361: The Pinkertons Part 2 with Rob Hilliard

Dan LeFebvre  02:15

We’ll start today with a very sensitive topic, because episode number eight of the Pinkertons addresses racism from white towns, people in Kansas City and Native Americans as the Pinkertons are trying to solve the murder of Chippewa man. The show doesn’t really portray any racism itself, but it is a sensitive line to walk, because I think it’s fair to say racism was definitely a thing in the 1800s unfortunately, still is today. Where did the pickerton stand when it came to injustice against Native Americans?

Rob Hilliard  02:46

Well, specifically on their involvement with Native Americans, it would have been unless there was a native who was a specific suspect in a case, they probably wouldn’t have had any involvement as a company. And what I’m sure individual Pinkerton agents, as any individual person would have their feelings, you know, one way or another, as you said, certainly very strong racism against Native Americans, against blacks, against Asians. You know, the list goes on right at that time period. I mean, you’re talking about basically just over a year after the last of the slaves were freed during the American Civil War. And certainly there had already been, as the Eastern US was settled. You know, the Trail of Tears, for example, with with Cherokees, they were pushed out of southeastern United States in, like one said, I started around 1815 maybe 1820 so 40 plus years earlier, and but it was about to get a whole lot worse as US expansion started moving into the what we now know as the West, or the prairies in the West. So we talked about the last episode Kansas City, Missouri, at that time, was just starting to be settled. Um, but there were waves and waves of people coming right after the end of the Civil War. So again, without getting into a topic that’s, you know, could be a whole college course in itself, there was a very basic assumption that, I’ll just say white people, European settlers, were going to move in, dominate, push out people of color who lived in that area, whether they were black, Asian, a lot of Chinese immigrants at the time. I. Um, or just a bit later, I guess, not exactly at that time, but coming in through San Francisco and then certainly the Native Americans who were already there. So all that is to say, certainly individual fingered agents would have had their own positions thoughts on things, but the company as a whole, and I couldn’t even find I did do some research on this, I couldn’t find any specific cases where they were either working on behalf of a Native American tribe or or pursuing a suspect who was Native American. That’s not to say that those you know don’t exist or didn’t happen, but I wasn’t able to find anything through the resources that I had available. So

Dan LeFebvre  05:45

maybe kind of what you were talking about in the last episode, where is about the money in there, whoever is going to pay and be their client, that’s who their client is. Yeah,

Rob Hilliard  05:56

that’s exactly right. They were very the Pinkertons were very mission focused, and they were very success focused, and ultimately, that equated to, at that time, being very dollar focused. And yeah, you’re exactly right. They they would have been, it would be less likely that they would be working on behalf of the Native Americans, just because they’d be less likely to have the money to pony up to pay for things at that time. Again, not to say that they didn’t have a specific case like that, but I’m not aware of it and but that equally on the other side, like I said, unless there was a suspect who happened to be Native American, I don’t think that the company as a whole, probably devoted much thought or interest to it, other than how it affected their bottom line. Makes

Dan LeFebvre  06:49

sense. Makes sense? Well, in the last episode, we talked some about John Bell or John Scoble, and if we go back to the series, in episode nine, we get to learn a little bit more about his backstory, according to the series, at least, because there’s an investigation into another murder, and that suspect turns out to be an old friend of John Bell, and that leads us into learning more about his background. The Pinkertons find out that the house they’re paying rent for at Kate’s house in the series is owned by Casey holdings, number 6107 which is actually owned by John Bell. So when he’s confronted, John says he grew up in New York City, he was brought under the protection of a lady named Marm. And then when the episode suspect Aldred and John Bell were kids, they were on the street, Marm took them in and gave them a quote, unquote family in exchange for them stealing for her. So this episode is him, kind of breaking free from her and his own past. And of course, as you mentioned earlier in our last episode, the John Bell is John Scoble. So how well does this episode kind of portray the background for what we know of the real John Scoble,

Rob Hilliard  07:55

not even remotely close. And what it does do an excellent job of, though, is stealing the plot of Oliver Twist, because this is exactly what I mean, you know, tweaked a little bit to shorten it for TV, but this is the plot of Oliver Twist. And with Marm, the title character of the show, being the Fagan character. And so from my standpoint, this is not only poor history. Is poor writing, sloppy, sloppy writing, but yeah, it’s not close. Scoble. We talked about this a bit in the last episode, but Scoble was a slave. He was born a slave prior to the outbreak of civil war. He lived in Mississippi. He was on a on a the plantation of a man named Doggone it. I forgot his first name. I should know it. But anyway, his name was skobel. And so, of course, like man escapes leaves, he took his master’s surname. And so, yeah. I mean, the story couldn’t be more different. Scoble ultimately escaped, met the Pinkertons, was recruited as a Pinkerton agent. So for anybody listening to the episode here, you’ll notice there’s not one piece of what I’m talking about that remotely ties into what we saw in the episode, which is unfortunate, because again, when I when this one sort of started up, and they started into the episode, and they were talking more about John Bell, I’m like, Oh boy, here we go. And then they seem like they were going to get into his past. And I’m like, wow, this is going to be, you know, somehow aligned with with the book that my story is about, the story that my book is about, excuse me, and yeah, it wasn’t even, I mean, there was really no part of it that you know that aligned with what we know about his backstory. So, like I said, it was disappointing from a historical standpoint, but it was equally disappointing just from. A writing standpoint, because I’m like, this is just Oliver Twist.

