Son of the Old West by Nathan Ward

No figure in the Old West lived or shaped its legacy more fully than
Charlie Siringo. Born in Matagorda, Texas, in 1855, Charlie went on
his first cattle drive at age 11 and spent two decades living his boyhood dream as a cowboy. As the dangerous, lucrative “beeves” business
boomed, Siringo drove longhorn steers north to the burgeoning Midwest
Plains states’ cattle and railroad towns, inevitably crossing paths with such
legendary figures as Billy the Kid, Bat Masterson, and Shanghai Pierce. In his
early thirties he joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s Denver office, using
a variety of aliases to investigate violent labor disputes and infiltrate outlaw
gangs such as Butch Cassidy’s train-robbing Wild Bunch. As brave as he was
clever, he was often saved by his cowboy training as he traveled to places the
law had not yet reached.
Siringo’s bestselling, landmark 1885 autobiography, A Texas Cowboy,
helped make the lowly cowboy a heroic symbol of the American West. His
later memoir, A Cowboy Detective, influenced early hard-boiled crime novelists for whom the detective story was really the cowboy story in an urban
setting. Sadly sued into debt by the Pinkertons determined to prevent their
sources and methods from being revealed, Siringo sold his beloved New Mexico ranch and moved to Los Angeles, where he advised Hollywood filmmakers
and especially actor William S. Hart on their early 1920s Westerns, watching
the frontier history he had known firsthand turned into romantic legend on
the screen.
In old age, Charlie Siringo was called “Ulysses of the Wild West” for the
long journey he took across the Western frontier. Son of the Old West brings
him and his legendary world vividly to life.

NATHAN WARD is the author
of The Lost Detective: Becoming
Dashiell Hammett, which was
nominated for the Edgar and
Anthony awards, as well as Dark
Harbor: The War for the New York
Waterfront. He has written for
the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CrimeReads,
and Westword, and was an editor at American Heritage
magazine for several years. Though he lives in
Brooklyn, NY, he has had a lifelong interest in the
American West and its history

$28.00 (Canada: $38.00)
6 x 9, 368 pp.
U.S. History (HIS036040)
978-0-8021-6208-3
eISBN: 978-0-8021-6209-0
U.S. and Canadian rights:
Atlantic Monthly Press