this is. Exactly my interpretation of who the main characters are. So feel free to add any others that you feel are relevant. But there’s you mentioned Kate Warren, who I think is the lead role. I consider her the lead role in the series. There’s will peakerton along with his father and the founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Alan. You see him a few times here and there. And then there’s two associates we see helping the peakertons regularly throughout the series, there’s John Bell, and then Kenji Hara, and then the primary law enforcement that we see throughout the series is a character named to share with Logan. How many of those are based on real people? Well,

Rob Hilliard  05:30

the first four, I think that you mentioned there are for sure, then I’ll kind of take them one by one here. So Kate Warren, very much real person. She’s known to the extent that she is known, really, as the first female detective, or at least the first female detective in the United States. And she did work for the Pinkertons. Again, we’ll talk about this a bit more later. But the Pinkerton agency was found at around 1850 she started working for them about 1855, or 56 depending where you read it. So that part is all true. And she worked for the Pinkertons through through the Civil War and then after the Civil War. But that’s that’s kind of where it stops is in terms of accuracy. So so a couple things to know she was and I got checked my notes here. But Kate Warren was born 18 October of 1829 so in 1866 when the show was set, she would have been 37 years old. And Martha McIsaac, the actress who played her, was born in October of 1984 so in 2014 when the series ran, she was like 30 years old. And so there’s a bit of a, you know, a bit of an age gap there. But not, you know, Hollywood, Hollywood, right? So, as you said, a lot of times are they play fast and loose with the with, certainly with ages. A couple other things to note, important things to know about. Kate Warren is one, as I said, she when the Pinkertons, which I know we’re going to talk about a whole lot more later, but the Pinkerton Pinkertons served as the espionage arm of the US Army, or, you know, union, early in the Civil War, and Kate Warren was one of the agents, operatives, as Alan Pinkerton liked to refer to them who served in that capacity. So she was actually a spy for the Union during the Civil War. In that role, she really had two involvement of two very critical pieces, or two critical things. One was what’s known as the Baltimore plot, which was the inauguration of Lincoln, really, prior to the epic break of the civil war in early 1861 where he was traveling from Springfield, Missouri to Washington, DC, after he’d been elected and the Pinkertons caught wind of an assassination plot that later became known as The Baltimore plot. And the idea was that Lincoln was traveling my train. He was going to come through Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, then down through Philadelphia, or from Philadelphia, down through Baltimore into Washington, DC, along the railroad route. And there was a Confederate I it. The Confederate states were already starting to secede at this point, so the schism was already, you know, beginning to happen. And there was an organization I’m struggling with how to exactly couch it without giving you an hour long explanation. But the group was called the Knights of the Golden Circle, and they were pro confederate. And there definitely was a scheme to attempt to assassinate Lincoln, or at least a lot of discussion around it. Now, what’s unclear is whether it was really something that was going to be carried out, or it was just a lot of blocked her. And, you know, impossible to know that the Remove of, you know, 160 plus years. What we do know, though, is that the Pinkertons caught wind of this, and they got with, made a connection through the railroads with Lincoln, you know, informed him of it, and they changed his travel route. And so basically, instead of coming from Philadelphia, they got a special train, went over to Harrisburg, which is about two hours west of Philadelphia. Well, two hours driving. It would have been more than that in 1860 um. And they um. I came in in the middle of the night from Harrisburg into Washington, DC, and completely avoided the path that they were going to take through Baltimore. And so, you know, to hear or read the Pinkerton version, they say, Blinken avoided his assassination. Kate Warren was actually his escort during that last leg from Harrisburg down into, well, really, from Philadelphia to Harrisburg and down into DC. Are one of his escorts, and so she was intimately involved in that. Now, the reason I’m sort of, you know, using some weasel words and describing this is, again, we don’t really know. It’s hard to prove a negative, right? So it didn’t happen. Does that mean it was never going to happen? Or it was and it was avoided. You know, if you hear the Pinkerton side of it, of course, they saved Lincoln’s life, and Queen Warren was integral in doing that. But there are equal arguments from, you know, from other historians who say, Ah, this was all, you know, just a lot of talk, and it was Pinkerton kind of self aggrandizing and, and he’s certainly guilty of that in other areas. So it’s a, it’s a vulnerable accusation, but, but anyway, so that was Kate Warren’s involvement there, and then the other thing that happened to her during the war, as I said, she was working as a spy for the Union, and she was actually captured and served about nine or 10 months in a Confederate prison in late second half of 1862 and was released in December 1862 so. So she was, by the time of the setting of the show, really quite a, quite an experienced, I mean, she’d been working for the Agency for 11 years. At that point, had been in prison for a while. So it was really quite an experienced and sort of veteran agent for the Pinkerton agency, so, and very much worthy of being a lead character in a show, which was, again, one of the reasons why I was excited about it at the outset. So, so anyway, moving through the other characters here, will I get like I said, I guess calling him will that’s weird to me, because I always see this William, but he was, you know, very much real person, very much Alan Pinkerton son. He was Alan’s oldest son, which I know we’re going to talk later about his younger son, Robert. But that was something that seemed like the show. They weren’t specific, but it seemed like it was a little backwards, like they kind of made it seem like Robert was the older one. But anyway, and but another thing that they really got, I won’t say they got wrong, but they they didn’t portray correctly, was in 1866 will Pinkerton was only 20 years old. He was basically a kid. And Jacob Blair, who was the actor that played him in when the show went on the air, he was 30 years old, so he was the same side, same age, excuse me, as as Marco Martha McIsaac. And of course, in the show that as it goes on, they kind of play that for you know that there’s a bit of a romantic interest between the two. But the reality is that will Pinkerton was younger than what they portrayed, and Kate Warren was substantially older than what they portrayed. So in reality, there was like a 17 or 18 year age gap between them.