Dan LeFebvre  10:06

That’s a good point. I guess I didn’t even make that connection that, yeah, just Oliver Twist in another form. The last time we talked, we covered episode number three with a traveling troupe in Kansas City, and we see another troop coming in in episode number 10. But this time it is different, because it’s a boxing circuit. This time we see Henri the Iron Fist Fox, fighting against Bert the butcher Grove. And it turns out Henri Fox is an old flame of Kate warns. So that’s how the Pinkertons get involved in this episode’s murder. Since this is the second time in the series, we have this concept of traveling troops come up. It makes me think that the TV show is using them as a means to get new characters into the show so they can just get rid of them after a single episode. Once their part is done, they can leave. It also makes me think of how local law enforcement today, like the police, handle local crimes. Well, federal crimes go to the FBI. Of course, the FBI didn’t exist in the timeline of the series, so that makes me wonder if then the Pinkertons almost work similar in a way that the FBI does today with local law enforcement in the series. It’s Sheriff Logan. He’s handling these local crimes. And maybe that’s why the Pinkertons are handling crimes associated with traveling troops because they’re not the locals. Is it true that the traveling troops kept the Pinkertons as busy as we see them in this area? Well,

Rob Hilliard  11:30

definitely not. But there were, there is a seed of of truth in there. Well, two seeds, maybe so. One is, there were definitely traveling troops. They were a big thing at that time period the country was starting to it had just come out of a four year war. And of course, you know, the war was internal to our boundaries, so that limited people’s mobility in and of itself, not to mention the fact that there was a war going on and people were focused on and people were focused on that, and not other things. But at the close of the war, a couple of things had happened. More railroads had been built as part of the war effort or extended. More roads had been built or extended. So, as they show in the Pinkerton show, the wagon trains and things were kind of moving. There was increased mobility, and they were starting to enter into an era of more prosperity, and that westward expansion that I talked about a minute ago. And so you did see these traveling troops. And sometimes they were boxers, sometimes there were actors, like we talked about the previous episode. There were revivalists, religious revivalists that traveled around the country like that. And then you had the, you know, kind of the shysters, you know, fortune tellers, or, you know, snake oil salesmen, whatever. And but those, those things were all real.

Dan LeFebvre  13:00

The

Rob Hilliard  13:02

did they travel around and murder each other when they got to each city? No, it would have been a pretty short trip, right? Because once you kill all the people involved in your show, you know, they laugh. So that wasn’t really a thing. But the other, the other piece in the law enforcement that you latched on to there is, is a key to station that’s worth talking about, because virtually all law enforcement at that time was local, and even most cities didn’t have a detective force. Some did. New York City did in, I think, 1850s and there might have been a couple others, like, really one or two others, but most of them just had, like, what we would call today, a beat cop, right, a force of those, and they were exclusively men and but there was no national there was no FBI. Secret Service was formed in 1865 oddly, they didn’t really have a a presidential protection element at that time, as much as they were an anti counterfeiting organization, because counterfeiting was a huge deal at the time, and that was something that the Pinkertons did get involved in, that the series somehow failed to latch on to. But anyway, um, but what was happening with that mobility is two things, people would travel. Um, crime travels with people, right? Good and bad people travel. But the other thing is that the break, there was a breakdown in jurisdictions. So if you were the Sheriff of such and such a county, or the fictional sheriff of Kansas City, Missouri, and a crime was committed just outside of the town, actually a really good, a really good example of this is a show that I know you’ve covered, a movie that you’ve covered on your show before, which is tombstone. Yeah, and there’s a part in there where there’s a shooting with the cowboys and the county sheriff, whose name I suddenly can’t remember. Now I can picture the actor, but anyway, he says, No, this is, this is a city matter. And so he pushes it off onto the herbs to deal with that wasn’t even a real thing, because they were actually Mar US Marshals as a whole anyway. But the point is, there were all these little jurisdictional disputes, but when you started looking at like a railroad robbery, for example, well, if that railroad runs from, I don’t know, Ohio to North Dakota, and the crime is committed somewhere alone there, right? And somebody jumps on the train in Minnesota and robs it. Well, who has jurisdiction over that? Is it the police force from the city, you know, Columbus, Ohio, where it left from, or is it the police in Deadwood? You know North Dakota, that would North or South Dakota, wherever, Fargo North Dakota, or is it Duluth, Minnesota, where the crime was committed, like they couldn’t figure out those things. And so the Pinkertons, actually, and really, where they made their bones, to a large extent, was they had that national presence or grew into it, and they were just starting to get it right after the Civil War, but they were able to take a warrant from, you know, the governor of such and such a state and pursue a criminal across state lines, because they had no they had no fixed geographic jurisdiction. And so then, if they caught that person, and there are specific examples where they they had a writ from, let’s say the governor of Indiana, and they pursued somebody and they captured them in Illinois, they would hold them and then wire back to the governor of Indiana, and they are, I’m sorry, to the Governor of Illinois, and they would basically rewrite the writ for Illinois, and then they can arrest that person and bring them in. So sorry, that’s kind of convoluted. But the point being, they had the ability to be overarching because they didn’t have, I mean, they were, they were getting paid, either reward money, or acting, you know, as a government contractor, in effect. So they were paid by those states where the crimes were committed, but then they could chase people anywhere they wanted to. So so that, so it’s

