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A Pinkerton’s Agent
“not the type of man one liked to argue with.” |
I wasn’t
long before more adventure seemed to seek Tom Horn out.
Late in 1890 C. W. “Doc” Shores, a deputy U.S. marshal,
sheriff of Gunnison County, Colorado, and part-time Pinkerton
agent, was on the trail of thieves that had driven stolen Colorado
horses into Arizona. In December he received a letter from the
postmaster of Solomonville, in southeastern Arizona. The postmaster
and his brother owned the Dunlap Brothers’ Ranch, where
Tom Horn was foreman. Both he and Horn had seen the thieves who
had been described on a “Wanted” poster that had
been distributed in the region. Shores said, “Being in
the cattle business himself [the postmaster] appreciated what
I was doing and would have his foreman appointed as deputy sheriff
to assist... in making the arrests. He praised Tom Horn highly
as a capable cattleman, rodeo star, and a former Indian Scout.”
Shores answered Dunlap’s letter, and arranged to meet Tom
at Willcox, forty miles south of Solomonville. They met in the
lobby of the hotel where the Colorado sheriff stayed after arriving,
and he described his new acquaintance as “a tall, dark?complected
man with a black mustache.... He was around thirty years of age
and presented an imposing figure of a man ?? deep?chested, lean?loined,
and arrow?straight. He was wearing a plaid shirt, woolen trousers
and high-heeled boots. A wide-brimmed sombrero covered his head.” Shores
also said Horn had “black, shifty eyes.”
As they traveled by buckboard to the location where the horse
thieves had been seen, the two lawmen became engaged in discussions
on various matter. Shores further described his partner as an “interesting
conversationalist... [but] not the type of man one liked to argue
with.”
After capturing the two robbers without trouble, the two men
went their separate ways. Shores wrote a letter to James McParland,
superintendent of the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency
in Denver. He praised Horn’s work in helping him run down
the horse thieves, and recommended that the Agency hire Tom as
an agent.
Within months Tom Horn and his partners in an Arizona silver
mine sold out. He went to Denver and, as he said, was “initiated
into the mysteries of the Pinkerton institution.” His superintendent,
McParland, asked him what he would do if he were put on a train
robbery case. Tom told him simply that if he had the help of
another good man, he would catch the robbers.
Around midnight on August 31, 1891, a train was robbed on the Denver and Rio
Grande Railway between Cotopaxi and Texas Creek, roughly midway between Salida
and Canon City on the Arkansas River. Horn was sent out on the job, and was told
that his partner would be none other than “Doc” Shores. When Shores
caught up with him, he:
… asked me how I was getting on.
I told him I had struck the trail, but there were so
many men scouring the country that I myself was being
held up all the time; that I had been arrested twice
in two days and taken in to Salida to be identified.
Eventually all the sheriff’s posses quit, and then Mr. W. A. Pinkerton
and Mr. McParland told Shores and me to go at ’em. We took up the trail
where I had left it several days before and we never left it till we got the
robbers.
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F. M. Ownbey, a Pinkerton’s
who worked with Tom Horn (author’s photo, courtesy
Al Carr).
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The robbers went
west across the Sangre de Cristo range in southern Colorado.
They proceeded into an
iron mining area and crossed back to the east side of the
Sangre de Cristos at Mosca Pass, just southeast of present-day
Great
Sand Dunes National Monument. Horn and Shores then chased
them through Huerfano Canon, out by Cucharas and east of Trinidad
near the New Mexico line. The robbers dropped down into Clayton,
N.M., and “got into a shooting scrape there in a gin mill.
They then turned east again toward the ‘Neutral Strip’ and
close to Beaver City, then across into... a place in Texas called
Ochiltree” in the northeast part of the Texas Panhandle.
The robbers proceeded toward the Oklahoma Indian Territory, and
entered it below Canadian City. They then came to the head of
the Washita River and followed it downstream to their final destination.
The two Pinkertons men chased the robbers on horseback to
Paul’s
Valley, south of Oklahoma City, and more than three hundred miles
from where they had first picked up the trail. At Washita station
they located and captured one of them, Burt Curtis, in a house
owned by a man named Wolfe. Shores hauled Curtis back to Denver,
leaving Tom Horn to wait and see if the other would come back
to Wolfe’s.
After
several days of waiting on my part, he did come
back, and as he came riding up to the house I stepped
out and told him someone had come! He was ‘Peg
Leg’ Watson, and considered by everyone in
Colorado as a very desperate character. I had no
trouble with him.
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Early in the investigation, Horn and Shores had suspected
that Joe McCoy, who was wanted in Canon City by the Fremont
County, Colorado, sheriff for murder, was also a party to
the Denver and Rio Grande robbery. That was not the case,
but McCoy and his father, Dick, had been tried and convicted
of murdering a stock detective. Joe escaped from jail before
he was sentenced, and Dick was out on bail at the time of
the Denver and Rio Grande incident. Dick’s ranch was
across the river from the place where the train had been
robbed, and it was natural that the lawmen would suspect
him and his boys… |
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