Allan Pinkerton Pinkerton in a Season 2 episode of "Drunk History". Pinkerton is also a recurring character in the 2014 series "The Pinkertons", played by Angus Macfadyen. Pinkerton is also portrayed in an episode of "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams", by Don Galloway (1937-2009), and in the 1994 American biographical western film "Frank and Jesse" by William Atherton. In but in these cases, as in the others, he seems to be portrayed with an American accent, although he was Scottish by birth, and may still have retained his Scots accent. Hardboiled crime fiction writer Dashiell Hammett was employed by the
Pinkerton (detective agency) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businessmen hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions, supply guards, keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and recruit goon squads to intimidate workers. One such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to reinforce the strikebreaking measures of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie. The ensuing battle between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to the deaths of seven Pinkerton agents and nine steelworkers. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois,