Allan Pinkerton forms the North-Western Police Agency,…
1850 CE
Pinkerton had emigrated from Glasgow, Scotland, to the United States in 1842 and in the following year had settled in Dundee Township, Illinois, fifty miles northwest of Chicago on the Fox River.
He built a cabin and started a cooperage, sending for his wife in Chicago when their cabin was complete.
As early as 1844, Pinkerton worked for the Chicago abolitionist leaders, and his Dundee home was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Pinkerton first got interested in criminal detective work while wandering through the wooded groves around Dundee, looking for trees to make barrel staves, when he came across a band of counterfeiters—who may have been affiliated with the notorious Banditti of the Prairie.
After observing their movements for some time he had informed the local sheriff, who arrested them.
This later led to Pinkerton being appointed, in 1849, as the first police detective in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois.
In 1850, he partners with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker in forming the North-Western Police Agency, which will later become Pinkerton & Co, and finally Pinkerton National Detective Agency, still in existence today as Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations, a subsidiary of Securitas AB.
Pinkerton's business insignia is a wide open eye with the caption "We never sleep."
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