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found himself pressed for cash. “There was plenty of dickering, but no money,” Pinkerton complained. “My barrels would be sold to the farmers or merchants for produce, and this I would be compelled to send in to Chicago, to secure as best I could a few dollars, perhaps.” A series of bank failures earlier in the decade compounded the problem. “There was but little money in the West,” he wrote, and a workingman such as himself “could get but little.” Looking to save whatever he could, Pinkerton found ways to scavenge for the raw materials he needed for his barrels and casks. “I was actually too poor to purchase outright a wheelbarrow-load of hoop-poles, or staves, and was consequently compelled to cut my own,” he recalled. To this end, he often roamed along the banks of the Fox River, and in time he found a small island a few miles north “where the poles were both plentiful and of the best quality.”
    One day, as Pinkerton took a raft upriver to cut a fresh supply, he stumbled across the smoldering remains of a campfire. For months, he had heard talk of gangs of counterfeiters in the region and concluded that the island was being used for unlawful purposes. “There was no picnicking in those days,” he recalled, “people had more serious matters to attend to, and it required no great keenness to conclude that no honest men were in the habit of occupying the place.” Curious, and perhaps offended at the thought of sinister doings on his patch, Pinkerton decided to investigate. He returned again and again over the next few days, hoping to catch sight of the visitors. One evening, hearing a splash of oars as a small boat rowed out of the darkness, Pinkerton hid himself in a stand of tall grass and watched as several men scrambled ashore and lit a fire. After hearing a few snatches of conversation, Pinkerton felt sure he had uncovered a criminal hideout.
    The following day, Pinkerton took his suspicions to the sheriff of Kane County. Rounding up a posse of men, Pinkerton and the sheriff led a raid on the island a few nights later and discovered an elaborate counterfeiting ring. “I led the officers who captured the entire gang,” Pinkerton reported proudly, “securing their implements and a large amount of bogus coin.” The sheriff subsequently discovered that the ringleaders were well-known swindlers, or “coney men,” who were also wanted for cattle rustling and for horse theft. The episode brought Pinkerton a great deal of attention, with eager villagers stopping him in the street to hear details of the raid. “In honor of the event,” he recalled years later, “the island ever since has been known as ‘Bogus Island.’”
    The matter would likely have ended there but for the arrival a short time later of the tall, well-dressed stranger. It seemed obvious to the shopkeepers Henry Hunt and Increase Bosworth that Pinkerton, the hero of Bogus Island, would be just the man to prevent another outbreak of counterfeiting. Pinkerton himself, standing barefoot in the back room of the general store, felt dubious. He had no skills, he told the two men, and no experience. “Never mind now,” one of the shopkeepers told him. “We are sure you can do work of this sort, if only you will do it.” If Pinkerton could catch the stranger in the act of passing bad paper, they insisted, the plague might be cut off at its source.
    This, Pinkerton later realized, was the turning point of his career:
There I stood, a young, strong, agile, hard-working cooper, daring enough and ready for any reckless emergency which might transpire in the living of an honest life, but decidedly averse to doing something entirely out of my line, and which in all probability I would make an utter failure of. I had not been but four years in America altogether. I had had a hard time of it for the time I had been here. A great detective I would make under such circumstances, I thought.
    Privately, his reservations were more practical.