Dan LeFebvre  13:43

And she had almost been an agent for as long as he had been. He had been around almost,

Rob Hilliard  13:48

yeah. I mean, yes, that’s exactly right. And in fact, she was, you know, basically old enough she could have been his mom. And so with the, you know, as I said, like as they kind of played that for a romantic thing throughout it would have been quite a bit weirder if she, you know, if she was 17 years older than him. So, so I understand why they did it. But again, just focusing on historical accuracy, that was, you know, that was way off base. Just a couple notes on Will he was by 1866 had been working for the Pinkerton agency. He even did a little bit of spy work during the Civil War, when Alan Pinkerton was in Washington, DC, even though will was only like 1617, years old, he did he wasn’t sort of actively in the field, from an agent standpoint, from an espionage standpoint, but he did travel with his father. In fact, there I saw one note, and I don’t get anything to verify this, but that will was actually wounded in the knee by piece of shrapnel at Antietam. So he was in the field. Well, you know, from that standpoint, he helped run agents, espionage agents, during the war. Like I said, I didn’t see any indication that he was actually undercover anywhere outside of Washington, DC. Now, there was plenty of spy activity in Washington, DC at the time, so that’s not to say that he wasn’t, you know, eavesdropping or acting as a spy during that period, but I don’t think he was ever behind the lines in the Confederacy like some of the other Pinkerton operatives were. So um, one other note on him a Will was, uh, he did really, one thing that did show accurately Is he really preferred being in the field and being a field agent over kind of the office piece of it, so that was portrayed accurately. Although a few years later after the time period of the show, I think it was about 1870 or 75 him and his brother did take over the operation of the firm, and and they ran it up through the late 1800s maybe in the early 1900s I can’t remember the exact date now, and so they kind of ran it as CO heads through the latter part of the 19th century, on them and after their father passed away. So, so he did, even though he did act as a field agent at times. It wasn’t, again, not the way it was shown in the show where he querying, you know, a brace of pistols and and, you know, drawn down on everybody. He came across, and that looked cool, but, you know, not, not a real thing. So, so that’s probably a good segue to Alan Pinkerton. And again, very much a real person. He was emigrated from Scotland. He was born in Scotland 19, I’m sorry, in 1819 immigrated to America in 1842, and he was portrayed in a show by Angus McFadden. They were actually pretty close on McFadden’s age. I think there was a difference there about four years Pinkerton was like 47 in 1866 and McFadden was 51 at the time of the show. I don’t have anything at all to base this on. It’s just a guess, but I suspect that the McFadden is listed as one of the producers of this show, and I suspect that this was kind of a passion project for him, because he’s Scottish. Pinkerton is famously Scottish. And like I said, I suspect that, you know, McFadden kind of put this together from a from a creative standpoint, so I

Dan LeFebvre  17:54

got that impression as well as I was watching it, yeah, although,

Rob Hilliard  17:57

weirdly, then he hardly showed up in any episodes.

Dan LeFebvre  18:00

Yeah, that is true. I guess I also kind of, I don’t have anything to base this on, either, but I got the impression that he was more behind the scenes like but also more famous than any of the other actors, so he probably had other jobs to do.

Rob Hilliard  18:17

Yeah, well, you’re probably right about that, which is, this is kind of an aside, but one of the things I did read about the show in researching for this show was to save money. It was filmed in Western Canada, and I can’t remember now where British Columbia or someplace and but I think that’s one of the reasons to the point that you just mentioned that you never see any like recognizable guest stars, and they were kind of drawing on the local acting community, which, I mean, the population of Western Canada is small, so I’m assuming the acting community is really small, at least prior to when Hallmark movies were being shot there. And so anyway, I guess that was a, you know, one of the reasons why you never, like, usually, when you see a show with different guest stars each week, somebody different being murdered, or being the murderer, there you like, oh, yeah, I see, I’ve seen that guy in such and such a show, right? Or that woman and that, I don’t know that that happened, even once watching the Pinkerton, yeah, I don’t remember any, yeah, um, but anyway, quick background on on Alan Pinkerton, as I said, he emigrated to America in 1842 moved to Chicago. Interesting part of the story. His story was, he came here as he was a barrel maker, a Cooper, and so the way he got into the deck detective work was he was actually out looking for lumber, and he was on an island on the Fox River, which is, I guess, near Chicago, and stumbled on to a group of counterfeit counterfeiters, and ended up working with the local sheriff, their county sheriff, to break that counterfeit ring. And. And in doing that, I think he kind of found that he had an aptitude for it, and he also found that there was, I think there was a reward involved. And so, you know, found out that could be lucrative. And so that’s really what led him to found originally, it was called the northwestern detective agency, and he was a partners with an attorney named Edward Rucker. And then a few years later, he bought Rucker out, and it became Pinkertons national Detective Agency, which, of course, I see it in the show and but that was, you know, that was the foundation of, and I know that was where your questions here that we’ll talk about. But of the Pinkerton agency was really, really through that. I mentioned already, that they were credited with breaking up the Baltimore plot, so they became pretty well known through that and and I talked about them, you know, hiring on us, the espionage arm of the Union Army early in the in the Civil War. So couple other characters, John Bell, I think you and I chatted about this before, the presumption for both of us is that he’s supposed to represent John Scoble, who was, of course, the subject to my book. Well, I know we’ll talk about that, and so I’m not going to dive too much into him, because we have some questions later to talk about, you know about him, who he is and what he did. I can’t begin to fathom why they changed his name, other than if they just thought that bell was easier, can house than stubble, right? Hard to say, but he was, I’ll just say, for the purposes of answering your question here, most accounts indicate that John Scoble, I will call him by his the name that I’m familiar with was a real person. There’s some there are some people who who will dispute that, and again, we’ll get into that um, but he was an agent for the Pinkertons during the Civil War. That’s the only documentation that we have of him. It’s not impossible that he worked for the agency after the war, but there’s no record of it. And the reality is that John Scoble, or John Bell, certainly was his real name, but the John Scoble probably wasn’t his real name, and so I guess I can just touch on that real quickly. The information that we have about John Scoble was from a book that Pinkerton, Alan Pinkerton wrote in 1883 called the spy and the rebellion, to talk about his agency’s involvement all the things I’ve already mentioned, how they were working as for the government, every bit of information about John Scoble traces back to that book where Pinkerton talks about him, and there have been lots of people research them over the years, but the in Pinkerton used different names. For example, Kate Warren was given a different name in that book, and some of his other agents whose names did not become known at the time of the war, he used a nom de guerre, if you will. You know fake name for them in his book, essentially, or presumably, to protect their identity, because it maybe wasn’t known that they were a spy during the war. He most likely did the same thing for John Scoble. So you have a guy who was born a slave, so he there’s no record of him. He escaped, made it to the north, became a spy, where, of course, his identity had to be protected. And then 20 years later, his only biographer, Alan Pinkerton, probably used a fake name, so there’s really no way to trace his existence. And so that’s why I say, you know, there’s no record of him having worked for the agency after the Civil War. There’s no record of him at all after the Civil War, aside from pinkerton’s book. But the problem is, unlike the white agents who work for Pinkerton. There, there are records of them that you can kind of trace backwards to say, Oh, this was really this person, but, you know, they use a different name and but with skill bowl, you know, with his circumstances, there’s no way to trace that backwards. And a lot of people who like African Americans today who are trying to do genealogy research, running the same kind of roadblocks, working backwards. So anyway, that’s the short version of background on the character John Bell Kenji Hara, who was. Uh, portrayed as an agent, an Asian agent who came on board for the Pinkertons at this time period. The only reference to anybody named Kenji Hara that I could find anywhere was there’s an, uh, I believe it’s a Japanese artist from the 20th century who was named Kenji hora. So I don’t know if they just plucked that name or what I’m not a real person. I will talk about this a bit more later, I think, as well. But I didn’t see, haven’t come across any record of the Pinkertons having used Asian immigrants as agents. Not to say that they didn’t, but I’ve not seen a reference to that anywhere. And then Sheriff Logan was what I like to call the token Barney Fox character. He was, you know, kind of the bumbling sheriff who couldn’t get anything right, right? He was not a real person. I did look up, though, the actual sheriff of Jackson County, Missouri, which is where Kansas City is located, in 1866 and it was a guy named Henri Williams. So we’re able to document who that was. It wasn’t, it wasn’t Logan and and again. Nothing like, you know, like he was portrayed in in the show. You can actually look up Henri Williams, though, and find, you can even find a picture of him online. So, yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  26:24