Dan LeFebvre  17:29

not like they they didn’t have jurisdiction. And so because they didn’t have jurisdiction, they had jurisdiction everywhere. Basically,

Rob Hilliard  17:36

yeah, exactly they had it where they decided they had it and but that was to the benefit of crime enforcement, not just to the benefit of the Pinkertons, but, but there were cases where, prior to that, where somebody was arrested and they would get off because it’s like, well, you can’t arrest me because, you know, you’re the sheriff of this county, and I actually committed the crime in this neighboring county, and they would be like, Oh yeah, you’re right. We can’t hold you. And they take the handcuffs off and walk away. So, um, that was, you know, that was a problem, and which is why, ultimately, eventually the FBI, you know, came into existence, because there needed to be some mechanism to, you know, to address that. So one other thing I wanted to come back to for a second, and I mentioned this in the last episode about talking about the travel and troops. This is what I call the Gunsmoke approach to TV writing, right, where you build one set in one place, and then you find some mechanism in your writing to bring the bad guys to you, and then, as you said, they also then pack up and leave conveniently at the end of the show, so they’re not hanging around like, I don’t have to explain their presence, you know, four episodes from now, because they got in their wagon and got on down the road, or got on the train and got on down the road. Well, we even see

Dan LeFebvre  18:58

that in the next episode of the series, episode of the series, episode 11, because there’s another traveling troupe that comes through this time, though it’s spiritualists called doc Sprague’s traveling spiritualism show. And the episode focuses on a woman named Mio, the guy who runs the show, claims that she’s a seer of spirits, but we quickly find out that she’s a Japanese lady who’s being forced to participate in the show until she can make her escape to a handsome man in St Louis who has promised her marriage in a wonderful life. And then when she shows will the photo of the man in St Louis that she’s going to be marrying, will recognizes the photo, and it’s General George Armstrong Custer. In other words, Mio has been duped. There’s no promise of marriage. She’s been sold by the spiritualism show. So of course, the Pinkertons intervene to stop this from happening. Basically, it seems like a case of human trafficking that the Pinkertons are managing to stop and remembering that this is all happening right after the Civil War. I’m sure that the character of mio is probably fictional, but the kind. Concept of human trafficking, even after the end of the war, I’m sure is true. Were the Pinkertons involved in fighting against human trafficking

Rob Hilliard  20:09

in the way that I guess you’re intending to pose the question? I think the answer is no, and that is to say, first of all, the concept of human trafficking as we think about it today would have been very different, very foreign to, you know, to that time period. As you said, we’re talking about being, you know, a year or so removed from the end of the Civil War. And even though a lot of people might be, you know, familiar with the emancipation proclamation that only freed slaves within the Confederacy, and then only within the areas, basically, where Union soldiers moved into the Confederacy, because otherwise, obviously the Confederacy didn’t feel like they had to follow the laws of the world space. So

Dan LeFebvre  20:57

they’ve already left this the country anyway. Do whatever you

Rob Hilliard  21:00

want. We’re not going to do that, and we’re going to follow that. So the Emancipation Proclamation on paper freed the slaves. In reality, the last of the slaves, which is what Juneteenth is about. You know, weren’t freed until, really, after the end of the war, but in 1865 so, so we’re very close to that in time, at the time of the series, and so it wouldn’t be sad to say a foreign concept that somebody being kept in some form of bondage. Right on the show, she’s not in physical bondage, but in effect, she is. And there’s certainly many examples of that even much later in the 19th century. Well, obviously there’s examples of it today in a different way, but, but people who are immigrants brought to the United States and then subjugated in some way, kept, kept in a way where they couldn’t just pick up a move and didn’t have freedom that we would associate with being a citizen, and that took a lot of forms, but it wouldn’t have been something that the Pinkertons would be involved in. And very similar to what we talked about, we were talking about the Native Americans in the first part of this, this show, you know, if it didn’t pay the bills. It wouldn’t have been something they were they were looking into. And again, that sounds harsh, but you know, that is the reality that there. I’m sure there were individual agents who maybe ran into situations like that, and may have even taken it into their own hands and done something about it. You know, possibly, I’m not aware of that one way or the other, but it wouldn’t have been something that, as an agency or as a company, that they would be directly intervening the way we saw in that episode. I guess it’s kind

Dan LeFebvre  22:52

of like what we were talking just talking about, where they’re not law enforcement. So it’s a it’s a fine line, like they’re almost, they’re almost law enforcement, but they’re not. And so it is about the money. So it’s not, you know, see a crime, solve the crime. It’s, you know, get paid to solve.

