Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (15 page)

In an effort to quell the rapidly bubbling rumors of fraud, he circulated falsehoods intimating that no less than the US government had all but offered to pay him $100 million for full claim to the grant. Instead of shutting his mouth, Reavis did the opposite and continued to expand the reach of his quit-claim attacks.

Meanwhile, newspaper editors continued their instigation of insurrection against Reavis, resulting in a handful of organized opposition groups in towns such as Florence, Phoenix, Tempe, and Globe.

At this point in the epic, unfolding drama, it's fair to ask what Reavis hoped to gain by altering ancient and official government and church documents, by potentially displacing thousands of settlers, by fouling masses of real estate transactions for years to come, and damaging no less than the fragile and still-budding formation of United States territories and statehoods?

As with so many men whose very core is corrupt and bent, it appears Reavis wanted far more than wealth. He wanted power, and he enjoyed the very real thrill he got from making all his nefarious plans fall into place. Should he pull it all off, and he wholly believed he would, then James Reavis would be known soon and forevermore as James Addison Peralta-Reavis, Baron of Arizona.

By the mid-1880s, however, Reavis and his mighty minions were all but halted in their tracks by a pair of lawsuits. The first, a claim by his dead partner's father, George Willing Sr., petered out due to lack of finances on Willing's part. But the second lawsuit, brought by Territorial Attorney General Clark Churchill, was much more substantial. In it, Churchill held fast to what he believed were his own personal properties.

In effect it was a challenge to Reavis to offer the goods, to make a case for his land grant's legitimacy. It was a challenge Reavis could not afford to ignore, but his February 1884 deposition revealed a number of chinks in his armor. Among them were questions about his finances and how he came to possess the land grant. Reavis grew defensive, arguing that the territorial court had no right to question the validity of his grant. The court said, “Not so fast,” and sided with Attorney General Churchill. This would prove a major victory for opponents of the increasingly wary Reavis.

Verification research being conducted by the Land Office and Surveyor General was halted, all but killing in its tracks Reavis's claim. As if to prove his detractors correct, Reavis tucked his thieving tail between his legs and ran for California. But he wasn't done. Not by a long shot.

The entire time he'd spent dashing all over the map accumulating information, forging, filching, altering, and stealing documents, Reavis had also been accumulating information about possible descendants of the Peralta line to which his claim was attached. He learned that there may be some descendants in California. On a train there some years before, he met a woman whom he decided resembled the fictional second baroness of his claim. This young thing, all but a peasant, was engaged as a servant. To have a handsome stranger tell her that she might well be heiress to a substantial fortune was no doubt overwhelming to her.

Fortunately for Reavis, the young woman possessed no documents as to her lineage. Not a problem—Reavis was nothing if not a conjurer of such papers. And conjure he did. Following a correspondence-based courtship, they married on December 31, 1882. Then, so confident was he that his claim was to be a raving success, he sent her to a convent school so that she might gain the manners of a lady.

Following the thrashing he took in court in Arizona, the chastened Reavis made his way back to California and managed to accumulate an impressive stack of letters of introduction from well-placed contacts in California. Reavis, along with his wife, who outwardly traveled as his ward, headed to New York City, where they used their letters to meet senators, congressmen, men of high finance, and most importantly, John W. Mackay, a man who had made a fortune in silver in the Comstock Lode. Mackay was so thoroughly taken in by Reavis's impressive mass of documentation substantiating his claim that he offered Reavis $500 a month as a stipend so that Reavis might continue digging deeper to substantiate his claims.

This financial boon enabled Reavis and his wife to travel to Spain to foul archives in Seville and Madrid with his forgeries, thefts, and alterations. Reavis was so crafty and convincing that Spanish families with names he'd connected to his grant gladly entertained the couple.

By the fall of 1886, they made their way back to the United States, where Reavis had a line of high-profile politicians and businessmen falling over themselves to acknowledge his refreshed claim to the land grant and its holdings. This only goes to illustrate how excellent Reavis was at making seem legitimate his entire package—forged paperwork, phony old portraits of claimed descendants, and even his wife.

In August 1887 the emboldened couple returned to Arizona Territory. He had taken to calling himself James Addison Peralta-Reavis, and his wife, for whom he filed a claim, was known as Doña Sophia Micaela Maso Reavis y Peralta de la Cordoba, third Baroness of Arizona. Once back in Arizona, they took a carriage ride into the mountains southwest of Phoenix, where they “happened upon” what he claimed was the Peralta land grant's original southwest corner marker. In reality, it was a known boulder covered in ancient petroglyphs.

Showing no shame, next to these petroglyphs Reavis chipped in a rectangular figure he called the “Inicial Monument.” Then he took a photograph of his wife standing beside the markings.

With this new establishment of the legitimacy of his claim, and with the backing of so many high-profile movers and shakers of industry and finance, Reavis no longer monkeyed with selling quit-claim deeds. Instead he used his new contacts to develop corporations, three in all, that would offer shares, the sales of which would ostensibly develop the construction of railways, dams, roads, and numerous other improvements. He would also lease water rights—no small consideration in that arid region.

