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(Left: CJ Bonaparte, American relative of the French emperor and founder of modern U.S. Federal law enforcement. [Wikimedia Commons]; Right: Red Dead Redemption’s Edgar Ross, a representative of this new breed of Federal Special Agent, who offers Marston a deal he can’t refuse.)

A former outlaw reborn as a peaceful family man, John Marston’s world is shaken to its foundations by ruthless federal agents who kidnap his wife and child.  Their motive?  The leverage to strong-arm John into interrupting his blissful retirement to track down his old partners in crime… if he ever wishes to see his loved ones again.

For a man like Marston trying his best to adjust to a changing America amidst the ashes of the Wild West that he once roamed with impunity, there can be no greater indignity than government interlopers breaking up his family and robbing him of his hard-won freedom.  In our latest installment of The True West: The History That Helped Inspire Red Dead Redemption, we outline the growth of Progressive government during the timeframe of the game, and how it led to a national, federal Bureau staffed with Special Agents tasked with reining in crime across state borders.

The life-or-death power of these menacing federal agents over John was, in the actual West, spawned by Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois, a case in 1886 where the Supreme Court declared the supremacy of the Federal Government over the individual states to regulate interstate commerce.  The following year saw the passing of the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act, a law that had almost as much to do with the death of the Old West as did the extermination of buffalo and the settling (and privatization) of the frontier; for the Commerce Act gave the Federal Government unprecedented regulatory authority not only over interstate commerce and railways, but also over interstate law enforcement.

And yet most of the demand for these new federal lawmen wasn’t filled until Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte—an American relative of the famed French Emperor Napoleon who was nicknamed “the Imperial Peacock” by the press— took matters into his own hands.  In 1908, then-President Theodore Roosevelt, whose Progressive policies promoted an expanded Federal Government in an effort to modernize the country, supported Bonaparte’s efforts to form the Bureau of Investigation.  Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch was chosen as the head of the new elite team founded with around a dozen former Secret Service men dubbed Special Agents.

(Left: The Mexican Revolution of the early 1900’s as Marston encounters it in Nuevo Paraiso; Right: Armed Mexican rebels pose with cannon circa 1911.  American Federal law enforcement was dispatched to Texas around that time to assist in thwarting radical skirmishes like the infamous Plan de San Diego. [Wikimedia Commons])

Born the year after Wall St’s cataclysmic Panic of 1907, the fledgling organization at first focused on cracking down on fraudulent securities scams like ‘bucket shops’ (an early version of modern day ‘boiler rooms’ where gullible investors made phony derivative trades that went ‘in the bucket’) and land fraud, in which scammers sought to bilk gullible people of properties that promised a rich return in timber, coal, oil, minerals or other valuable resources.

However, the Bureau’s power quickly expanded under laws like the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910 and the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act of 1919, as well as assignments of significant national security or political interest, such as deployment to the US-Mexican border during the Mexican Revolution.  One such instance saw BOI Agents dispatched to the Lone Star State to help the Texas Rangers infiltrate and stop the Plan de San Diego, a wild scheme concocted by nine radicals in which a race war between Anglo Texans and Mexicans, blacks, Indians and Japanese would liberate Texas from the US.

In another notorious case, the Osage Tribal Council pressured the Federal government to intervene after several investigations into a rash of killings on their Reservation in Oklahoma led nowhere.  It wasn’t until several Agents took to extreme undercover measures in various guises — cattle buyer, herbal doctor, oil prospector, insurance salesman — that they gained the confidence of and proved that William Hale, the infamous “King of the Osage Hills” who used gangster tactics to strong-arm the Natives out of lucrative oil rights for nearly a half-century, ordered the killings.  World War I also saw the BOI tasked with investigations into espionage, sabotage and enemy aliens.

Armed with ever-expanding abilities to pursue criminals across state and national boundaries, the BOI and its sister organization, the Bureau of Prohibition, was well-positioned to combat the new wave of outlaws that took the country by storm during the so-called “lawless years” of Prohibition.  Capitalizing on the success of federal agents in apprehending or killing legendary gangsters and bank robbers like Al Capone, Alvin Karpis, John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, a young, ambitious director of the BOI named J. Edgar Hoover oversaw the final evolution of the BOI into the powerful organization known today as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the FBI.)

The True West - Previous Volumes:
Western Weaponry of the Early 20th Century
Bad Guys Gone Good... and Vice Versa
Frank James | Pearl Hart | Tom Horn