The Pinkertons first filled a niche in the market while the rapidly growing United States tried to figure out what it wanted to do about policing. In the second half of the 19th century, Americans were moving across great expanses of space in the West, but had not come to agreement regarding who should be responsible for enforcing laws in the middle of nowhere. This made capitalists, who were trying to make money in the “Wild” West, very nervous. The answer to this problem, for decades, was that those who could pay could buy security for their property and their interests, in the form of Pinkertons.
The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, founded by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton in the early 1850s, initially found work by offering employers a way to identify employees who might be costing the company money. Railroads were some of Allan Pinkerton’s first and best customers. Pinkerton spies tried to ferret out conductors who, on their long shifts between stations, were operating unsupervised and might sleep the hours away, or chit-chat with passengers, rather than carrying out their duties. Conductors could also pocket the money from tickets they took on the trains, and the people in charge would be none the wiser. It was as early as this phase in the company’s history that workingmen began to resent Pinkerton’s presence. “Pinkerton operatives were called ‘vipers,’ ‘spies,’ ‘scoundrels,’ ‘jailbirds,’ and ‘thieves set to catch a thief,’ ” Frank Morn writes in his history of the agency, “The Eye That Never Sleeps”.
But Red Dead’s Pinkertons aren’t passing on names of embezzlers and malingerers to bosses. They are finding a bandit gang and bringing them to justice, and in the 1860s, this was how the agency burnished its name in the public eye. Pinkertons, Morn writes, had 10 years of “successful and glamorous detection of railroad bandits” after the Civil War. Morn takes the fact that local vigilantes lynched the members of two gangs the Pinkertons busted, the Reno Gang and the Farrington Brothers, as evidence that in identifying railway bandits, the Pinkertons’ actions generally aligned with the desires of the local populace.