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business had barely recovered from the last wave of bogus currency, and he was determined not to let it happen again. In his view, there was only one man who had the skills to deal with the matter. Keeping an anxious eye fixed upon the stranger, Hunt sent his errand boy to fetch Allan Pinkerton, the town cooper.
    “I was busy at my work,” Pinkerton recalled, “bareheaded, barefooted, and having no other clothing on my body than a pair of blue denim overalls and a coarse hickory shirt—my then almost invariable costume—but I started down the street at once.”
    Arriving at the store, Pinkerton found Hunt and another shopkeeper, Increase Bosworth, waiting behind the counter. “Come in here, Allan,” Hunt said, leading him to a room at the back of the store; “we want you to do a little job in the detective line.” Pinkerton greeted this proposal with a burst of incredulous laughter. “Detective line!” he cried. “What do I know about that sort of thing?”
    It was a fair question. Pinkerton was still a newcomer in Dundee, struggling to make a success in the coopering trade. After his turbulent departure from Scotland five years earlier, he and his bride had alighted briefly in Chicago, where his old friend Robert Fergus helped him land a job at the Lill & Diversey brewery, making beer kegs for fifty cents a day.
    Soon, Pinkerton set his sights on a business of his own. In the spring of 1843, he heard talk of a community of Scottish farmers on the Fox River in Kane County, and he realized that there would be plenty of work for a man who could make barrels, churns, and tubs. He told Joan that he would go ahead and “get a roof over my head” while she waited in Chicago.
    For Joan, married barely one year, it was a tearful parting. After a lingering farewell on the banks of the Chicago River, Pinkerton turned and crossed a pontoon bridge, his bag of tools slung across his shoulder. Upon reaching the other side, he looked back and waved, then set off into the tall grasses that lay beyond, whistling a Scottish ballad. “I couldna bear it when the great grass swallowed him up so quick,” Joan recalled, but long after he disappeared from view, she could hear him whistling, and was comforted by the thought that “there’d be a wee home soon for us.”
    In Dundee, near a bridge that crossed the Fox River, Pinkerton hand-built a small log cabin and work shed. Farmers and cattle drovers passing on their way to market could not fail to notice the bright new sign: ALLAN PINKERTON, ONLY AND ORIGINAL COOPER OF DUNDEE. After a few weeks, he headed back to Chicago to collect Joan, who soon turned her hand to growing vegetables and tending chickens. “In the little shop at Dundee,” she recalled, “with the blue river purling down the valley, the auld Scotch farmers trundling past with the grist for the mill or their loads for the market, and Allan, with his rat-tat-tat on the barrels, whistling and keeping tune with my singing, were the bonniest days the good Father gave me in all my life.”
    Pinkerton, too, seems to have enjoyed the quiet charms of Dundee, and his hard work soon brought dividends. By 1846, he had eight men working for him, a mix of fellow Scots and more recent German immigrants. “I felt proud of my success,” he wrote, “because I owed no man.” Pinkerton’s family, too, was growing. In April of that year, Joan gave birth to a son—the first of six children—named William, after both of his grandfathers.
    Now twenty-seven, Pinkerton became regular, even rigid, in his habits, going to bed each night at 8:30 and rising each morning at 4:30, a schedule that seldom varied for the rest of his life. He neither drank nor smoked, but he might indulge himself at bedtime with a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose florid historical melodramas, widely ridiculed today, were hugely popular at the time. Though Pinkerton would surely have read the novel Paul Clifford —with its much-parodied “dark and