The Forgotten American Case
by William H. Stadtwald
If we can trust William Baring-Gould in his indispensable Holmesian vademecum, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, the memorable conversation which provides the vital clue to a forgotten episode in Holmes' early career took place on the evening of November 19, 1896.
In their Baker Street rooms, Watson has just completed reading a note from the firm of Morrison, Morrison & Dodd, "Re: Vampires" and Holmes has taken up the "V" volume of his index.
Watson tells us of the moment: "Holmes balanced it on his knee and his eye moved slowly and lovingly over the record of old cases, mixed with the accumulated information of a lifetime. 'Voyage of the Gloria Scott," he read. "That was a bad business. I have some recollection that you have made a record of it, Watson, though I was unable to congratulate you upon the result. Victor Lynch, the forger. Venomous lizard or gila. Remarkable case, that! Vittoria, the circus belle. Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder. Hullo! Hullo! Good old index. You can't beat it. Listen to this Watson. Vampirism in Hungary. And again, Vampires in Transylvania."
This author wishes to focus attention here on Holmes' involvement in the case of "Vanderbilt and the Yeggman". This case played a pivotal role in the course of Holmes' career and may well have been the case in which he chanced upon the first slender strand of the spider web which ultimately led him to Professor James Moriarty of sinister memory.
Certainly this would not be the first paper to draw the conclusion that the Vanderbilt named could be none other than a scion of the famous Vanderbilt family of Newport, New York, and Chicago with interests in shipping, railroads, and monopolies, one of that notorious clan of "robber barons". Nevertheless, no commentator has as yet ventured to identify the specific individual. Nor has any attention been lavished on the use of the curious term "Yeggman" or discussed its import.
The term "yegg" is a coinage of relatively recent vintage. According to that ultimate etymological authority, the Oxford English Dictionary, it is of United States origin bearing out the notion that this case was American and that the Chicago Vanderbilts are indeed the family referred to by Holmes. "Yegg" was believed to be the surname of a certain American burglar and safe-breaker; hence a Yeggman or Yegg being "a burglar or safe-breaker". The first general use of the term is ascribed to the New York Evening Post newspaper of June 23, 1903, more than seven years after Holmes had glossed over it passing as a more or less forgotten item in his Index.
More significantly, in the authoritative Partridge's Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, we find "yegg" defined as a travelling burglar or safebreaker, with the origin of the term found in the Scottish and English dialect words "yark" or "yek" meaning to "break".
In point of fact, historians of crime inform us that the "yegg" was generally distinguished from the common burglar or safecracker by his social status, his choice of victim, and his use of nitroglycerin. A brief discursus into that history will prove illuminating as to the significance of these facts.
Following the start of the financial depression of 1893, the United States found itself overrun by an army of unemployed "tramps" who used the new transcontinental system of railroads to move freely from place to place, "bumming" rides. Many of these tramps turned to crime, but the modus operandi of many of these hobo burglars clearly distinguished them from their earlier counterparts. They avoided large cities, confining their activities to the scattered, less habited venues of our midwestern states. They concentrated their felonious attention on small towns which lacked more than minimal, untrained police protection. They stayed away from large banks or businesses which might employ security guards and have regular police assigned to duty on the premises, choosing instead to hit numerous small targets for hauls of hundreds of dollars or less rather than the thousands they might acquire in a single haul at a larger facility. Further, they forbore to make use of sophisticated tools or techniques in safe-cracking, preferring the quick and noisy use of nitroglycerin to "blow" the safe and then run. These "yeggs" generally extracted the nitroglycerin themselves from dynamite which was not at that time regulated or monitored. In 1904, William Pinkerton, the son of the founder and then-head of the Pinkerton Detective Agency estimated 90% of all bank burglaries committed since 1900 were done by "yeggs" using this method. Indeed it was Pinkerton himself who popularized the term by his use of it in his famous 1904 address on the topic "Yeggmen" to the assembled chiefs of police of the nation at their annual convention.
So we are faced with a puzzle: if the "yegg" was a social phenomenon which only appeared in the mid-1890's and which only received widespread recognition in the early 1900's, why was Holmes using the term in his index with regard to a case which had to be from the mid 1880's? And, how could he have known of the term if he were not personally involved in at least one investigation in the United States during the period of that term's initial entre to professional, if not public, recognition?
Holmes career is fully documented except for two periods: the span from April, 1883 to October, 1886 and the period of the Great Hiatus, from May, 1891 to April, 1894. We know authoritatively from his own account that Holmes did not visit the United States during the period of the Great Hiatus. Even though this period includes the span of time in which the "yegg" phenomena was beginning its reign of terror in America, that assault on the public's peace of mind and its banking system was just beginning there at that time - it had not as yet taken hold or fully revealed itself even by April, 1894.