I got the sense that he was the token law enforcement kind of you got to have somebody there for the agency to refer back to, and actually have a jail to put the people in the episode

Rob Hilliard  26:36

right, and somebody to outwit every time right with that

Dan LeFebvre  26:40

kind of overall we start digging into some of the individual episodes. And the the first episode in the series called Kansas City at the very beginning, because it’s set in Kansas City, Missouri, as you mentioned in 1865 66 somewhere around there. And according to the show, that’s when the first train robbery in American history happens. And so Alan Pinkerton calls his own will, along with the world’s first female detective, Kane Warren, and they’re called in to solve the train robbery. So you already answered a little bit of that, but that’s the impression from the TV series. That’s the origin story for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. And I’m guessing that’s just not true at all.

Rob Hilliard  27:17

No, not even remotely. Although the funny part of this is the first train robbery, robbery in US history did happen in 1866 October 6, and it was by a gang called the Reno gang. And they just give you the quick rundown on that they got on the train would have pulled out of the station. I don’t ask the name of the station. I don’t remember that, but and they rode along for a certain distance, and then they got up and they were carrying guns, and they went to the mail car, and there were two safes there, and they were able to break open one of the safes and take the money out of that, and there was some cash and also, um, bonds, if I recall correctly, and then the other safe they couldn’t get into. So they actually just opened the door on the railroad car and rolled it out of the moving train. They just pushed it out the door and said, well, we’ll come back for it later. And so that is all true and and the Pinkertons actually pursued and captured and broke, I’ll say the Reno gang, but nothing remotely to first of all, it happened in Indiana, not Missouri. It was, it was will Pinkerton, that kind of at the lead of that pursuit. But it didn’t happen until about two years later, in 1868 that they finally captured one of the Reno gang. I think in 1866 the others were they didn’t really kind of fully break the gang until 1868 and there are, you know, a number of more robberies, and there was one where the Pinkertons were. They found out about it through their their, you know, detecting skills ahead of time, and hid on the train. So when the gang hit the train, there were like 10 Pinkertons armed and waiting for them when they when they broke in. So they captured a couple there. So it is true that the first train robbery in the US was in 1866 it is with by the Reno gang, and it is true that the Pinkertons arrested them. That’s it, though out of, you know, a 60 minute episode. None of the rest of the facts even remotely match up to, you know, to what was portrayed in the show. So and it wasn’t to more directly answer your question, of course, it wasn’t the origin story for the Pinkertons. Again. It. Was kind of shown that way, but they had already been in operation for 16 years. They were already, already had a national reputation as a detective agency slash police force. And so it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t the beginnings of the company, or, you know, anything like that.

Dan LeFebvre  30:24

Now, people listening to this, I’m sure, will understand, you know, the Pinkertons. They’ll have heard that name before, probably, and they actually, as far as I understand, they’re still around today. Would it be fair to say that this entire series is trying to be like an origin story for a detective agency that still exists?

Rob Hilliard  30:42

I think the answer your question is yes, that’s how it came across in the series. But again, the fact, you know, don’t match up with reality, but it is still so. The company that was known as pinkridges National detective agency kept that name until it was like the mid 60s. 1960s actually called and they changed to just Pinkerton zinc or pinker. Excuse me, I think it’s Pinkerton zinc and but yes, they’re still very much a real company, very much involved in security. Today. If you go on their website or their Facebook page or anything, you’ll see they do a lot in cyber security. I think they still provide some, like, private protection services, things of that nature, but, but yeah, they didn’t. They didn’t. They didn’t originate in Kansas City, Missouri. They didn’t originate in 1866, all that stuff is

Dan LeFebvre  31:43

made up. Well, talking about with John Bell in this series, we see him for the first time in episode two, and when we do, I thought this was interesting. When we see him, he already knows who the Pinkertons are. And since we just found out about the Pinkertons in the TV series, like an episode ago, either Word travels fast, or there’s a lot that the TV series isn’t showing us, how realistic would it be that he would have known about the Pinkertons the first time, of course, in the series, that’s the first time he meets Kate Warren, and it sounds like he may have already worked with her. How realistic is this kind of first meeting?

