ATD - Basnight / McParland

[Raphael Saltwood]

Marguerite Young in the Debs biography on page 411: “Allan Pinkerton, his big western hat sheltering his face with a permanent shadow, had been riding along on a trolley car in Chicago ... when he had spotted the man who was that spotter who would bring the Mollies into the spotlight....”

That is, he recruited James McParlan to go undercover in the Molly Maguires.

McParlan, under the alias of McKenna, headed to the coalfields of the East, spreading (to establish street cred) the tale of a mysterious murder he was supposedly fleeing the consequences of having committed in Buffalo.

Whereas, in AtD, on page 61 and onward, Nate Privett recruits Lew for White City in a Chicago cigar store. Lew, shorn from his previous life by a crime mysterious to himself, eventually heads West to the silver mining country of Colorado to confront the labor situation there.


  *    recruited off the street in Chicago
  *   Mysterious, possibly fabricated, crime
  *   Pointed in the direction of labor movement

McParland (Marguerite Young calls him McParlan) went on to testify against the Molly Maguires - although he strongly protested deputies shooting the wife of one of them and almost quit the profession - and eventually he moved west, involved himself in high-profile cases such as the assasination of ex-Idaho governor Steunenberg, using dubious methods. Plus, he inspired a Sherlock Holmes character in “The Valley of Fear”. Pinkerton took Conan Doyle off his Christmas list after that.

Whereas, the fictional Lew Basnight possesses a conscience capable of more than the flicker evinced by McParlan(d), resulting in a different trajectory entirely. “What the world might be, with a minor adjustment or two.”