Rob Hilliard  23:10

No, that’s a good way to that’s a good way to say and and the show repeatedly, you know, bordered that line, but it wasn’t. They were, and it said, even in some of their advertising at the time, detectives for hire. And I’m kind of underlining the for hire part when I say that, but you know, to your point, they weren’t just sort of roaming around solving mysteries or crimes. You know, out of the goodness of their heart, they were doing it because somebody hired them to specifically do something. So, yeah, like,

Dan LeFebvre  23:45

we think of a private investigator today exactly. They’re not doing it just for the fundamental they’re doing because they’re getting paid to do it exactly. Yeah. Well, if we head back to the TV show in episode number 12, we learn about four nurses in the Civil War who reunite in Kansas City, conveniently, of course, after the they experienced this horrible, what they call the Battle of big sheep two years earlier, and they try to pay someone off $2,000 to keep them quiet, but then later, the guy that they paid off ends up dead. One of the ladies admits to it, saying that she just wanted to keep their secret quiet. According to the show, their secret is that the four women were nurses at a hospital the Battle of big sheep and for weeks on end the Union General General hunt, according to this show sense, the soldiers to take big sheep Hill from the Confederates. Despite being outnumbered, the officers tried to convince hunt that the battle was pointless. The Hill had no strategic value, and they mentioned some like 5000 soldiers were lost because of Hunt’s insistence on taking the hill. So when hunt came to the hospital injured, the nurses decided just to leave him untreated. Basically, they let him die because in their minds, they were saving 1000s of men by letting one man die. And that’s. Secret, is there any truth to this story of general hunt in the Battle of big sheep?

Rob Hilliard  25:06

None. This was so this was kind of, I don’t remember what episode number was this. Again, this is episode number 1212, okay, so it was almost midway through the series, or just over, and this is where I got to the point where I was watching these with my wife, and I’m like, Okay, it’s, this is the biggest eye roll so far. And I started to really, you know, almost kind of get off the bus with the whole concept of the series. Nothing of that is, again, remotely closed. You’ve heard me say that about other episodes before, but it is so far outside of the realm of reality that I’m just like, oh my gosh, this doesn’t even make sense. So just to give you a couple of statistics. Well, first off, just to hit a hit on no such person, no such battle. And you said the key thing there that they talked about it going on for weeks. I don’t know if they were specific, but they said that it went for weeks. Most of the Civil War battles, actually, most of them were a day. A couple were longer. Gettysburg, just to give a good example, was three days, and that was the single bloodiest battle overall. Now you often hear quoted that Antietam was the bloodiest day in American history. That’s the bloodiest single day because the Battle of Antietam only lasted one day, effectively. And so I’ll give you some statistics here in a minute. But, but my main point was there were not Civil War battles that lasted for weeks, where they were repeatedly trying to take one hill. There were some, like the peninsula campaign, where McClellan was trying to take Richmond in 1862 where there were like repeated battles as they were moving along a long, you know, 70 or 80 mile stretch and progressing. And there were repeated battles, or multiple battles, day after day. But each of those have, like their own name and their own objectives when they were fighting the battle. And so this idea of like trying to take a hill repeatedly, repeatedly, is just didn’t exist. And I’m going to come back to that so. But let me give you some statistics first. So in the three day battle of Gettysburg, the total number of union Dead was only 3200 people, 3200 soldiers. The Confederate total was 3900 at Antietam, the Union lost 2100 dead, and the Confederates about 1600 dead. Now I certainly don’t want to minimize that those numbers, because you know, all those people were humans. They all mattered, right? But nothing near 5000 dead on one side, like they talked about in in the episode. And if there were a battle that lasted for weeks and 5000 soldiers on one side or the other were killed, we would know the name of it, like, we know, Gettysburg or Antigua, or Chickamauga, or any of the bloodier battles of the war, right? We would already know about it. So, like I said, I really started getting, you know, annoyed watching this, and then when they got to the end and revealed what their secret was, you know, as you said, that they they basically left the was he a general? I can’t remember.

Dan LeFebvre  28:47

What is. I think they gave the as a general, but they didn’t really mention any anything other than that, you know, what major general agenda, whatever. You know, yeah, just Yeah. So

Rob Hilliard  28:57

this was the same when it when it finished and the credits were rolling. I turned my wife and I said, they stole that plot from an episode of mash. There was an episode of mash, again, I’m showing my age here, but there was an episode of mash where Hawkeye Pierce, if anybody hasn’t seen it, he was the main doctor in there, and it was set in Korea, where he operates on an officer. I didn’t look it up. I’m just going from memory, but I’m gonna say he was a colonel, but same concept, he was a guy who was repeatedly leading people trying to and they did have battles there that lasted for days or weeks. And, you know, I can’t tell you the casualty numbers, but where they were trying to take a single Hill, right? Korea, Vietnam, that those are that more fits that story. But the episode of mash Hawkeye removes healthy appendix from this doctor or from this officer, and so that he’s in the hospital and can’t lead his troops on another. The attack of this hill. So, same concept, you know. And again, I’m like, as a student of history, I’m looking at I’m like, this is all wrong. And when what to the end, as a writer, I’m like, they just stole this from another, you know, like we talked about the other episode, they just lifted it from something else. So I don’t know if, I don’t know if they did that, you know, we’re cognizant of the fact that they did it or not, or if it was just incidental. But, yeah, you can, anybody want to go look up that episode of mash. I don’t have no idea what it’s called or anything like that, but I do remember watching it 40 years ago,

Dan LeFebvre  30:39

things like that, like we don’t really, we don’t see any of that in in this, in the Pinkertons, we don’t see any of the actual battle itself. They only talk about it. And so it’s just in the dialog, which means you can change that very easily and still have a similar concept of, you know, these nurses that are killing one lot, you know, instead of 5000 right? But you don’t have to say 5000 you can say something a little more historically accurate, right?