Rob Hilliard  32:19

So there’s two parts to the question there, the first part is, how well known were the Pinkertons? And could he have known them? That is actually very realistic, because by by the close of civil war, let’s say the Pinkertons were not household term in the way that they would be 20 years later by, say, the 1880s at that point in time, if you said Pinkerton, you know, immediately everybody knew who, not all the company you were talking about, but they were associated with Alan Pinkerton. He kind of became like semi retired in the mid 1870s and started writing books about what a great job he was and all the wonderful things he did. Yeah, I like to say he was a great detective. He was kind of a middling spy. He was a terrible writer. And he was, he was about as you know, he was about as modest as a WWE wrestler that way. Um, so, anyway, but, but the reason I say that is that was kind of the era of the dime novel and all those things. So, um, his book sold, you know, 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of copies. And so by that late like the period that we know is like the old west or the Wild West era. Call it like 1875 to maybe 1890 the Pinkertons were probably almost literally household where anybody in United States would know that name at the end of the Civil War. They weren’t quite that famous, but they were still very well known. There were articles about them in the newspaper. In newspapers all across the country, they actually ran advertisements for themselves in the newspaper, advertising their security services. So it wouldn’t have been, you know, unusual at all for somebody to know them. Now, second part of your question was they did kind of imply that John Bell knew Kate, although it wasn’t on the nose, like, it was a little weird how they said it. And when I said, when they said that, I was like, Oh boy, here we go. We’re gonna get into, you know, the johns global story. And then they just immediately veered off. And, you know, never came back to it so but again, in real life, John Scoble, John Bell would have very well known Kate Warren, because they worked together. I don’t believe they were ever put. Partnered together, at least, we don’t have documentation of that, but they both worked as Pinkerton operatives, working in the Confederacy out of Washington DC, during a period between 1861 and 1862 so that’s a very small group of people, and as you can imagine, pretty close knit. So yeah, they would have absolutely it would have been more like when when he walks up there and, you know, she comes out of the door and points a gun at him, it would have been more like her coming out and probably giving him a big hug, yeah, because it, you know, four or five years since they seen each other so

Dan LeFebvre  35:37

well, you talked a little bit about a river near Chicago. And at the end of the second episode, we see Alan Pinkerton. He’s leaving Kansas City to go back to the Pinkertons headquarters in Chicago. But then the show stays in Kansas City. That’s why we get Kate and will as kind of the primary main characters throughout the rest of it is they’re basically the impression I got was they’re running the Casey field office, basically. And we already talked some about the Pinkertons origin story, but because there aren’t any other locations mentioned at this point as I’m watching the show, I’m just assuming that the Pinkertons probably started in Kansas City, then Alan went to Chicago to try to expand into further territories. Is that a good representation of what really happened?

Rob Hilliard  36:16

Yeah, again, no. Hear me say this a couple times as we go through it’s, it’s backwards of I mean, the impression they gave in the show is actually reverse of what what happened in real life. So, um, Alan Pinkerton, when he came to the US, settled in Chicago. That’s where he started the detective agency in 1850 so that’s where they were built up. Um, their headquarters remained in Chicago, and from from 1850 until 1960 when they finally moved to New York City. So they were very much rooted in Chicago, in fact, to the extent that one of the kind of interesting sidebars when I was trying to research about the pinker day agents and so forth from during the Civil War, a lot of their records were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire, which was 1881 I want to say I’m probably wrong on that date, but, but of course, all the records were paper, and They literally went up in flames with the Chicago Fire. So, so yeah, they were a Chicago company, you know, born and bred and stayed there for well over 100 years, as near as I could tell. And I tried to dig into this so you could find a little bit of information about when they opened other offices. So they opened one in Philadelphia and another one in New York around the time of the Civil War. And those were opened by George bangs, whose name you might recognize because it was mentioned a couple times during the series, although he doesn’t ever appear on camera, and he was, he was really Pinkertons right hand man, um and in fact, there are some pictures taken during the Civil War where you see bangs is in the picture with Alan Pinkerton, but the bangs ran the agency in Chicago for the most part during the Civil War. He opened those two new offices. I couldn’t find any indication that there was an, ever an office in Kansas City, and there almost certainly wasn’t in 1866 because they had just opened those other two offices. And Kansas City was, you know, a cow town in 1865 and only had a few, a couple 1000. Actually, I think you, you provided me with this information, but like, 3500 residents, there would have been no reason for the pink returns to have an office there. Um, so yeah, like I said, it was basically the opposite of that, where the Pinkertons were starting to expand, but they were expanding from Chicago east, where the population was and, by extension, where the money was and where the crime was, and they did ultimately work into what is today, the Midwest and then later in the West. But not, you know, not during the time period that’s established for the show. Maybe

Dan LeFebvre  39:16

it’s kind of what you were referring to before, where they’re filming out in, you know, in Canada, out in country area, and it probably costs more money to build a set like Chicago than it does to build like a cow town, like Kansas City in the 1800s

Rob Hilliard  39:33

Yeah, you are absolutely correct. And this is also, I was going to talk about this later, but I guess I’ll just hit it now. It’s what I call the Gunsmoke model of team production, right? So you build one set in one town, and then you bring all the bad guys to you, right? You don’t have to travel around, because it’s very expensive. And even if you build a set of Chicago in the 1800s like you said, that would be expensive. Uh, but, but the reality of the Pinkertons is they traveled, really, all over the country. And it would have been more like I’m, like, really showing my age here, but the old, not the movie, but the old TV show, The Fugitive, where he would travel from city to city each week. So if you were following, let’s say, Will Pinkerton, it would look more like that, where one week he’s in Kansas City, and then another week he’s in, I don’t know, Duluth, and then another week he’s in San Francisco and but if you’re going to create sets for all those towns that look like they did in the 1800s according to your agreement, for a lot of expense, so I think that was there. Like you said, you build one set in war nowhere, and you say, oh, okay, well, they were working in the middle of nowhere. And that comes the, you know, that becomes the base of the storylines.

Dan LeFebvre  40:53

We talk about people coming into their town. And if we go back to the series, in the third episode, we see a traveling troupe that comes into Kansas City to perform Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and one of the actors is a guy named Robert, and will joins the troop undercover to investigate the episode’s crime. We find out that Robert’s real name is Edwin Booth. He’s the brother of John Wilkes Booth, and he’s been hiding his identity to basically separate from his brother’s assassination of President Lincoln. And I’ll go ahead and fill in one historical fact. We do know that John Wilkes Booth really did have a brother named Edwin Booth, but my question for you for this episode is kind of a two parter. Was Edwin Booth an actor who tried to hide his identity after his brother’s assassination of Lincoln, and did Pinkerton agents like Kate Warren? And will Pinkerton actually get involved in a case with Edwin like we see in the series?

