Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (10 page)

On the occasion that a sucker would haul a marshal to the spot where less than an hour before he'd been bilked, he'd not find the same bustling office. Instead, Doc and his team would have disassembled the entire affair, then decked out the room to resemble a boudoir, and hired a Chinese woman to explain that her employer, the missing lady of the house, was not in. The mark would go away sore and vowing he'd find that shop, if it was the last thing he did. . . .

What they didn't know was that the vault, along with everything in the place, was a ruse. The interior of the safe was little more than an optical illusion cleverly painted on silk to resemble the interior and exterior of a safe. But it was enough to get the job done, the job being to convince whomever had been marked for bilking that the place was most legitimate.

These elaborate scams took in a number of wealthy folks, who often also happened to be high-profile society types. This factor often worked in Doc's favor as the famous marks were not apt to want their names outed in the press should they complain to the police. And so they frequently kept quiet, preferring anonymity to revenge through law.

A prime example of one of Doc Baggs's big-store scams is also one of the most famous, notably for the high-profile name of the mark and his soon-to-be-famous son.

In 1882, wealthy Las Vegas, New Mexico, businessman Miguel Otero Sr. traveled to Denver in part to take in the spectacle that was a visiting Oscar Wilde, Irish writer, dandy, and bon vivant. While there, Otero Sr., just leaving his Denver hotel's lobby for a stroll alone, happened to bump into a harmless-looking man who claimed to be an old acquaintance. This acquaintance/steerer said in low tones that he'd just been onto a sure thing, a can't-lose proposition, and that he was headed to a local “policy shop” (a legitimate business at the time engaged in state-sanctioned lotteries). And why didn't Otero tag along to see if his ticket was a winner?

As luck would have it, on the street they bumped into a chum of the Denver man who, oddly enough, also possessed a lottery ticket. But this chap winked and allowed as how he had a particular system for besting the game. Otero, at this point, was amused and curious, still sensing no reason for alarm.

The policy shop was run by a trim, middle-aged man with brown hair and beard and green glasses, and curiously, he sported a space where a finger should be on his right hand. The next draw took place, and though Otero's “friend from back home” came up duds, his chum from the street, true to his word, scored $100 with his “system.”

He won the next drawing as well. His repeated claims that he knew how to best the game were, apparently, quite true. Otero was intrigued enough that when the young man, short of cash but eager to press on, inquired sheepishly if Don Miguel might fund the venture for a fifty-fifty split, the elder money-man agreed. After all, he reasoned to himself, this was a sure-fire way to make a spot of easy money.

Soon enough it appeared Don Miguel's investment was to be a worthy one. But there was a problem: The shop operator, he of the missing digit, informed them that he would only pay that much cash if the gamblers, Otero and young sure-thing, could establish their credit. To do so they had to prove their veracity by offering the same amount, proving that from the start they were legitimate bettors, in the event they had lost the game of chance.

Naturally the young man pulled a worried look and sheepishly once again looked to Don Miguel Otero Sr., who also happened to be a bank president as well as a former railroad executive. Yes, Don Miguel smiled benignly, he would gladly proffer a five-day note covering the $2,400. He signed it over and was told to return the next day to collect the winnings. All sounded quite aboveboard and legitimate. This was, after all, a state-sanctioned, run-of-the-mill policy shop.

When he returned the next day, however, there was nothing but a locked door and no sign of the shop. Hmm. He next went to the bank to inquire as to the whereabouts of his note and was told that the young man, his “friend,” had taken receipt of it. Otero was left holding the bag, or rather an empty one.

The only bag involved was Doc Baggs, who amazingly enough admitted to the scam the next day in the newspaper: “I'm a poor man and Otero is rich. I need the money and he can afford to lose it. He dares not squeal or have me arrested for he is a businessman, has served several terms in Congress and is afraid of publicity.”

In truth, the check made its way to a banker named Pliny Rice, who paid Baggs a percentage of its worth. The banker intended then to cash it himself for full value.

True to Baggs's guess, Otero wanted no part of the publicity his lapse in good judgment would bring, so he failed to show up in court to testify against the bunco king. But not so with Otero the younger, who was traveling with his father at the time. When he learned of his old man's woeful skinning, he vowed to retrieve the money and get someone to pay for the crime. Papa cried no, but the son bulled ahead.

He stopped payment at the bank, then recruited a lawman, who threatened to arrest Doc Baggs, and ended up negotiating for the return of the purloined check—for a fee, naturally. Enter banker Pliny Rice, again, who took $1,000 for Otero Sr.'s check. As the check and cash were proffered for exchange, bold young Otero grabbed the check.

Alas, Pliny (or perhaps Baggs?) had the last laugh, as the snatched check turned out to be a fake. The nerve! Once more, a meeting took place at a Denver bank. Pliny swore the check, this time, was the real deal. Once again a swap happened, but Otero Jr. took no chances and had an undercover Denver police officer descend on Pliny Rice. Rice blustered that he would sue Otero for the missing $1,000. It's a safe bet that Otero didn't pay up.

Curiously enough, Miguel Antonio Otero II became a prominent politician, as was his father before him. He also wrote a number of popular books about Western history and lore, though he did not go into great detail about his father's bilking at the hands of Doc Baggs.

