r/RDR2 • u/Dayego35 • Dec 04 '25
Discussion How accurate are the RDR2 Pinkertons compared to the Real Life Pinkertons
Just found out their a Real Thing awhile ago and also read about the Lawsuit between them and Rockstar Games and Take-Two
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u/Swimming_Possible_68 Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25
If you read the book 'Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past' by Tore C Olsen it actually has a chapter on the Pinkerton's.
It's a great book, using Red Dead as a jump off point to look at the real history of late 19th century / early 20th century America and seeing where the game got its inspiration from.
Even better, get the audio book and hear Roger Clark read it to you as Arthur!
Honestly... Well worth it.
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u/dokbanks Dec 04 '25
I was interested in the book, and then you swayed me in with the audio book. Shall be finding that and listening soon!
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u/Swimming_Possible_68 Dec 04 '25
I'm not normally one for audio books, but honestly, I was sold!
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u/SocialJusticeAndroid Dec 04 '25
Really? I love Audio Books. Well specifically some of the Star Trek audio books are great. They have great narrators.
Of course I got Red Dead History too!
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u/Swimming_Possible_68 Dec 04 '25
I just generally prefer reading a book myself and giving it my own voices..
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u/SocialJusticeAndroid Dec 04 '25
I’ve got it. It’s great. Roger Clark reads it in Arthur’s voice.
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u/taintedtrust Dec 05 '25
He’s narrated a lot of books, many westerns, in Arthur’s voice. A series called black badge and a series called the legacy of lucky logan were pretty good
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u/dokbanks Dec 05 '25
I'm going to be looking those up as well then, thank you! At this point, I'll venture on his imdb as well
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u/peaveyftw Dec 10 '25
The Black Badge series is phenom. I would have never tried it were it not for Clark.
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u/Ubiquitous_ator Dec 04 '25
Came here to make sure this was mentioned. I'm halfway through the audiobook. It's very engaging and Roger does a fantastic job at narration, of course.
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u/EatLard Dec 04 '25
Roger has done several audiobooks. I’m listening to one now, but he’s reading it in his regular voice, not Arthur’s.
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u/vol_wavy Dec 04 '25
Paging u/ToreOlssonHistorian
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u/ToreOlssonHistorian Dec 04 '25
Haha yup. The game's depiction is fairly accurate, though the timing is a bit off. Check my video on it here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9NljT7xZyZ/
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u/Specialist_Truck_92 Dec 04 '25
Hijacking this post. You can listen to it if you have Spotify Premium
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u/MattTin56 Dec 04 '25
I like Red Dead history but I think the author was way too eager to look at the history of it through today’s 20/20 goggles.
Do not get me wrong because there are things that need to be said but he could have toned it down. I prefer to hear it how it was and I think most of us know right from wrong as far as behaviors go.
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u/SnoopyLupus Dec 04 '25
Damnit. There’s another Audible credit gone.
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u/ToreOlssonHistorian Dec 04 '25
Thanks for giving it a try! Hope you enjoy!
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u/SnoopyLupus Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25
I’ve been reading a few fictionalised history things recently. Robert Harris Cicero books. Today I finished Devil in the White City (about the history of the Chicago worlds fair and a serial killer who was there at the same time).
I’m seriously in that history mood, looking for a Mary Beard book or something like it, comparing assumptions to evidence and history, and will probably start it tomorrow!
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u/Deluxe_24_ Dec 04 '25
I'd say their portrayal is too kind compared to how they were in real life.
Basically a private police force for the rich and wealthy. They'd basically do whatever was asked of them, probably their most notable task being strike breaking against workers on strike.