Rob Hilliard  41:44

So the answers to those questions are no and definitely no

Dan LeFebvre  41:50

sensing a trend here. Maybe that’s why you gave me,

Rob Hilliard  41:53

which I’ll refer back to the original D grade. We so as you said, Edwin Booth was, was the brother John Wilkes Booth. Um, they were actually both actors, and they had, they were the son of an actor named Junius booth, and they had another brother named Junius Jr, prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. And, well, really, even through the Civil War, Edwin Booth was probably the most well known actor of his of the time in the whole us. He traveled through Europe and and you know, all the great stages of Europe, Paris, London, wherever every you know, every big city in the United States, and even some smaller ones. So he was super well known. And I have an anecdote here that kind of shows that. But before I get to that, just just to directly answer the question. So there was, of course, negative blowback after John Wilkes Booth murdered Lincoln. But Evelyn booth, first of all, was known as such a staunch Unionist, and in fact, he and his brother had actually had a falling out around 1863 or 1864 not really publicly, but it became known later over John Wilkes Booth being such a staunch Confederate And Ty Lincoln, and so Edwin Booth really distanced himself. You know, a year or two prior to Lincoln’s assassination, there was a period of time very short after the assassination where Edwin Booth didn’t act and he he laid low. And I think that was probably less to do with with him or his reputation, that it was respect for Lincoln, and, you know, just out of respect for the assassination and just not feeling right about, you know, having his name out on a marquee. But that faded away pretty quick, quickly, and he was, he was back acting again by January of 1866 so where, nine months after Lincoln’s assassination and Edwin Booth owned, he owned a theater and file feed, I think he owned another one in New York City. And so in January 1866 he was back on the stage in New York City at his theater and performing Hamlet. Probably that was, my guess, his favorite show. But so, yeah, he didn’t really, he didn’t hide from the public eye, you know, in any way, like it was shown there, and it was, again, I think, less reputational than just sort of, if I want to say a mourning period or whatever, but just more, you know, out of respect for for what happened and his family’s involvement in it. But I’ll give you another tidbit, and this is. This is what I’m going to say about Edward booth being so well known in it was either late 1863 early 1864 Robert Lincoln, the son of of Abraham Lincoln, was about 21 at the time, and they were a train station, I think it was in Washington, DC, but I could be wrong on the location. But anyway, there was a crowd of people that were pushing onto the train, and Robert fell off of the ledge and fell between the wall of the platform and the train and couldn’t get out. And if anybody’s ever, you know, been to a train station or even a subway, you know, there’s like a little narrow crease there, and he fell down into that and somebody reached down and grabbed him by the coat collar and yanked him back up, literally as the train was starting to pull out. So probably, you know, certainly saving him from being severely injured, maybe saved him from being killed. And so when, when he pulled him back up onto the platform, and Robert Lincoln actually wrote this, you know, story. Told the story. He said, I turned around to thank the person from saving me or for saving me, and I recognized it was Edwin Booth, the famous actor. So, couple interesting things there, obviously, connection between the direct connection between booth family and Lincoln family, more than a year before the assassination. But also that’s how famous Edwin Booth was. It would be like, you know, I don’t know Kevin Costner, helping you out today, and you’d be, you know, Tara. I look at him like, Holy mackerel. You’re Kevin Costner. You know, that’s really the how well known Booth was even, you know, during the time of the Civil War. And

Dan LeFebvre  46:51

were the Pinkertons ever involved with Edwin Booth at all? I mean, we see him in the series. No connection there.

Rob Hilliard  46:57

I couldn’t find any, even any like passing around, any connection between them. So, yeah, he was very much, you know, near as we could tell, a law abiding citizen. There was an incident, I would think was maybe in the 1870s or 1880s where somebody took a shot at him while he was on stage. Apparently that was more of a jealous husband situation than anything to do with the Pinkertons or, you know, the government, or the Civil War or any of that. But, but yeah, aside from that minor thing, he was, well, I should say the minor somebody took a shot at him. Well, it’s minor to me, but

Dan LeFebvre  47:44

not something to pick or to investigate necessarily,

Rob Hilliard  47:46

right? Exactly. So, yeah, I don’t think there was ever any connection there.

Dan LeFebvre  47:51

He might have already answered this. We were talking about John Scoble before, but in episode number four of the series is called the fourth man, and it’s referring to John Bell, who, according to the series, becomes the fourth man in the Pinkertons, alongside Kate will and Alan. What was the real John scobles relationship to the Pinkerton Detective Agency? Well,