Thanks to the efforts of Baring-Gould and the noted canonical scholar Edgar W. Smith, we know that during the period from April, 1883 to October, 1886, no cases have been recorded by Dr. Watson. While this has generally been attributed to Dr. Watson's absence from London and the Holmes menage, why may it not have been due to Holmes absence in America?
As we know from the prior humble efforts of this author in his monograph entitled "The Impecunious Country Squire: The Identification of the Real Client in the Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton", Holmes played a key role in the later 1870's and early 1880's in the investigation, on behalf of the Crown of radical Irish nationalist activities. Those efforts included a tour of the United States as a member of Parnell's entourage when he came to these shores on a fund-raising tour. At that time Holmes became acquainted with the Pinkerton Agency and many local police officials as he investigated and infiltrated various Hibernian societies. Those efforts culminated in 1881 when he was responsible for bringing to justice the Irish Invincibles responsible for the notorious Phoenix Park murders in Dublin in which Mr. Thomas Burke, the Permanent Under-Secretary and Lord Frederick Cavendish were brutally slashed to death.
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that during those "lost years" from 1883 to 1886, Holmes may well have been called to duty as an agent of her Majesty's government in America to further investigate Irish terrorist plots and criminal activity. Indeed, it is plausible that he may have returned to Chicago at the request of the Pinkerton Detective Agency because of his proven skills and knowledge of the problems and people.
At this period, the Pinkerton agency was primarily concerned with labor disruptions and violence. While it maintained a small "standing army" of guards, it also mustered a large roster of agents, "provocateurs" to their targets, whose purpose was to investigate and prevent violence by identifying those persons and organizations involved in organizing strikes and other incidents. We know that in 1885, the business and community leaders of Chicago, under the aegis of the Citizens League, had subscribed a fund of over one million dollars for the purpose of "stamping out anarchy" in the community. Who better to assist in that endeavor than a man with a new face; a master of disguise, who could use his considerable talents to help ferret out plots which were afoot.
That Holmes knew Chicago we cannot doubt. Matthew E. Bunson, in his Encyclopedia Sherlockiana, points out several indications "that Holmes had greater experience with America than he was willing or disposed to discuss." Indeed, by this authors count, nearly four of ten references in canonical cases which involved the United States included some reference to the City of Chicago.
When we combine these elements, the use of the term "yegg", the presumption of the presence and application of explosives in a criminal context, the peculiarly American nature of that term, Holmes' familiarity with Chicago, the approximate date of origin of the term, the lack of any recorded cases from that period, and Holmes' presumed absence from London, we are led inexorably to a most startling conclusion.
It is the belief of this author that the case of "Vanderbilt and the Yeggman" involved the efforts of Holmes in discerning the true facts underlying the Haymarket Square Riot of May 4, 1886 and, in consequence, his first discovery of the existence and activities of Professor Moriarty on U.S. soil in the planning and execution of that most dastardly and cowardly deed.
The 1880's had seen a steady rise in labor violence in the United States, much of it centered upon the City of Chicago. In 1886, events swirled around the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago which in February had been the object of a strike and whose owners had subsequently refused to discharge nonunion workers hired to break the strike and the union. The strike became violent when, on May 3rd, a large crowd of unemployed men sought to enter the factory, breaking windows with stones before being run off by the police. While no one was fatally injured, the Arbeiter Zeitung, the Workers Paper, written and edited by August Spies, published and circulated a handbill announcing that six men had been killed by the police and calling for the workers to take up arms and avenge the massacre, announcing a meeting in the Haymarket Square on May 4th.
Several hundred workers appeared, closely watched by more than 200 police officers. While the rally was initially entirely peaceful, an anarchist leader, Samuel Fielde, took the stage and delivered a fiery speech which threw the crowd into an excited turmoil, with "selected individuals" in the crowd calling for a violent uprising. Alarmed, Police Inspector John Bonfield called for his men to advance and disperse the crowd. As the police moved together in a massed formation for mutual support and protection, a bomb was thrown into their midst with the result that one policeman died on the spot, six more were mortally wounded, and sixty-eight others were casualties with various degrees of lesser wounds. Police fire on the dispersing crowd resulted in a number of wounded workers.
Shortly thereafter, eight "leaders" were rounded up: Spies, Fielde, George Engel, Albert Parsons, Oscar Neebe, Michael Schwab, Louis Lingg, and Adolph Fisher. They were charged with murder and being accessories before the fact in the deaths of the police officers. While it was never legally established that any of them was actually responsible for throwing the bomb, Lingg was proved to have made the bomb. This was accomplished by means of a comparison of bomb fragments with materials in his workshop which were shown to be identical (perhaps the work of Holmes, the expert proto-forsensic chemist?). All the defendants were convicted of constructive conspiracy to provoke murder. Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887. Lingg committed suicide in his cell. Schwab and Fielde drew life sentences and Neebe was sentenced to fifteen years. All three of them pardoned from their remaining terms by Governor John Peter Altgeld in June of 1893.