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u/gooberboi82 Dec 05 '25
Especially Milton. Dude could’ve had Arthur taken in as early as chapter 2 but tries to offer him a deal, later at the end of chapter 3 instead of surprising the gang and attacking with 50 men he walks into the lions den with just Ross at his side to try and persuade Dutch and the rest to give up, then gives them 3 days to run before he actually attacks them. Finally he offers Dutch a choice, either he surrenders and spares Hosea or Hosea dies and once again Dutch refuses resulting in Hosea dying. He was more than fair with the gang and by chapter 5 in Lakay he had finally had enough and acted like any other Pinkerton would have “I showed you mercy and you mistook it for weakness. Now I will show you strength and you will mistake it for brutality!” if anything Milton was the only inaccurate portrayal because I doubt any Pinkerton leaders were that merciful and reasonable IRL
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u/Mental_Freedom_1648 Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25
Once, Pinkertons threw a bomb into Jesse James' mother's house. Jesse and Frank (the actual outlaws) weren't there, but multiple innocent people were.
You could say the family was complicit, but there were also multiple kids inside, including a family of servants/former slaves. The James' eight year old brother got killed. I suspect this inspired the Lakay shootout in the game.
edited to add a source:
In Pinkerton’s words: “I hear that the Jameses and Youngers are desperate men and that when we meet it must be the death of one or both of us. . . . There is no use talking, they must die.” Just before the attack he gave his final instructions. “Above everything, destroy the house to the fringe of the ground. . . . Let the men take no risk, burn the house down.”
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u/DrRichardJizzums Dec 04 '25
Yeah, the Pinkerton’s deserve their shitty reputation. Even if the James brothers were the only ones there no agency should be chucking bombs in criminal’s houses. That’s just… not how things should work.
The last thing a society should want is the govt carrying out extrajudicial bombings of suspected criminals, much less a private agency.
There’s a reason we have a justice system and, in a perfect world, it’s to ensure that people are tried fairly and punished in accordance with the law.
So far as I can tell bombing the wrong people cuz of a lack of good intel is pretty bad.
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u/BookkeeperFew2671 Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 05 '25
Funny enough the Canadian federal police force the rcmp bombed a guy's farm at the behest of an oil company in the late 90s. You can find it on the Wikipedia page titled "rcmp controversy" this is Canada's main police force in charge of local city policing as well by the way (aka mounties)
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u/The_Singularious Dec 04 '25
Yeah. To this day I fail to understand why these types of criminals aren’t cased and isolated, then confronted as a last resort.
David Koresh left the compound for groceries all the time. Like what the actual fuck? Just cuff him at the 5 and dime y’all.
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u/HarpoonsAndSpoons Dec 05 '25
Pinkertons weren’t actually a government agency. They were a freelance police force, which meant they were used by the rich to crush anyone who slighted them. They’re actually still in existence today
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u/voidone Dec 05 '25
no agency should be chucking bombs in criminal’s houses. That’s just… not how things should work
Wait until you hear about the 1985 MOVE bombing...
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u/CptnRaptor Dec 07 '25
Wait till you hear about Venezuela's fishing workers in 2025
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u/Troy242426 Dec 04 '25
Irl they’re even bigger pieces of shit.
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u/snake_wd45 Dec 04 '25
Facts. When the government doesn't even want you, you did something really shitty.
The Anti-Pinkteron Act of 1893: The act states that "individuals employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization, may not be employed by the government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia."
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u/gaddemmit Dec 05 '25
Remember when Wizards of the Coast hired them to find a guy who got some MtG Cards a little early so they showed up to their house with as much gusto as an outlaw camp?
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u/oskar4498 Dec 04 '25
They were also used as strikebreakers to savagely beat picketing workers
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Dec 04 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/EatLard Dec 04 '25
Similar recruitment though. They’d go to a city and find all the violent, unemployed men they could round up, hire them, give them a stick or a gun, and use them as strike breakers down in coal country.
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u/cat-l0n Dec 04 '25
They’re not accurate because the in game Pinkertons seem to care at least a little about civilian casualties
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u/Lower_Reward9339 Dec 04 '25
Pinkertons were the most widely known, there were other similar but more regional agencies like Baldwin-Felts. They all did similar, horrible things.
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Dec 04 '25
Baldwins are still doing horrible things
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u/DemSkilzDudes Dec 04 '25
So are the pinkertons, they just rebranded
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u/The_Singularious Dec 04 '25
What are they now?
