Son of the Old West by Nathan Ward

Author:Nathan Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

19

“A Strange Country”

Often in his undercover travels, Siringo would run into people he had known while still a Texas cowboy, frontier characters who thought nothing of his using a different name, assuming he had done something outside the law to need an alias, not that he worked with the law himself. To guard against suspicion, Siringo sometimes traveled with phony newspaper clippings about the misdeeds of his stealth personas and would have letters mailed to him that referenced his former “crimes.” Occasionally, though, he was exposed.

Tuscarora was a mining camp up in the Nevada high desert about fifty miles northwest of Elko, named after a Union sloop of war and the Tuscarora people. Since the first mining expedition there in 1867, it had seen some riches in both silver and gold, and its population included an impressive Chinatown settlement of several hundred former railroad workers. By the 1880s, the town was also a battleground in a war between labor and capital seen across the West.

On an April night in 1889, two executives from the Price and Peltier mining corporation had just retired to their separate cabins in Tuscarora when they suffered simultaneous bombings. Long fuses were lit that touched off blasting powder beneath each of their beds, blowing the men through their own roofs. George Peltier had been tucked in his blankets before the bomb threw him into the air, landing on his mattress in the street, and was able to recover surprisingly quickly. But C. W. Price had not been as protected when the charge went off. He landed hard on the roadbed, his wounds considerable, though he would live to be an old man.1

According to some San Francisco detectives they hired, the clear suspect in the bombings was Clarence Buck, who had threatened to blow up his bosses several times, before witnesses. But the case broke apart, and the detectives were chased off; reports that Buck had made “a clean breast of it” and confessed to the assassination attempts were followed within weeks by his lawsuit for $15,000 in damages for “malicious prosecution.” George Peltier had recovered enough from his dynamiting to travel to Denver to hire a new agency. He met with McParland, who arranged for Siringo to see Peltier secretly in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco to discuss the case’s background and cast of suspects.

After developing pleurisy, Mamie had gone home to Springfield, Missouri, at the insistence of her father, for a desperate operation that he felt required the family physician. Charlie had agreed it was a better arrangement for his wife’s rest and possible recovery. He began to sell their furniture and prepare for a new field assignment. Then, “seeing my wife and baby off on an Eastbound train,” he wrote, “I boarded a flyer for the extreme edge of the Golden West.” As arranged, he met with George Peltier in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, on his first visit to California, marred by the knowledge that his wife would “undergo an operation without my presence to comfort her.

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