Predictably, Doc Baggs was nowhere to be found following the younger Otero's attempts to recover his father's money. Though the Denver police force tried for several days to run him aground, they turned up empty-handed. When asked later what he thought of the matter, Baggs himself, never short of opinion or words, replied:

Why don't the papers pitch into bad places and try to break them up, and also go for “tin-horn” gamblers, who are robbing the poor laboring man of his last dollar. Here are all these keno and faro rooms running night after night and no one says “stop them.” Many a poor laboring man who has been robbed of his few dollars of hard-earned money has come to me for help and I always help them in such cases. I have often found a poor devil of a clerk gambling away $25 of his employer's money and I have taken him to one side and said: “Look here, you are bracing yourself against a game that I can't beat, smart as I am. Here is $25, take it, fix matters straight and never bet on a game again.” There are many young men that I have thus saved from ruin. I never try to rob these poor fellows, but now because of an ex-member of Congress, who told me that he knew all about finance and was the smartest man in this whole Western country, starts out with me and gets robbed of $2,400, at least they say he was, the press all began to attack me. I look down with supreme contempt on all these “tin-horn” gamblers, and I will give $350 toward suppressing them and driving them out of town. But I will tell you one thing: We want a chief of police that can see a trick when it is turned, and who won't let a sucker be skinned before his face and eyes.

Throughout his many years as King of the Confidence Men, Doc Baggs was always busy with one scam or another and likely enjoyed every minute of it. He was known for his snappy mode of dress, his kindly voice, and for not using off-color language. Instead he got his jollies conning people and indulging in a theatrical bent. He played many roles in his various cons, among them ranchers, miners, bankers, and ministers, and he sported elaborate costumes and disguises for each.

By 1915 it was reported in a Denver newspaper that the dishonorable Doc Baggs had bilked his last mark in Denver, a doozy of a con netting him $100,000. It is believed that Baggs, by then in his seventies, took his newfound mountain of cash and retired to his ranch in California.

T
he dictionary tells us that a
nostrum
is a “medicine, especially one that is not considered effective, prepared by an unqualified person.” Well, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was a good bet that the majority of tinctures, tonics, liniments, and compounds pedaled over hill and dale were of dubious effectiveness, especially when they contained significant amounts of alcohol. No wonder the users provided glowing reviews.

But who is to say that many were prepared by unqualified hands? This was in the days before government regulation and oversight of the medical field, after all. A time when most folks relied on themselves or a wise elder to minister with trusted folk remedies passed down in families for centuries. In such a context, it is difficult to judge the qualifications of a homegrown healer, someone who learned how to treat a chest cold with comfrey leaves or bruising with arnica.

All that changed when opportunists saw the promise of easy money to be made by preying on the fears of the masses. After all, they intoned to their rapt crowds, if you don't have your health, what do you have? In the nineteenth century there were thousands of hucksters working their tenuous trade, rolling from town to town, farm to farm. They brimmed with confidence and spewed outlandish claims about their particular product, whether they were merely selling someone else's tincture or they themselves had concocted it.

Among the popular derivation tales explaining where the term “snake oil” came from is one attributed to early European settlers who had seen native peoples of what is now the northeastern United States gather naturally occurring oil seeps for use in treating wounds. The practice was attributed to the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois, and the Europeans, ever on the make, bottled and labeled the goop as a cure-all-ills salve. The name “Seneca oil” eventually became bastardized through mispronunciation and laziness to “snake oil.”

This possibility seems far less plausible than the commonly accepted derivation of the term, which came from the healing lotion Chinese laborers concocted in part from Chinese water snakes. They rubbed the salve into their aching limbs after working long, inhumane hours laying track on the First Transcontinental Railroad. Eventually they shared their soothing balm with their European comrades and thus an industry was born.

In time, the shady but likable character so familiar in Western movies—the one who wheels into town atop a fancy-painted wagon with bold claims painted on the sides—became a fixture throughout the West. This was in the days long before the federal government had established oversight that protected citizens from swindlers bilking them of their money in exchange for shoddy goods and services. Until the landmark 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, the United States was a-crawl with peddlers, mostly up to little good, hawking tonics, tinctures, lotions, salves, and creams, claiming they could cure anything from headaches to cancers.

All these products really ever did was lighten the wallets of the poor sots who purchased them. The sad part of such transactions is that often the buyer suffered from a genuine affliction, one often exacerbated instead of relieved by the fake medicine. The only real creative element of the salesman's product was his over-the-top trumpeting proclaiming his product to be the very thing the world had been waiting for.

These peddlers often billed themselves as doctors, offered inscrutable or untraceable credentials when pressed, and could rattle off a litany of scientific-sounding jargon to seal the deal. The very best of them could whip up crowds into a frenzy of need, whether or not they had a genuine affliction.

Often a ringer or shill would work with the “doctor,” circulating through the crowd, corroborating the doctor's claims with outlandish claims of his or her own, purporting to have been cured recently by the very same product the good doc was offering for a mere pittance.

But wait! Who hasn't heard that phrase, say, when an infomercial comes on and you're about to change the channel, but there's something . . . something that compels you to stay your hand, just a moment, then a moment more. And before you know it, you're dialing the phone, getting in on the last-minute opportunity to buy that miracle cleaning product that you really didn't need. But then again, it does such a good job, surely you'll need it. And then there's that offer—two, wait, three bottles for the price of one! How can they afford to practically give away their products?!

These modern hucksters learned from the best, their predecessors: those charlatans roaming the byways of America's yesterday. One of the most famous of these roving shysters was Clark Stanley, self-proclaimed “Rattle-Snake King.” He not only was a snake-oil peddler, he was
the
snake-oil peddler . . . until the US government shut him down. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.