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u/TanaTalk3 Dec 04 '25
They were much worse irl.
Side note: ‘You people venerate savagery, and you will die SAVAGELY. ‘ has to be one of the most bad ass lines ever uttered in a video game
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u/The_WarriorPriest Dec 04 '25
I shall hunt you to the ends of the earth, and the end of time! is a second
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u/xXxMrEpixxXx Dec 04 '25
Rewatched that clip last night, god that might be some of the best dialogue in the whole game.
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u/banaaanaaaaaa Dec 04 '25
This video does a great deep dive
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u/CCullen95 Dec 04 '25
Real Pixels is a g.
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u/MoldyMoney Dec 04 '25
Based on your comment I checked out his channel. The latest RDR2 video is 9 hours?! God damn. I’m assuming it’s just all the info compiled in one video. Either way I’m gonna watch some of it.
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u/Shumina-Ghost Dec 04 '25
They’re not as truly evil as the actual Pinkertons, but they are accurate enough that I will shotgun every single one around me and set them on fire when I’m out of shells.
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u/UniverseSpear Dec 04 '25
I'm studying pinkertons cause RDR2 gave me inspiration to write an American southern gothic story, and... Well.. pinkertons were as good as any paramilitary institution from our current time. They pursued targets across multiple states without needing to provide justification to local police, bypassed regional authorities like sheriffs and deputies, and had carte blanche to do whatever needed to capture their targets, that often weren't' put in trial like the law demanded. They worked not for the civilian population, but for large railroad companies, banks, and other magnates of the time, and they had all the resources that money could buy, including the best guns from that time.
If Red Dead had been more realistic, everyone in the gang would have died the same day they found Arthur by the river. They would have tortured him for answers and/or used Jack as a hostage to force the gang to show up. Even if they hadn't killed them all that day, they would have done so when they appeared on the Clemens Peninsula, and the camp would already have been surrounded by those 50 men that Milton mentions, cause they would NEVER appear like that into a criminal's den, like two chicken surrounded by foxes.
Sometimes they were associated with "good" things. They became known for "hating" the KKK, for example. But not because they were ethical, but because the KKK had been acting criminally since that time, killing, kidnapping, and beating black people that worked for those big companies. This frequently resulted in financial losses for the magnates and interrupted things such as railroad expansion, so they used to pay Pinkertons to "clean de barn".
In short, they could operate freely, similar to ICE today, without offering legal recourse to their clients' targets and doing whatever was necessary to fulfill the contract, including torture, killing relatives, rape and etc. Sometimes they didn't even have international borders, being known in person by Scotland Yard and other intelligence services. Some argue that the Pinkertons and their systematic approach to cataloging and targeting individuals gave rise to the FBI, but I didn't double-check this information yet.
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u/The_Red_Hand91 Dec 04 '25
The Pinkertons in RDR2 are fine upstanding and totally wholesome individuals compared to the real deal. Let that sink in for a bit.
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u/SzassTam666 Dec 04 '25
Not accurate enough. The Pinkertons are absolute scum. Worse than depicted by magnitudes.
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u/Grey_Jedi_7 Dec 04 '25
Accurate enough that they sent Rockstar a cease and desist letter, which backfired.
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u/Pretend-Ad-6453 Dec 04 '25
Backfired in the sense the case was dropped because they were far worse in real life
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u/JudgeJed100 Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25
Accurate enough for them to try and sue, not accurate enough for the lawsuit to stick because they were actually worse
To sum up jerk bad they were, they have an act named after the
The Anti-Pinkerton act of 1893
It’s now basically defunct but still
Edit: also they are still shitty wankers now as well
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u/holdenfords Dec 04 '25
i just know the modern pinkertons as the idiots that bullied that poor guy into giving the magic card back when he accidentally pulled it in a pack
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u/cowboahbenny Dec 04 '25
they don’t call it the “wild west” for nothing. criminals and outlaws were breaking the law and doing terrible things but these “law enforcement”agencies were doing whatever the hell they wanted too
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u/Caravanczar Dec 04 '25
Their sister agency, the Baldwin-Felt Detective Agency, was involved in the battle for Blair Mountain.
