Railroad History • Fact or fiction about Allan Pinkerton

I don't know about his railroad stuff (though he isn't fondly remembered, a prime duty of the Pinkerton's was breaking up labor organizing in the railroad industry and didn't exactly do so nicely), but if you look at the Civil war, he either was an incompetent boob or was working for the South.....he was McCleland's chief of intelligence, and what he told McCleland was generally 180 degrees from the truth. He kept telling McCleland that the South had many more troops than they really did, and at Antietam it likely kept McCleland from potentially taking out Lee's army, because he was afraid of mythical troops that didn't exist, and there were other examples of the same thing. 

The Homestead strike of

http://history1800s.about.com/...tead-Strike-1892.htm

Pinkerton helped the newly elected Abraham Lincoln arrive safely into Washington DC.  There was a planed attempt on his life in route.  They left a dinner early, got on a PRR train to Baltimore, pulled the passenger car through the city of Baltimore with horses (quieter) to a waiting train bound for DC, cut the telegraph wires along the line, and arrived in DC before the plotters knew he had left. 

I read it in the compilation book:

A Treasury of Railroad Folklore, editor B.A. Botkin and Alvin F. Harlow; Bonanza Books, New York, 1989. 

Their source was The Pennsy, Vol. 2 (February, 1953), No. 2, pp. 6-7.  Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania Railroad Company. 

Nathan

(the English teachers will be correcting me for my improper citation style...)

Pinkerton wrote any number of books, both fact and fiction, about his detective exploits. One of them (unfortunately I don't remember the title) had a number of stories about his exploits while working for various railroads.  I'm guessing that the copyrights for his books are such that they might be available online through something like Project Gutenberg.