Words shift from their original meaning and assume new forms and definitions as they come into broader use. We know from the definition cited previously that the term "yegg" originally (at the time Holmes was in America) referred to the "breaking" of a safe by means of the use of dynamite or nitroglycerin. Thus, while a "yeggman" was originally a "bomber" he became a "safecracker" when it became more common for the "bomb" to be used to break a safe. It reflects the shift in importance from the use of a bomb to the use to which it was put, i.e. breaking safes.
When Holmes was referring to his earlier case of "Vanderbilt and the Yeggman" it is significant that he talks about "the" Yeggman and capitalizes the "Y" (i.e. makes it a proper noun, a reference to a particular person and not just any member of a class). It appears that he was referring to the original Yeggman, the "Ur- Yeggman," the Father of his kind: the man responsible for the Haymarket Square riot in 1886, the man who threw the bomb. Keeping in mind that the Oxford English Dictionary gives the term a Scottish derivation (implying a "United Kingdom" origin), we can begin to discern here how it came into use to describe a peculiarly American phenomenon. It does not stretch credulity to argue that all future criminals who used bombs in the furtherance of criminal designs would be referred to as Yeggman by reference to this original deed.
Do we have any supporting evidence for the presence and involvement of the Master in these affairs?
Indeed we do, in an almost forgotten contemporary account of these events by a Pinkerton operative who was involved in the Haymarket Square case as his first major assignment for the agency, Charles A. Siringo, in his book A Cowbody Detective, first published in 1912. This book was the subject of extensive litigation by the Pinkerton Agency to prevent its publication and it was only published upon the agreement that names would be changed and the identity of the Pinkerton Agency as his employer would be masked in the published version.
In June of 1886, Mr. Siringo made his first appearance in the office of the Pinkerton Agency in Chicago with letters of reference and applied to join that famous organization. After an interview, he was told by Mr. William L. "Billy" Dickerson, the head of that office, that he would be contacted with a final decision on his employment in a week or two after his references had been checked.
The next day, a Saturday, in the evening, he went to the Barnum Circus. Near the ticket wagon, he was attacked by "a large man, who would have made two of me " Pulling out his Colt 45 pistol he struck the man in the head and laid his scalp open with the sharp front sight, drawing a stream of blood. The man's partner moved up behind Siringo with a board in his hands raised high over his head, but Siringo noticed the movement and pointed the cocked pistol in his face. A policeman promptly took Siringo and the two men into custody.
Appearing for trial on Monday morning, the situation looked bleak for Siringo. He had no attorney and no witnesses and he was faced with his two "victims" and their "wives" who shamelessly perjured themselves. We take up the story here in Mr. Siringo's own words:
"I was then called up and told my story. When I had finished the judge asked if me if I had any witnesses. I replied 'No.' Here a nicely dressed old Scotchman rose up in the crowd and said: 'Your Honor, I am a witness for that young man.' This was a great surprise to me and showed me that luck was on my side. The old gentleman was put on the stand and corroborated my statement. He said he was taking a shipment of draft horses back to his home in Scotland; that he has trying to get to the circus wagon to buy a ticket to the show, when the fracas began, and thinking that I might need help, he had come up to the court room this morning. I thanked the old fellow later at his hotel, but I regret that his name has slipped my memory."
When the Scotchman left the stand, the judge dismissed the case. "I looked at the prosecuting witnesses with a happy smile," said Siringo. "They looked daggers at me in return." He later learned that his primary attacker was a prize fighter with a reputation as a "slugger."
Shortly after the incident, Siringo was hired by the agency. If Dickinson ever knew about the incident, he never made any mention of it. The first case Siringo worked on was the "great anarchist Haymarket riot case" which he followed up until the final conviction of the ringleaders.
The account of this affairs tells us much. The Pinkerton Agency was the premier organization fighting the lawless anarchist elements of the labor movement engaged in terror. But even more importantly, its operatives were best fixed to discover the guiding hand of another hidden and unseen organization using those elements for its own purposes. The police of that day were neither trained nor educated to recognize the existence of such a cabal, nor was it their duty to do so: they were there to keep order and arrest malefactors, not determine motives or uncover plots.
Thus, if such an organization existed, it would be vital to its interests to contain, subvert, or destroy operatives of the Pinkerton Agency to prevent knowledge of its existence from coming to light. It could not afford to have any link between its activities and the Haymarket riot being made.