Rob Hilliard  31:06

Well, and that’s what, you know, that’s what really started to annoy me, was they didn’t have to be, it didn’t have to be that far off, right? I mean, as I said a minute ago, if you’re talking about, you know, let’s say the union debt at Gettysburg, 3200 that’s a tragic loss of human life. And so it’s almost like somebody in some writers room was looking at it, and they said, Well, it’s, you know, 1500 people. Ah, that doesn’t sound like enough. Let’s make it 3000 that doesn’t sound like enough either. Let’s make it 5000 Okay, 5000 is, you know, and like I said, that’s, that’s sloppy history and sloppy writing. So to me, it doesn’t, it doesn’t bode well on either front

Dan LeFebvre  31:50

maybe it’s just me, or maybe it was because in an earlier episode, they showed that they had a picture of Custer. When I heard the name of this one, the Battle of big sheep. I was like, Oh, they’re, they’re trying to say Little Bighorn. Basically,

Rob Hilliard  32:06

I had the same reaction. It’s funny, you said that, because when it first popped up, I’m like, Oh, that’s weird. A Little Bighorn wasn’t, you know, it was, you know, maybe there somehow, but it was yeah, it was yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  32:18

and then it wasn’t that either, well, the case in this episode is interesting because it starts when will Pinkerton just happens to be at the saloon when one of the nurses gives the guy at the bar an envelope full of cash, and will just happens to notice it? When some of the other episodes we’ve seen the Pinkertons get cases by being hired by the governor local law enforcement. Sometimes it’s private citizens. Sometimes it’s things like this, where they just seem to notice something is awry, and so they step in to make things right, kind of like with this episode. So that would make me assume that the Pinkertons maybe did some pro bono work. How well does the series do, showing the various ways that the Pinkertons got their cases, and

Rob Hilliard  33:01

some of those are accurate, I don’t think they did any pro bono work. Again, not that I’m aware of. They were all about bringing in the buck. But as far as how assignments came to them, it was often that, you know, there was a crime of some sort, and then, as I said earlier, like maybe train robbery, so the railroad company would reach out to them, and they became, like the de facto, or, I’m sorry, the default, the go to Company specifically for train robberies. In fact, talk about another movie here for a second, based on true story Butch Cassidy, Sundance, kid at the end of that they are pursued, but they’re not called Pinkertons. I forget the name they use in in Bucha but, but they, in real life, they were the Pinkertons that were chasing their gang. And I think that was, was it the Hole in the Wall Gang? I want to say doesn’t matter. But anyway,

Dan LeFebvre  34:07

it’s been a while since I’ve seen that. I’d have to make

Rob Hilliard  34:09

sure. But anyway, but that really did happen, and the Pinkertons really did, you know, pursue them and break that gang, and they were known for, like, never giving up. We talked in the first episode about how they ultimately broke the Reno gang who committed the first and one of many, but the first train robbery in the US and the Pinkertons ultimately caught them. So they had this reputation of just, you know, to steal from the Mounties. We always get our man. And also, as they had in their in their advertisement, with the all seeing eye on it, the Pinkerton eye. It said, We never sleep. And they really cultivated that image purposely, purposefully and to the extent that little bit of trivia here, the term prior. Of it, I that we use today is actually derived from the Pinkerton all seeing eye logo. Okay, that was Alan Pinkerton, I suspect probably behind his back. They used to call him the eye because he was, you know, the founder of the company, and I think the one who came up with the logo, or at least the one who blessed it. And so they would, they would call him the eye. But anyway, that became known as a private detective, trans modified into private eye from that logo. So that’s where the turn comes from. But so they did get, you know again, train companies reached out to them, express companies that were moving stuff that got robbed. Banks, obviously, and then there were instances. And this comes back to what we talked about a minute ago, about jurisdictions where state governors would reach out to the Pinkertons because they didn’t have a law enforcement agency that fit the right jurisdiction for a particular item, or they knew the criminal had left and gone across to another state, and that the Pinkertons could cover that ground. So that wouldn’t have been at all unusual. It wouldn’t have been totally unusual either, for a Pinkerton agent to be in a bar and to see something and have it kind of like a modern, let’s say a detective on you know, I live near Pittsburgh, so the Pittsburgh police force, one of their detectives in a bar see somebody hand somebody an envelope full of money there that’s going to immediately trigger. Let’s buy your senses, right? So they might look into it and check into it and maybe see who that person is or what might be going on, or investigate a little bit further, but they’re not going to take that all the way to its conclusion without without a sponsor, without a client.