Rob Hilliard  48:12

yeah, we touched on it a little bit before, but I’ll give you some additional background about you know, John Bell slash John Scoble, um, the and this will, I’ll tiptoe around a few things, because my book in freedom shadows about John Scoble, and there are some spoilers there that I would rather not give away, but we’ve already kind of hit it. So a minor spoiler is that Scoble did, in fact, work for the Pinkertons during the Civil War. So the beginning of that story is John Scoble was a slave in Mississippi prior to civil war, after the war broke out in kind of middle part of 1861 as many Confederate officers did his master, of course, volunteer for the army, and then they went north into the Robert E Lee’s. Well, sorry, wasn’t Robert E Lee’s at that point, but it was the Army of Northern Virginia. And once there, Scoble was able to escape. And when he did, he made his way to Washington, DC. And at that time, Alan Pinkerton was, as I’ve referenced several times here, the head of the what he called the US Secret Service. But it’s not the secret service that we know today. I was just the term they used at the time for spy agencies. And Pinkerton, to his credit, um one, one thing I should note is Alan Pinkerton was a very staunch abolitionist, and the reason I mentioned that here is there were um such cultural beliefs at the time. Um. Know that were, you know, anti black, and obviously that’s the whole basis for slavery. And I’m not going to get in the giant tangent on that, because we could teach probably multiple college courses and not capture that in the podcast, but, but the point is, there was an assumed ignorance, or not even ignorance, but, but low IQ of blacks at the time and but because Pinkerton had had, you know, as I said, was a staunch abolitionist, had different views. He had the idea of starting to interview, really debrief the escaped slaves who were making their way from the Confederate side to the union side. And that was kind of the first time that had been done because of the reasons I just mentioned. Like, people didn’t think they would get any useful information and but the reality was, those slaves that were escaping from the south to the north they were, you know, yesterday afternoon, or a couple days ago, or whatever they were in the place where you were trying to get information about so they might know what, what infantry units were here, what cavalry units were there. How many cans did they see, you know, at such a such a place before they came over. And so pickerton set up basically a network of getting these people as they came over, bringing them to his office on I Street in Washington, DC, and debriefing them. And that was very, very similar to what you see today in a war zone, where they’re interviewing refugees and again, debriefing them and trying to find out, well, what’s going on on the other side of the line, where I can’t see but you were just there. So it was a very modern idea, really, on pinkerton’s part. And when he interviewed Scoble, he made such an impression. Scoble made such an impression on Alan Pinkerton with when I was working on my book, I was talking to a guy who was a CIA agent, now retired, but who had done research on Scoble when he was with the agency, and he used a phrase that really stuck with me. He said, When Pinkerton met Scoble, Scoble had what we would call today, street smarts, like he was well for one thing, he could read and write, which was unusual for a slave, but he but the impression that he made was with his again, I use the term street smarts, where he was just sharp. He picked up on things quickly. So he made such an impression that most, most of the escaped slaves who came through Pinkerton, interviewed them, got their information, and then, you know, sent them on their way. And by the way, as another aside, on their way was usually to what was called a contraband camp where escaped slaves were able to live free in the north, but in kind of they were free, but they weren’t totally free again. I don’t want to sidetrack the whole conversation here, but it was kind of an odd, almost a purgatory existence for them. Anyway. The important part to them was they weren’t in slavery anymore, but Scoble made such an impression that he actually, Pinkerton actually recruited him to become an active spy and part of the Pinkerton agency, and then he was sent back under copper, of course, as a slave, into the Confederacy on multiple different espionage missions. So that’s the background on Scoble with the Pinkerton agency. As I said earlier, we don’t really know what happened after the war and whether he remained as an agent or didn’t. There’s just no documentation of it. So it’s at least plausible that he might have been working for the Pinkerton agency come 1866 it’s implausible. What was we touched on earlier they would be in Kansas City, because they’re probably anchored in there and but there wouldn’t have been, kind of back to the episode. There wouldn’t have been any reason to bring him in as the fourth man, because he would have already been, you know, working for the company for like, 5.5 years at that point. So

Dan LeFebvre  54:18

Well, you also talked about Kenji Hara and how he’s not a real person. But in the this episode, we see Kenji kind of becoming an apprentice for the Pinkertons. Did they? Did they have apprentices? Kind of like what we see happening in the episode, um,

Rob Hilliard  54:35

no, and, but I’ll qualify that No. I will be quite as hard of a no, as I was on some of the other ones they did have. The Pinkertons did have an extensive training program. So when they came in, and I again, I talked about this a little bit my book. But Pinkerton talks about when they when they brought in John school bowl, teaching him at. And all the all their operatives, teaching them to do certain specific things, like shadowing somebody, which was a term that the Pinkerton started using. We use it regularly today, right to shadow or follow somebody. Alan Pinkerton also used the term pumping people for information, which today is kind of a common term in an interrogation. But Pinkerton actually invented that, or at least put into common usage of that term, so they would be operatives would be taught to do those things. Now, the qualifier is up into the 20th century, but certainly in the 18th century, the word apprentice has a very specific meaning, and the biggerness, did not have apprentices. So you would have an apprentice who, like a printer, for example, or a blacksmith or some type of a trade, they would bring in an apprentice. And it was kind of a it was maybe somewhat analogous to an intern today, which meant you could get them to do your medial labor, and you wouldn’t have to pay them as much as like a regular employee. So it wasn’t slave labor, but it wasn’t a whole lot more than that. But the idea being that they would work in that apprenticeship for some period of time and then learn that trade, and then eventually they could go off on their own. So I kind of in that episode when they talked about him being an apprentice, it kind of struck, you know, my ear wrong, because I’m like, Oh, that’s not an apprentice. He’s just like a trainee, which today, the way those terms are used, they might sound somewhat similar, but, you know, 160 years ago, it would have been a very different thing than an very different implication of the term. So,

Dan LeFebvre  56:48

yeah. I mean, that makes sense, yeah, they would have a very specific meaning for that, so they wouldn’t have used for that, for that term, yeah, exactly yeah.

Rob Hilliard  56:56

Apprentice was they used to use the term. The full term was apprentice to trade, meaning you would go, you would work there for nothing or almost nothing, but again, you would learn that trade. So like the examples I used, you know, printer, blacksmith, Fairy, or something like that, they had apprentices. A detective agency wouldn’t have apprentices so

Dan LeFebvre  57:19

well. In episode five of the series, we find another character named Captain Buckner, and the title of the episode is called the hero of liberty gap. And according to the show, Captain Buckner is using heroics during the Civil War to run for mayor of Kansas City, that is, until Kate and will figure out that Buckner lied about what he did during the war. So this episode is them kind of uncovering the true story. I did a quick Google search, and it tells me there really was a confederate officer in the Civil War named General Simon Buckner. But in this series, when we see a flashback of Captain Buckner hiding during the battle, he’s wearing the union blue. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just assuming that this storyline around buckner’s faked heroics during the war were in themselves fake for the series. So my question is kind of more around the fact that this is the first time in this series we see the Pinkertons getting involved in any political affairs. Did the Pinkertons actually get involved in politics like we see in this

