![]() ![]() The state of Ohio outlawed them, concerned that they might operate as a private army - to nefarious ends. Both strikers and agents died in the ensuing battle, and the Pinkertons gained a reputation as ruthless corporate henchmen and violent union busters. At the infamous Homestead Strike, more than 300 Pinkertons were hired by Carnegie Steel to break a union strike at the Homestead, Pennsylvania mills and furnaces. and had become notorious for infiltrating unions and strikebreaking on behalf of big-time industrialists. By the 1890s, the Pinkerton agency employed around 2,000 detectives and 30,000 reserve agents - a larger force than the standing army of the U.S. Allan Pinkerton died in 1884, leaving the company to his sons. In the 1870s, the Pinkertons worked as bounty hunters in the lawless Wild West, chasing outlaws like the Reno Gang, the Wild Bunch, and Frank and Jesse James. She posed as his caregiver on the journey and helped him change trains safely. Undercover as a coquettish Southern belle, Warne learned about the details of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln while he transferred from one train to another by carriage in Baltimore. He’d gotten a tip about the plot and sent several agents, including Warne, to infiltrate pro-Confederate circles in Baltimore. Allan Pinkerton headed a Union intel-gathering service during the Civil War, and in 1861, helped thwart a plot to assassinate President Lincoln. Indeed, she did: Warne helped solve an embezzlement case by befriending the prime suspect’s wife, and Pinkerton asked her to head a division of female detectives in 1860. But Kate Warne, around 23 years old, assured him that she could “worm out secrets in many places to which is was impossible for male detectives to gain access,” as he recalled in his memoir. One day in 1856, a young woman walked into the Pinkerton agency to apply for a job as an investigator. ![]() An early logo for the company, which featured a drawing of a sleepless eye, inspired the term “private eye.” Kate Warne, the First Female Detective In 1850, Pinkerton left the force and created the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which specialized in security for railroads and express companies. After stumbling upon a band of coin counterfeiters and helping apprehend them, he was appointed a county deputy sheriff and later became Chicago’s first police detective and an agent for the U.S. It was founded by Allan Pinkerton, a staunch abolitionist from Glasgow who fled Scotland in 1842 and moved to Chicago, where he established a barrel-making shop that was also a stop in the Underground Railroad. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was one of the first, and certainly most successful, private detective agencies in America. ![]()
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