Dan LeFebvre  36:51

I wonder if some of that, the concept of them never stopping, comes from that jurisdiction, because I could see it from, you know, from the criminals perspective, if you’re used to once you get out of the law enforcement jurisdiction, you’re free. And it’s, I’m thinking again, another movie, Bonnie and Clyde, like when they cross state lines, the cop cars just turn around and leave. It’s not their jurisdiction anymore. But the Pinkertons Can, can do that, and they can keep going, and they keep going no matter where they are. So I wonder if that helped feed into that sense, you know, from the other side, like, Oh, they’re never, they’re never going to stop you’re going to keep coming.

Rob Hilliard  37:27

Yeah, no, you’re absolutely correct. And even taking that a step further, I said a minute ago that Alan Pinkerton and the agency cultivated that idea, right? But part of the reason they cultivated it was to instill that fear in the criminals. And there was no worse news than you know, let’s say about 1870 or so. He’s saying, Oh, I committed a crime. And they’re like, yeah, the Pinkertons are after you. Like that. You could not get any worse news than that, because you knew that they would exactly to your point, like, there’s not, there’s not a safe place. It’s all home in the United States, right? And again, back to Bucha Sundance, kid. That’s why they leave and go to Bolivia, because I was the only place they could go to get away and and really, as the Pinkertons went on over time, even getting outside the boundaries in the US, wouldn’t, you know, wouldn’t be enough, because it would start pursuing people International.

Dan LeFebvre  38:23

Well, the title of episode number 13 is called frontier Desperados. It’s named after a dime novel of the same name that we see in that episode. And according to the show, the woman in the book is courageous enough to pass on that courage to the woman reading it. Her name is Bill Carson in this episode, and her husband, though, insists that frontier Desperados is a fool and all women should just do what they’re told. As I was watching that part of the episode as a reminder of how bad sexism was back then, and even though today as well, unfortunately, but even though it’s not really in the series here, I couldn’t help but think then about Kate Warren, who, as a woman in the Old West had to face her own I’m sure share of you know misogyny and sexism. Can you explain what sexism was like in the old west and how it affected the real Kate Warren?

Rob Hilliard  39:14

Well, first of all, I probably can’t fully explain what sexism was like in the old west, being neither a woman nor having lived there. But fair point. But to try to answer your question, it was, I mean, it was about what we would think, I guess, is probably the best way to say it, which is to say that women were minimalized. I mean, they weren’t allowed to vote until what 1919, I think it was. But well into the 20th century, they there were places in the country where women didn’t have property rights. They that wasn’t everywhere, but so even at a not even a person to person. Um, perception of sexism, but, but a was a term I’m looking for here, built into the system. I’m struggling like a society, like the whole society, yeah, institutional sexism, ones was absolutely, you know, a reality of that time, um, and of course, it wasn’t recognized as that, in large part because that was the societal norm. And it took, you know, decades until those things started to change. So Kate Warren certainly did experience that. And the example that I’ll kind of use to tell that story is when she first applied to the Pinkerton a museum directly down Pinkerton, which was like 1855 and said, I would like to be a detective. And his immediate response was, No, you’re a woman. And so she kind of repeatedly came back and said, I think I’d be good at it. And here’s why and what ultimately opened his eyes. And I’ve said some bad things about Alan Pinkerton over the course of these shows here, but he must have been to an extent open minded, at least to the point of being able to further his business, right? Because he recognized, after some explanation, that, you know, what if we bring in a female detective, and this is the point that Kate made to him, was she said, I can go into places that no male detective can ever go into. Meaning she could go places. And there were instances over the years where she where a man committed a crime, and she went to his wife, and sat down one on one with her, and said, Listen, you really need to tell him to turn himself in. And here’s why. And so she talked the wife into doing it, and the wife in turn, and talked the criminal into doing it. And those were the kind of points that she was making to Alan Pinkerton at the outset, but it took some convincing. And in the show the Pinkertons, we see several times places where, where kid comes in and, you know, whoever the person is, whether a bad guy or just a character, they’re like, oh, who are you? You know, you’re some woman. Get out of here. That would have been, that would have been a very real reaction at that time, women were not largely, were not respected, at least respected in that environment for having sort of the guts and the toughness and the knowledge and the smarts to Be able to to carry out those types of assignments. So that would have been very much a real thing. The other point that I wanted to make, oh, sorry, just one quick aside on that one thing that’s shown multiple times, but I felt like it got more as they went through the episodes. Was Kate going into the saloon and in the bottom in the first floor of the hotel and drinking beer at the bar that wouldn’t that would be hard. No, in the 1800s a woman, unless she was a woman, employed by the bar for certain purposes, would be, let’s say, a woman of, you know, respected woman. I’m struggling to come up with the right terms here. But would a not go into a saloon and B, certainly not go in and go up to the bar and have a beer that, I mean beer was, was, you know, in public, was considered to be a male drink, a male, you know, that was a male domain. And if you were there, you were a floozy of of some sort or another. So, um, so I again, another thing I kind of got to chuckle out of as the as the show went on, um, another thing I wanted to go back to about this episode, though, is, and again, when it started, I thought, oh, okay, this is where they’re going. But I think Bell Carson was intended to be Bell Star, who is a notorious, probably the most notorious female outlaw of that time period. And so I just want to make sure I I don’t know her story as well, so I wrote down some notes here, but she did live in in Missouri. She was born in, I think it was Springfield, but she lived in that area, and she was associated with the James younger gang, which is Frank and Jesse James and Cole younger. And I know we’re going to talk about that a bit later, but there is a theory that Cole younger was actually the father of Bell stars, oldest daughter. So they were, they were together at some point. So there is a connection there between Bell Star. Or in Jesse James or the James younger gang and and, like I said, when that started, I thought, Oh, this must be where there. I had known a little bit about that connection. I didn’t know that Bell Star was from Missouri or close to Kansas City, Missouri, but that was not at all where they were going. And they didn’t even, you know, get around to touching on that. So again, I thought they were going to have some historical, at least a spin off from a historical, you know, accuracy standpoint. But they they veered