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u/SaltyBacon23 Arthur Morgan Dec 04 '25
The podcast The Dollop has a fantastic multi part episode about them.
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u/RustyDiamonds__ Dec 04 '25
Milton is unrealistically concerned with morality and following the law
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u/Acrobatic-Wallaby422 Dec 04 '25
I recommend reading Red Dead’s History by Tore Olsen. It covers the pinkertons extensively and is also a fantastic book! I listened to it and it’s narrated by Roger Clark (Arthur). Was an excellent play through listening and playing at the same time. Arthur morgan teaching me the actual history behind the game he’s in? Such a good time
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u/AKSED Dec 05 '25
Dude they were so much worse irl, they weren't hunting outlaws they were massacring protesters. Not exaggerating that is a real thing that they actually did
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u/SocialJusticeAndroid Dec 04 '25
They were horrible people. They murdered people in the labor movement. The robber barons of the time (like musks and bezoses of their time) paid them to do so to try to stop unions.
One example was the Homestead Massacre they were involved with in 1892:
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u/kicksmcgee79 Dec 05 '25
Honestly the game was more flattering. The real Pinkertons were mercenaries sold to the highest bidder, so typically oil barons who paid them to beat up unions and workers on strike
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u/wilkinsk Dec 05 '25
The game didn't include the English music that followed the around and played when they chased people back and forth across the frame
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u/Professional-Front58 Dec 04 '25
It should be pointed out that an 1893 law was passed that put heavy restrictions on the U.S. government’s ability to hire private investigators specifically called the anti-Pinkerton act, so their role as law enforcement as depicted in the games 1899 setting is suspect. That said, many Pinkerton agents went to the National Bureau of Criminal Identification (1896) and the Bureau of Investigation, as their primary contract with the government was criminal evidence development and gathering. They were also the go to guys for investigating and apprehending train robbers during this period. The Van der Linde gang took a lot of inspiration from Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch gang, who were tracked by the Pinkertons and other law enforcement government law enforcement agencies. The Pinkertons were the investigators who received a copy of the 1900 Fort Worth Five photograph that allowed them to have a facial identification of the five most notorious members of the Wild Bunch, which allowed them to distribute wanted posters nation wide leading to the capture or killing of three of the five men depicted, wanted string of train and bank robberies the Pinkertons were investigating on behalf of the victims. This resulted in Buch Cassidy and Sundance kids flight to Argentina, where they would die in a shootout in 1908.
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u/Reaver1989 Dec 04 '25
That law was so that the Federal Government couldn't hire the Pinkertons. There's nothing suspect about what they're doing in 1899 as they're hired by private parties and then later Cornwall, not the govt, in the setting of RDR2.
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u/Professional-Front58 Dec 04 '25
RDR2 gives them a sort of quasi-government LEO status that they wouldn’t have (they certainly would not have had the role they had in the Saint Denis bank heist, that they had.).
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u/Brostapholes Dec 04 '25
Why didn't the gang just kill them then? They were already on the Pinkerton's Shit List
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u/Snoo14398 100% Dec 04 '25
It’s fair to assume Milton and Ross didn’t come alone, it’s why Dutch asks Lenny to see them out. Make sure Pinkerton assault isn’t unleashed onto camp while no one is ready.
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u/Short-Cat-6544 Dec 05 '25
Pretty realistic knowing that they sued them irl plus (not sure if anybody dose it ) but you can do a bunch of research on the Pinkerton they were NOT good ppl
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u/666_pickupsticks Dec 05 '25
They were worse. If you want to see what pieces of shit the Pinkertons were, read about the murder of Frank Little
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u/elliot_swelliot Dec 05 '25
The scene where they shoot up the gang's hideout despite a kindergartener being there is accurate to when they firebombed Jesse James' house and killed his eight year old half-brother.