Rob Hilliard  58:17

episode? No, not, not the way we saw in this episode. So a couple of notes. I did exactly what you did. I’m like, Are they talking about Simon Bolivar Buckner? And we’re like, well, but then when, like you said, it kind of showed a meeting, and I think they even said at one point that he was a Union officer, or that he kind of he was, and it is worth noting that it was a real thing. And you know, of course, today we might use a term like Stolen Valor or, you know, something of that nature, but it was very much a real thing in the US at that time, for people to claim that they did something during the war that they didn’t do so that wouldn’t have been unusual. And particularly, you know, in that era where you didn’t have good documentation of, you know, people didn’t have a driver’s license or, you know, social security number, whatever. So it’s hard to know, like, what is this? They might even have the same name, right? But is this the same, you know, John Doe, who did this? Or was that some other guy with the same name? And so that wouldn’t have been unusual. But on the political side, the this sounds harsh, but I think it’s pretty accurate. The baker doesn’t do anything. It didn’t pay. They were in it for the money. And I know there’s some stuff you know, that we’ll talk about some other episodes later, where it was like, Well, you know, they’re kind of looking out for the little guy, and that was not a thing they they were, you know, Alan Pinkerton was scrupulously honest and but he was also harsh. You. Was almost dictatorial at times, and he was all about the business, and at the end of the day, he was about the business of making $1 and so when you say, did they get involved in politics? They weren’t like the way that episode, you know, plays out, I think they even say something like, well, who’s who’s going to pay for this, or who’s our who’s our client here, and they wouldn’t have been working on it if it wasn’t, if they didn’t have a client, if somebody wasn’t putting the bill. And but now the other side of it is, and Alan Pinkerton was good about this. It became more so when, when William Robert took over the firm later, um, they definitely did cultivate political relationships that they felt would benefit the company. So and they also, at times, provided security, including for Abraham Lincoln, um, for political figures. But, yeah, to get involved in it, like hands on, involved in an election, the way it’s shown here, that wouldn’t, you know, I’m not aware of any instance of it, and I would be extremely surprised, because it doesn’t pay, right?

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:19

Yeah, that was a good point there. I forgot that they had kind of talked about, you know, who’s about, you know, who’s our client, but so it kind of gives the impression that they’re just out to do the right thing.

Rob Hilliard  1:01:28

Yeah, which is great for, which is great for characters in a TV show, or can be great. But yeah, it doesn’t reflect real life. And I’ll even say this is really kind of a, I’ll call it a writer’s aside here for a minute. But in in in freedom shadow, when I was writing about John school bowl, um,

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:54

the

Rob Hilliard  1:01:57

we don’t know all the details of why he agreed to work for Pinkerton and to go back into the south and because, obviously he was putting everything at risk right, his life, his security, his freedom, all those things, it’s entirely possible that he did that as an as an altruistic thing, and, you know, to help others who had been in This situation and tried to help the union win and free the slaves and all those things. From my standpoint, though, when I wrote the book, I was like, You know what that might be true, but if it’s it, I think it made him more interesting as a character, if there was a different reason. And again, I’m tiptoeing because I don’t want to give away what those reasons were, but they did involve Alan Pinkerton, but that he wasn’t just doing it out of the good of his heart, right? He was, but there were other reasons. And so anyway, I say that only to say, in my opinion, it actually would be more interesting, or make characters more interesting, if they’re not just totally doing it for while. We’re just doing it because we’re the good guys, and this is what the good guys do, you know,

Dan LeFebvre  1:03:10

yeah, which makes it, it’s more realistic too, because that’s usually how it works, is you people often have ulterior motives. And I guess that sounds like it’s always negative, but, you know, it’s, it’s not always just to do the right thing. They’re trying to make money, too. It’s a business. And

Rob Hilliard  1:03:28

yeah, and again, the pig it is. We’re about making money. And there are certainly lots of people who have argued over the years that they weren’t just trying to do the right thing. But it’s, again, I’m talking more from a writer standpoint here, but it helps you create three dimensional characters, right? If it’s not just, Well, we’re always going to do what’s right. We’re always going to do, you know, what needs to be done at the end of the day. So, but anyway, like I said, that’s kind of an aside to the whole to the whole question. So Well,

Dan LeFebvre  1:04:00

if we go back to the series, we’re on episode number six, and we start to see a more complex relationship between the Pinkertons and law enforcement, as the episode’s crime revolves around the murder of another Pinkerton agent. And Kate and Will are surprised to find out that there’s other Pinkerton agents working undercover in Kansas City without their knowledge. And as part of this episode, we find a brand new technique introduced called an identity parade. Is what they call it in the series. In the episode, Kate helps helps us out by calling it a term that we’re more familiar with today, a police lineup. Now, of course, we’re all familiar with police lineups now, but in this episode, it really seems to imply that the Pinkertons introduced this concept to law enforcement. Is there any truth to that?

Rob Hilliard  1:04:46

I couldn’t find any documentation of it. Now that’s not to say that they didn’t, because the Pinkertons were definitely innovative when it came to investigative techniques. And one of the things that they did invent, or at least take credit for reinventing, is a mug shot book where you photographs. Course, photography was a relatively new technology at that time. I think it was maybe invented in the US, in 1830s or something like that, maybe 1840 so, but they’d started taking pictures of everybody they encountered, every everybody they arrested, and by like, 1875 I think it was the date that I had found, they had a very substantial mug shot book that people could could look through. And some of the other techniques I already talked about, like, you know, shadowing people and certain interrogation techniques and stuff. So they were extremely innovative, and not even using female detectives, right? That was something that was unheard of. Like I said, Kate Warren was the first, at least in the US, maybe in the world, the first female detective. So they recognized that there was an ability to that she could go places and do things that a male detective couldn’t ever, especially in the 19th century. So they were willing to date. I wasn’t able to find any, you know, any reference one way or the other as to, as to a police lineup. I do want to touch on one other thing that you mentioned there about they were surprised that there was an operative, another Pinkerton operative. Again, I would be very surprised that there were more than two in Kansas City. There wouldn’t really any reason, but it wouldn’t have been unusual for the Pinkertons to have multiple operatives in a given city at the same time and not necessarily know that each other are there. There’s some documentation in that in Richmond during the Civil War, again, when they were carrying out their espionage efforts, that there was one case in particular where they talked about an operative walking into, I think he went into a bar, and the guy that was tending bar, he recognized them immediately as another Pinkerton, but they were both in Richmond on spying assignments, but didn’t know each other were there until they bumped into each other. So that wouldn’t have been all been unusual, and you got to consider the time period as well. It’s not like, you know, you could text somebody and say, Hey, where are you at? You know, or look on your you know, look on your phone at their tracking on their GPS. So the Pinkertons, as I said earlier, moved about quite a bit, and it wouldn’t have been at all unusual for, you know, two people to end up two ages, to end up in the same city, same place, at same time, and not necessarily know that.

