A true story of a man named Charlie Siringo. Went on his first cattle drive at twelve and then did the cowboy thing for a few decades until he began working for the Pinkertons. The story from there has him infiltrating different gangs to make arrests from Mexico to Alaska. By different disguises he he would take on a whole new person to get information to make the arrests. At times I felt like he was the character from the old T.V. show Wild, Wild West Artemus Gilmore who would come up with different designs and disguises. This man was the real thing. Later he would wright a book and be sued by the Pinkertons who were not all that upright themselves by the early 1900’s, but that is another story. Here is a book about a real man whom I had never heard of before and I am glad I read this book.

I thoroughly enjoyed Son of the Old West: The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier by Nathan Ward. This is an interesting and intriguing biography of a man who lived larger than life in his own time and seems to have been mostly forgotten today. Though some of Siringo's adventures seem more like fiction than fact, the author does a good job of separating the exaggerated tall tale from the verifiable truth.

I knew nothing about Charlie Siringo before reading this book, I just had a vague recollection of the name - actually I mistakenly thought he was a member of the "super posse" that sent outlaw Butch Cassidy fleeing out of the country. Pretty sure I had confused him with Joe Lafors another lawman of the era who Charlie Siringo worked with a time or two (FYI: Siringo didn't think too much of Lafors's abilities as a lawman).

If you're old enough to remember the old TV show The Wild Wild West, imagine someone who is the embodiment of both man of action James West and master of disguise Artimus Gordon; obviously that's an exaggerated example but you get the idea.

Siringo was really a remarkable person who, in many ways, personified what we tend to think of as that indomitable Old West spirit; Nowhere is that more evident than in his long-standing legal battles with The Pinkerton Detective Agency over the right of Siringo to publish his memoirs. That's an entirely different glimpse of history.

I found this book to be a fascinating read. Recommended for anyone with a love of history, particularly those who enjoy learning about America's Old West.

This book is a bit sad. You read about the larger than life adventures of someone who ultimately ends up broke and penniless in a world that largely would never know of the things he did. It takes a strong person to continue without stopping, and the man covered in the book was one. Despite being sued into debt, he never backed down from sharing his knowledge of criminal science (to use a modern term) to help others. Part western, part slice of life, part corporate greed, this book is very multi-faceted.