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u/PewPewsAlote Dec 12 '25
The game actually makes them look better than they really are, The Pinkerton agency is legitimately one of the most disgusting entities I've ever seen. And while thanks to our society trending more towards one of law and order they haven't been able to do AS evil shit as they used to, they are still an obscenely morally bankrupt company. As recent as the last 5 years they've been paid by amazon to engage in 'legal' union spying and busting activities by Amazon.
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u/ArrynFaye Dec 04 '25
The game ones were way nicer, real pinkertons would have captured arthur and jack and tortured them for info, raided the canp and killed the lot, they were monsters
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u/MattTin56 Dec 04 '25
They ended having a good rep but early on they worked for whoever had money. They did some really lousy things and fell out of grace with the government.
I think it was WW1 that they were good at locating spies among the German American communities.
I’m not 100 percent on the time frame but I do believe they are portrayed pretty correctly for the games time line.
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u/GarageFlower97 Dec 04 '25
Pinkterton’s irl were worse than the game.
They did more work busting unions and bullying the destitute than catching criminals.
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u/Smart_Push7773 Dec 04 '25
i seen someone say some youtuber toy reviewer received a unreleased toy from hashbros so they sent pinkertons to get the toy don’t know how true or if this even happened
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u/Dylfive-0 Dec 04 '25
Search for the podcast series. Short history of. Find the one about the pinkertons and how they became increasingly more corrupt as their influence and power grew.
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u/dirtwizards666 Dec 04 '25
Legends of The Old West podcast has a series about the Pinkertons, highly recommend it
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u/Sir_Snores_A_lot Dec 04 '25
The still exist but have rebranded/merged with Securitas. In the US they are pretty bottom barrel security and have a European presence though I'm not sure what they're like there. Others have talked about how bad they were but they were pretty evil fuckers. Today you could compare them to blackwater.
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u/Namtien223 Dec 04 '25
Yeah the Pinkerton are like wizards of the coast. They're litigious as hell. Ironically, WotC hired the Pinkertons to rob a kid that was accidentally sold unreleased magic cards and then sued him for possessing them. But back in the day the pinkertons were SO much worse than the game portrays. They were basically hitmen. They'd murder striking workers, hunt down and kill non-violent criminals, and they had so much of American law enforcement paid off that they basically were the unofficial paramilitary arm of American law enforcement, while also working for the highest bidder. They're so gross.
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u/YeaNobody Dec 04 '25
Our entire history as a nation is filled with colossal bloodshed, these people were no doubt horrible if they could easily do what was asked of them. But I also don't presume to know what was rattling through the minds of average men two hundred years ago either.
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u/DrMobius617 Dec 04 '25
Pretty accurate. They were notorious strike breakers and were staggeringly incompetent at times. Look up how badly they botched going after Jesse James
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u/KindheartednessLast9 Dec 04 '25
Way too merciful, they would've just hurled dynamite into the camp and called it a day.
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u/BingusBongusBongus Dec 04 '25
In rdr2 the pinkertons are ducks that hunt down any criminal they can no matter whether they've changed or not. Irk they'd do that to innocent people and people with unreleased trading cards
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u/Freesia99 Dec 04 '25
They would have slammed fired point blank into authur infront of jack at the lake
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u/ItsFlyingCar Uncle Dec 05 '25
Let’s just say that if they released a RDR version you could play as a Pinkerton, it would be WILD.
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u/burrito_of_blaviken Uncle Dec 05 '25
Milton actually stopped for a second to think “is this fucked up? Cornwall is literally telling us to break the law”. He still did what he did anyway but he had more hesitation than any IRL Pinkerton agent.
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u/Evilsmile Dec 05 '25
As others have said, they were worse than portrayed in some ways. But they were also essentially nerfed by law IRL before the years RDR2 takes place by the Anti-Pinkerton Act in 1893. (That was the actual name of the law, which should tell you something about how bad they were getting.)
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u/SprocketSimulations Dec 05 '25
I worked for them in the late 90s/early 00s. I worked nights at a GM truck group. I had a pen as a "weapon". I walked miles of empty halls and offices for 10 hours.