Dan LeFebvre  1:07:44

I’m kind of even surprised that they would recognize each other, like, I mean, you think of with the photos and mug book and things like that, but also you’re not going to make copies of that, and sometimes you just don’t, you don’t know, you might know names, but kind of like what you’re talking about before we’re talking about, you know, talking about, you know, Captain Buckner, and was, who was he? You might, you might hear the name somewhere, but you might not recognize the face. And so, you like, know what they actually look like. And so I’m kind of surprised that, even that they would be able to recognize other agents, even to know that they’re even other agents like to know, to know their face, right

Rob Hilliard  1:08:20

well, and that is, this was at a time when the Pinkerton agency was still growing, so they didn’t have all that many like they’re probably at that time, I would say their agents numbered in the dozens, and they were all housed, mostly all housed in Chicago, right? So they would have probably bumped into each other. But just, you know, again, by 1870 or 1880 Pinkertons had 1000s of agents, and they were more spread out. By then, they had offices, you know, in different big cities across the country. So to your point, yeah, it wouldn’t have been. They might be sitting right next to each other, and not, you know, not known. And and also, to your point, talking about looking for a criminal, unless you had a, you know, some type of photographic memory that you’re like, Oh, I saw that picture of that mug shot of that person that was in the Chicago office six months ago, and now I just passed him on the street. That would be pretty incredible. But, you know, again, plausible, I guess. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  1:09:19

you might have already answered my next question, because in Episode Seven, it’s titled The case of the dead dog, and the storyline follows the Pinkertons trying to solve a case of someone killing a farmer’s dog. It turns out to be railroad barons trying to force local farmers off the land. And according to the series, the Pinkerton agents are on the side of the local farmers against the railroad folks trying to make big money. It’s kind of a little guy against the big corporations, where we see them falling on the side of the little guy against these Corrupt Organizations. Is it true to assume that the Pinkerton agents would fight for the little guy, like we see in this episode, or like you mentioned earlier, maybe it’s just all about the money. Yeah, it’s all

Rob Hilliard  1:09:57

about they were. I mean, we talked. Talked before about the Pinkerton agency growing from, you know, a one or two man business into a, you know, today, a multinational corporation that’s, I’m sure, worth, you know, many hundreds of millions. They didn’t do that by working for the little guy and and really, you know, it’s a different era. I mean, I sound probably a little bit like I’m attacking the Pinkertons. I don’t necessarily mean it that way, but they knew where their bread was buttered, right? And they were all about making the money, and that’s what they did. But when I say it was a different era, it was i Yes, attitudes of the time were different, and there were maybe not as different as we might like to think, I guess, but there was much more class separation in American society than there is today, and that may be what I’m trying to say. So there was, you know, what would have them in term the lower class of society. And there was a lot of times just a presumption that, well, they’re all criminals. They’re all, you know, to use another term of the time, layabouts. And so there would have been less of a thought at that time to kind of come to the rescue of or stand up for that lower class of people, that there was just much more stratification of society than there is today. So but I guess more specifically, you know, around this episode where they’re talking about the railroad barons. I mean, that was railroad companies, railroad companies, banks and what they called Ben Express companies, like a Wells, Fargo, or, I forget the name of the other company. It was like United Express, or United States Express, or something like that, that shipped things that were valuable. Those were those groups right there, railroads, banks, express companies, made up probably 90% of the Pinkertons business in the 1800s and they were all, I mean, they were the business conglomerates at the time. So quite the contrary of working, you know, against a railroad bear, and they were working peckermans were working for them, and that’s where they made most of their money. Most of the stuff they investigated was train robberies, again, like postal robberies or shipping robberies, which would be the Express companies and bank robberies. So, yeah, I’m sure some writer sitting somewhere, you know, scribbling, typing away on their word processor, when they wrote that episode was like, Oh, they should stand up for the, you know, little guy. And we like that thought today, but that’s not even remote reality for the Pinkertons of the 1800s I’m so glad

Dan LeFebvre  1:13:00

we got a chance to finally chat on the show. Thank you so much for coming on to cover the Pinkertons. We’re gonna cut it here at episode seven in the series. We’ve got a lot to cover on the TV show, but until next time, our listeners can pass the time with your fantastic book called in freedom shadow that I’ve got a copy right here. It features one of the main characters in the show is the protagonist in your historical novel. So can you give our listeners a little preview of your book? Sure,

Rob Hilliard  1:13:23

we touched on it a little bit, but it is about, it is based on the true story of John Scoble. It is about, as I said, his escape from slavery, his recruitment by the Pinkerton, specifically Alan Pinkerton, to become a spy for the Union army. And that’s probably, I haven’t counted the pages, but that’s probably about the first quarter or third of the book. And then the rest of the book dives into missions that he went undercover into the Confederacy to spy on the Confederates and healthy union cause. And so just to this were, this were on the base on True Story podcast, for everybody’s knowledge, what I did with the book, with one notable exception that you’ll find out about if you read to the very last sentence of the book. But I made a commitment to myself that I was going to use whatever known, whatever facts were known about a person or an event that I would I would use those in the book in the way that we knew them to be in real life. So I tried not to bend timelines, or say, oh, this person was, you know, over here, when in reality he or she was actually over here. If I knew they were here, that’s where they are in the book. So it is, it is, again, to the extent that we knew the information. Conversation, I tried to adhere to stricter rules than the writers of the Pinkertons. I tried to keep it, you know, align with reality as much as I say, as much as possible. That’s not to say that Well, I just decided to fabricate something, but it’s more that we didn’t know some of the details. And so the true story part that I’ve described about John Scoble was really kind of the skeleton of the story, and then I flushed out the rest of the novel with putting more of the meat on the bones and filling in what happened in between there. And so that’s why it ended up being a novel instead of a non fiction book, because we just don’t know all that much, and I felt I wanted to fill that story and make it more complete. Makes

Dan LeFebvre  1:15:45

perfect sense. I’ll make sure to add a link to that in the show notes, and we’ll have you back on to continue talking about the Pinkertons. Thank you again, so much for your time. Rob, I appreciate

Rob Hilliard  1:15:53

Dan. I’m thrilled to be on as you know, I’ve been a fan of the show for several years, so I was very excited to be invited you.