Dan LeFebvre  45:34

off. Well, I think the crime in this episode was a kidnapping. And we do see Jesse James, so there was a little bit of a connection. Of course, he does show up later in the series too, not to get too far ahead. But is the show correct then, to suggest that the Pinkertons Chase Jesse James?

Rob Hilliard  45:50

Yes, absolutely. And this is a there have been actually multiple, multiple, multiple books written about it, and movies made about it. So to try and keep this as short as possible, because, again, this could be, you know, a long, long, yeah, the picker does absolutely pursued Jesse James. It wasn’t until it wasn’t in this time period. It wasn’t until about 10 years later, now he was active him and I mentioned already the James younger gang, as I called it. They were already robbing banks and I think probably robbing trains in the 1860s but the Pinkertons weren’t brought in again. They had no it wasn’t like they were just going to go after him because he was doing bad things. So they were ultimately hired in 1874 so almost 10 years after the time period of the show to start to pursue Jesse James. And that pursuit went on for years, and they never caught him. That was one of the one of the most famous, if not the most famous failures, of the Pinkerton agency. And there, there weren’t all that many, but that that became, like I said, probably the most famous. Another thing to note there is, during that pursuit, there was a Pinkerton agent named, I’ll make sure I get his name right here. Um, I thought I wrote it down, but I maybe I didn’t. Oh, here it is. Louis Lowell, l, u, l, l, um, in 1874 he was killed by the James younger gang, probably two of the younger brothers that’s younger with a capital Y, and so they killed him while he was on assignment as a Pinkerton agent chasing after the gang. And so Alan Pinkerton, who by this point was maybe 60 years old, actually went out in the field himself. He was he was enraged by it, and and joined in the chase for Jesse James. And then the following year, and I don’t think Alan Pinkerton was hands on involved with this, but there was a very now infamous incident and tragic incident where Pinkertons had gotten bad information, but they got information that Jesse was in their family farmhouse, and so They went in with some deputies and some volunteers, Pinkertons moved in closed around the place, and they ended up someone from Pinkertons ended up tossing, like a grenades, an incendiary device, into the house, and the house burned, and tragically, They killed Jesse and Frank’s much younger half brother. He was a boy, I maybe around 10 years old. I can’t remember exactly how old, and they, they pretty badly injured their mother. She her arm was, was badly burned in that incident. So, so anyway, those are a couple. Anybody who digs into that story at all, those are some incidents that they’ll hear about that were kind of flash points, uh, throughout the the search for Jesse James. But as most people know, I don’t think I’m spoiling this. Um, Jesse was ultimately killed by a member of a zoom gang, and the Pinkertons. Pinkertons never caught him, and so but that was, like I said, that that pursuit went on for, I’m gonna say, at least two years, and might have even been a bit longer than that, but they were never able to to successfully catch him. Wow, wow.

Dan LeFebvre  49:57

Yeah, I got the impression that, I mean, you mentioned the. Timeline made if I get the impression that everybody knows who Jesse James is, so we got to put him on the show somehow.

Rob Hilliard  50:04

And I think there’s some truth to that. And I think there’s also kind of a like, people who know a little bit more about history are like, Oh yeah, there’s some association with the Pinkertons and Jesse James, right? Like, vaguely connected in their head. So when they present this, they’re like, Oh yeah, okay, this makes perfect sense. But the reality is, it was, you know, not even prime morning is off. The incidents are off.

Dan LeFebvre  50:28

The whole thing’s off. Getting that sense for the a lot of the episodes on the show, fortunately, well, if we circle back to the TV show, speaking of, we’ve got one more episode to talk about today, and that is episode number 14, called Old pap, and that refers to a Confederate general named Sterling Price who arrives in Kansas City to set up a newspaper that he calls the Kansas City Guardian, and he starts printing about the oppression of the government, restricting our freedoms and other things that sound eerily similar to what people are complaining about even today. But general price takes it to the next level, because he says the Civil War had an unjust end, and he is openly trying to start the civil war again. Of course, our heroes in the show the Pinkertons, come to save the day and the nation. So this is kind of a two part question. Was general price a real person who was basically trying to start Civil War version 2.0 and Was it really the Pinkertons who stopped that from happening?