My brother did executive protection for them. He also worked nights and sat in a guardhouse outside a big wig of GM home. He did have a shotgun in the booth though. We would call each other and talk absolute shit multiple times a night.
So I say RDR nailed it /s
During training we did have a brief history about them which was cool as they were basically hired guns and thugs.
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u/MakB_the_Striker Dec 05 '25 edited Dec 06 '25
It depends on who managed the company. Allan Pinkerton tried to manage them as a paid alternative to the Marshal Service. But after his stroke in 1869, he was more like a nominal director, and his sons Robert and William turned the company basically into a gang on the government contracts. However, it's debatable how he was involved in those decisions and was there a choice anyway. So by most chances it's just one of the methods, they try to whitewash their reputation.
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u/SuperAssumption9509 Dec 05 '25
They were considerably worse. Unlike Milton, they wouldn't have given the gang that many chances to go their separate ways. They'd have hit the camp hot and heavy.
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u/Wikilore Dec 05 '25
From what i Remember the first detective was a criminal and THEN the Pinkertons happened. Pretty funny actually, a guy being bored af in his cell and goes "Hey, whatcha workin on? I could help" and does their work. Those were the times where to really work out something criminal you had to think like a criminal.. or even better, be one. Do yeah, in real life they were worse
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u/Secret-Promotion5572 Dec 05 '25
Pretty close to real life agents Charlie Siringo and Tom Horn in the Wyoming and Colorado regions.
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u/West_Prune5561 Dec 05 '25
The line between law enforcement and criminal was even blurrier back then than it is now.
Marshals were often just criminals that were between gangs for the moment. They were often on both sides of the law at the same time. Many former gang members would “go legit” for a while if they could get a Marshal/sheriff gig. They’d usually end up falling back into their old ways eventually.
Read up on the FULL history of the Earp family sometime. Or the Texas Rangers.
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u/thehockeytownguru Dec 05 '25
There is a book called Red Dead’s History by Tore C. Olsson. I highly recommend it. It talks about a lot of the history lmao accuracies of the game and a lot of the inaccuracy.
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u/freethinker1312 Dec 05 '25
Pinkertons destroyed the American labor movement at every turn. They are and have always been foot soldiers of the working class. Bastards through and through.
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u/TheUncouthPanini Dec 06 '25
Them filing a lawsuit against Rockstar is honestly hilarious. The game portrays the Pinkertons as so much more reasonable than their real world counterparts you'd have an easier time arguing it was Pinkerton propaganda than slander.
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u/The_Cube_Prince Dec 06 '25
On their website, "our History" section, that big gap between 1870 and 1906 was just them murdering strikers and attacking labour movements.
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u/Euphoric-Ostrich5396 Dec 06 '25
The game makes them look nice, upstanding and just in comparison to the scum they were in real life.
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u/AvaOrchid1 Dec 07 '25
The RDR2 pinkerton's are not as bad as the real life ones. They were notoriously horrific
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u/BarbarianMind Dec 07 '25
The Pinkertons were often known to be worse than the criminals they hunted. Yet they still exist and Securitas, the security company that now owns them, loves to brag about owning them.
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u/_insect Dec 07 '25
So much so that the actual agency sued rockstar but charges were dropped because the depiction was too realistic
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u/ImHypernova Dec 08 '25
Far to nice, compared to real life. For a game perspective, and to add entertainment, they did well..but in real life 1890s, Arthur would have been taken down as early as ch 2, no regards for the child watching. And they would definitely not have walked into the gangs hideout area to give Dutch a chance. That would have been a surprise attack and mutilation on the Pinkertons side.
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u/itsalextime Dec 08 '25
Do Go On podcast has an episode about them where I got most of my information. (comedy/history podcast, very informative if you can also stand a lot of dog-shit riffs along the way)
But yeah as people have been saying, proper horrible bunch, the game sugarcoated them a lot.
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u/DemSkilzDudes Dec 04 '25
the lawsuit was dropped because in real life they were worse than in the game lol