Siringo's experience was an example of the lengths to which the organization would go to preserve its anonymity. He was a potentially dangerous man. His prior law enforcement experience, which included participating with Pat Garrett, the famous Texas sheriff, (who was one of Siringo's references) in the hunt for and the slaying of "Billy the Kid" made him a prime target for elimination by the secret organization. It could not afford to have a man of his caliber with his wide experience of criminal investigation involved in the case.
The attack on him was a classic "set-up": a scheme to 'neutralize' him and get him out of the picture in one of three ways: either to kill or seriously injure him outright, to place him in prison, or to render him amenable to a deal, to get an aquittal from the charges by agreeing to work for the organization as an agent of the organization within the Pinkerton Agency.
His skill in dealing with his attackers eliminated the first option. He was not an easy man to kill or injure. Nor did it appear likely that he would be a proper subject for a deal. His unexpected release from prison on bond through the intervention of an influential friend probably surprised the organization's leaders and made an approach to him impossible. This left only the possibility of placing him in prison, at this point the easiest and most preferred option.
This was thwarted by the unlikely intervention of the elderly Scotchman. A more curious event. How did he know when the matter would come to trial? Why had he not intervened at the time of the arrest to inform the policeman of what had taken place? Why hadn't he followed the party to the police station to make his presence known?
The Scotchman could only have been one person: Sherlock Holmes, already on the case, in one of his famous disguises.
How did he come to be there? We can only speculate.
Regardless of the cause, Holmes was there at the key moment and intervened to foil the plot. It is certain that the event provided him with another link, through the attackers to the next level of the organization's leadership hierarchy.
It was here he undoubtedly found the first clues to the existence of Professor Moriarty. That he had not as yet traced them to Moriarty is clear since he is not named as the principal in his own Index. He may not have been aware that the mastermind was English although he may have suspected as much. He named "Vanderbilt", indicating that he traced the links back only as far as the paymaster for the job.
There can be little doubt that despite the death of the Vanderbilt patriarch, pirate, and robber baron, Cornelius, Sr. in 1877, the evil strain in the blood had been little thinned in his progeny. His son, William Henry, between 1865, when he took control of the family's business interest, and his father's death in 1877, had doubled the family fortune. He undoubtedly saw the benefits to be gained from labor violence which would bring harsh penalties and cast disrepute on more moderate labor reform movements. He would certainly have cast about for some means to infiltrate the movements and radicalize them. At some point, he came into contact with Moriarity who offered his organizational skills and criminal genius to accomplish the goal. What a rare opportunity was this conjunction of interests which offered immense wealth and mutual benefit to two of the century's greatest malefactors! What a terrible threat to public order and challenge to the forces of law and order!
How did Vanderbilt meet Professor Moriarty? We will, perhaps, never know. It may have been the mutual love of fine art which brought them together, the Vanderbilts spent a great deal of time in London, being regular visitors to the Randolph Churchill home through the Vanderbilt family friendship with the Jerome family of which Jennie Churchill, nee Jerome was a member.
Nevertheless, the criminal conspiracy that was borne of their partnership bears all the hallmarks of a Moriarty masterpiece.
First, there was the attempt to subvert Siringo which was foiled by Holmes.
Second, there was the bomb maker, Lingg, who "committed suicide[!] in his cell with a bomb" before he could he could break down.
Third, there is the mysterious disappearance from police custody of the real bomber: Schnoebelt. This is Moriarty getting rid of the evidence, the only two men who could have been traced back to himself.
It is interesting to note that only eighteen months after this incident, a little more than a year after Holmes returned to London, he has an extensive knowledge of Professor Moriarty's operation and even a "mole" within his organization, Porlock. In The Valley of Fear, dated as occurring in early January of 1888, Holmes is already in possession of all the basic knowledge he was ever to acquire about Moriarty. Inspector Alec MacDonald is already treating Holmes with some condescension about his theories on Moriarty, indicating that "in the CID [we think] that you have a wee bit of a bee in your bonnet over this professor." Thus, Holmes had undoubtedly brought his suspicions to the attention of the police in past months to the point where they thought of it as being just short of an obsession.
Clearly, Holmes had acquired in America through his involvement in the Haymarket Square case the first indications of Moriarty's activities. Certainly, Holmes' investigations in the United States provided him with the first tenuous evidentiary thread which he eventually forged into an unbreakable chain that captured and destroyed the Moriarty gang several years later.
The case of Vanderbilt and the Yeggman involved not only a pivotal incident in American History, but also a pivotal point in the career of Sherlock Holmes.
It was in Chicago, at Haymarket Square that the long road to Reichenbach began.