Rob Hilliard  51:23

The answer to your first question there is yes, kind of and the answer the second question is absolutely no. The Pinkertons had nothing to do with it, but Sterling Price was a, I think, a Brigadier General for the Confederacy during some war. Since we’re now making pop culture references to other movies, I’ll give you another one, seeing True Grit, oh yeah, not based on true story, but

Dan LeFebvre  51:48

two versions of that one, yeah, yeah,

Rob Hilliard  51:50

yeah. Well, I only acknowledge the earlier one, but, but he talks about in the in the movie. But his cat’s name is general Sterling Price. Oh, okay, and so he, you know, anyway, I could easily veer off and talk for an hour about True Grit by wall. But anyway, so yeah, Sterling Price was real person. He was certainly, you know, vehemently, vehement supporter of the Confederacy, vehement supporter of slavery. And at the end of the war, he he did refuse to surrender, like the other Confederate Confederate generals did, but he didn’t travel around the country. Instead, he left and went to Mexico. And when he was there, it was a relatively short period, maybe a year. He they tried to establish a new, basically Confederate colony, or southern colony, in Mexico, and kind of bring some of the people who you know didn’t want to live in the US under the under the non Confederate rule, and bring him down there that basically failed. He got sick with typhoid. So he left there, came back. He was, he was from Missouri. Actually, he was governor of Missouri from 1853 to 1857 so prior to the war, and then he was also Missouri’s congressman from 1845 to 1846 in the House of Representatives. So he was a very well known figure. And you know a Missourian by birth. So he did come back to Missouri in 1867 I believe it was, but he wasn’t. He was basically penniless at that point. He wasn’t. He didn’t have supporters, like it showed in the show, and he wasn’t pretty a newspaper or any of those things. He basically, as it turned out, came home there to die. So the only other seed of truth in that whole thing is that he did die of cholera. I feel pretty confident in saying that. As they suggested to the show, he was not poisoned with cholera by by John Scoble. I’m pretty sure that’s wasn’t real, but, but anyway, yeah, so very much a real person, to the extent that I could find out, and I did dig into this a little bit, never any association with the Pinkerton,

Dan LeFebvre  54:33

just another name from history that they’re pulling into, yeah, kind of

Rob Hilliard  54:37

tie in. So actually, I was a little bit surprised that they picked somebody who had an association with Missouri, usually in left field. Like I was surprised they didn’t pick somebody who I don’t know lived in Florida or something.

Dan LeFebvre  54:50

Maybe was an accident. Maybe they didn’t know

Rob Hilliard  54:53

it was good point. Well, we’re up to episode

Dan LeFebvre  54:56

number 14. It’s a perfect stopping point for today. We’ve still got another eight episodes left in the series to talk about next time. But let’s take one more overall look back from episodes number eight to 14 that we talked about today. Was there anything we didn’t get a chance to talk about that, how they portrayed history, that really kind of stood out to

Rob Hilliard  55:13

you? No, I think we kind of hit the high points. I mean, again, it seemed to be, and you just said it a second ago, it seemed to be kind of the MO of the show to just take a name, or, like in the case of Belle Starr, they just had a first name. I’m not sure why they didn’t use her full name or regular name, and then just sort of reinvent a story around that, which, as I said, you know, when we recorded our first episode made for good entertainment at times. I don’t want to give the impression that the show wasn’t enjoyable or that people shouldn’t watch it because, you know, it was good fun at times. But yeah, from a historical accuracy standpoint, I gave it a D where we started out here. Now, as I’m talking through all this stuff, I’m thinking I might have to lower that girl. But yeah, no, I think we’ve hit most of the, you know, mostly important points. Okay, well,

Dan LeFebvre  56:06

thank you again, so much for coming on the chat about the bigger 10s, and we’ll be back next time to finish up the whole series looking at episodes number 15 to 22 but in the meantime, for the listening audience at home, I would highly recommend you hop in the show notes, pick up Rob’s book called in freedom shadow, so before I let you go today, Rob, can you give listeners a little teaser of your book?

Rob Hilliard  56:25

Sure, and thank you for the opportunity. So the book is, we’ve talked a little bit here about John Bell slash John Scoble. The book is based on the true story of John Scoble, who was a slave who escaped Mississippi, or, I’m sorry, who lived in Mississippi at the outbreak of the Civil War, escaped and made his way to Washington, DC. And there he was recruited by Alan Pinkerton to become a spy and part of pickerton spy network for the Union army. And he was sent back into the Confederacy on at least two clandestine missions that we know of. And so that’s the basis of the book, and unfortunately, that’s we don’t know a whole lot more about the real life story. So as I jokingly say to people, if I just wrote that part, I would be about five pages. So you’re holding the book up there. It’s a little thicker than five pages. Yeah. So, yeah. So, basically, I made up the rest, but it’s tries to fill in the blanks in that story and hopefully tell it in an entertaining way that the people can enjoy and

Dan LeFebvre  57:34

a lot more accurately than the Pinkertons as much well. Thank you again, so much for your time.

Rob Hilliard  57:41

Appreciate it.