The Pinkertons, a detective dynasty, by Richard Wilmer Rowan, a family of outlaws, the reckless Reno gang of Seymour, Indiana.

The Civil War had been a fruitful season for outlawry. A rabble of renegades flourishing on either side of the imaginary line between North and South,

had taken bounties for enlisting in both armies, and had used their vague military status

to cover the raids they perpetrated with attendant feats of homicide, robbery, and arson.

The capitulation of the southern leaders bore but little significance for those uniformed bandits.

Some were guerrillas of such sanguinary record that they did not believe that they would be

permitted to surrender.

Not a few already had a dead or alive price upon their heads.

Still, others were genuine irreconcilables who had favored the Confederate cause while fighting

in the main for their own felicity and profit, who now declined to consider the South subdued

while they had rifle ammunition and a horse and saddle. There was then no shell shock known to

medical science or any other fancy way of excusing the restlessness ever adrift in the wake of war.

They were all of them young and chiefly unreconciled to the dull prospects of peace and honest employment.

And so they stayed in the field when the blue and the gray marched home,

and their more audacious exemplars gained widespread and somber renown. The Youngers, the James

boys, the Dalton's, the Reno's. Cole Younger had occasion to swear vengeance against all Pinkerton's.

However, his impulsive life was filled with many oaths,

and he showed, after all, but a train robber's normal aversion to railroad detectives.

The Renoes might have vowed to kill Alan Pinkerton, his sons, and half his force,

but instead that notorious troop, with quiet supervision from the agency, neither paused

nor pondered until they had destroyed themselves. They were, of course, a family before they

became a gang, a Pennsylvania Dutch mother and Swiss father,

...