His investors plied him with money while his plans were received by Arizona Territory residents with anger, scorn, and outright hostility, so much so that he and his wife left Arizona and roved between their residences established in St. Louis, New York City, and San Francisco. They dined at the finest eateries, wore the very best of fashions, and entertained all their well-heeled society friends.

They bought an estate in Chihuahua, Mexico, and there Reavis was treated with the respect he felt he deserved, particularly after he funded a hospital and a home for the blind. He even commissioned a monument to be built of his wife's nonexistent ancestor, Don Miguel de Peralta. But all this largesse was coming to an end.

Following the 1888 presidential election, new inquiries into the Peralta Land Grant were made by the Arizona Territory's reappointed surveyor general, Royal Johnson. He'd long been a critic of the Reavis claim and had, while out of office, kept up with his investigations of its legitimacy. On October 12, 1889, he released his official findings in a document titled
Adverse report of the Surveyor General of Arizona, Royal A. Johnson, upon the alleged Peralta Grant: a complete expose of its fraudulent character
.

In it, numerous errors, problems, and inconsistencies were found, among them that a number of the eighteenth-century documents bore distinct evidence of having been written not with the more historically accurate quill, but with steel-nibbed pens, a rarity of the time. Various samples of printing were shown to bear inconsistencies with other similarly aged documents, and there were many instances of grammatical and spelling errors, not something expected in documents derived from the Spanish Royal Court.

Despite the initial excitement and happy relief residents of Arizona Territory expressed, it would take the powers that be in Washington, DC, until early 1890 to respond. The Commissioner of the Land Office instructed Johnson to remove Reavis's claim from all consideration. This effectively dismissed the Peralta Land Grant from further consideration as legitimate. Though he was given the opportunity to appeal, it would have been wise of Reavis to leave well enough alone and slink off into the night, recouping whatever finances he might still have within his grasp. Alas, Reavis was never a man to give up a fight.

Instead of appealing to the Secretary of the Interior, Reavis sued . . . the government of the United States. He accused the government of thieving from him 1.5 million acres, and more. He demanded $11 million in damages he had thus far incurred and made provisions for “further relief and costs” should he incur other financial costs. He wasn't flying blind, however, as he was being represented by the attorney for Southern Pacific Railroad, along with notable assistants.

A number of stalling tactics, governmental delays, and fact-finding trips abroad postponed the trial's commencement until June 3, 1895. Reavis and his attorneys failed to show for the first seven days. The government's case proceeded nonetheless, and stacks of problems were presented with relation to Reavis's accumulated Peralta documents, among them entire pages he'd forged, then inserted into old official books of documents. This was but one of dozens of blatant examples revealing the shameless depths of his chicanery.

Nonetheless the case continued, with Reavis finally appearing on June 10, acting as his own counsel. By this time he was nearly destitute, having spent all his money in frantic travels all over the map in efforts to cover his earlier tracks and put out various incriminating fires. The case dragged on with the government's lawyers poking holes in Reavis's increasingly flimsy defense. He resorted to showing portraits of his wife's alleged long-dead relations, trying in vain to establish a family resemblance between his own twin sons (born two years before) and his wife's “ancestors.” His efforts were, at best, feeble—so much so that the government waived its right to a closing argument.

Reavis was arrested, charged with forgery, presenting false documents to the Court of Private Land Claims, and with conspiracy to defraud the United States government. The forty-two-count indictment left little room for doubt as to his guilt.

He spent a year in jail awaiting his criminal trial, which commenced on June 27, 1896. All the old evidence was dredged up, with Reavis maintaining his innocence in firm and full indignation. Nonetheless, three days later, on June 30, 1896, he was found guilty, and two weeks later was sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of $5,000.

He was released on April 18, 1898, his good behavior in the clink earning him a three-month reduction. Though a broken man, he did his best to stir up interest in various schemes he'd cooked up about developing large-scale irrigation in Arizona. Not surprisingly he met with no success. His wife and sons had relocated to Denver, Colorado, while he was in prison. He stayed with them for a time, but by 1902 his wife filed for divorce.

In 1913 he was living in a Los Angeles poor house, and the following year he died in Denver and ended up in a pauper's grave. Hollywood has made much hay of the life of James Reavis, including numerous television shows and a 1950 film starring Vincent Price called
The Baron of Arizona
.

In the span of a few years, James Reavis had forged more signatures and documents—including in excess of two hundred Spanish documents alone—than most of us write in a lifetime. Various amateur mistakes aside, he was an amazingly talented man, especially considering his abilities were wholly home-grown. Imagine if he had used his innate skills and quick mind for purposes benefiting more than just himself and his own ego.

Instead, Reavis attempted to take ownership of more than 18,600 square miles of land in Arizona Territory and western New Mexico Territory. He frightened thousands of residents, scared hundreds off their land and out of their homes, and bilked a number of high-profile investors, people who were among the top tier of the day's financiers and titans of business. He took from them $5.3 million (equal roughly to $150 million today). And through it all he maintained his innocence, even while he moldered in prison.

K
nown as the “senator maker” through the long halls of the federal government, North Dakota behind-the-scenes politico Alexander McKenzie preferred to stay out of the limelight and instead influence legislation through carefully placed handpicked candidates. He was so successful with this gambit that he was the Republican party's national committeeman for nearly two decades, all the while placing his own hand-selected representatives and senators. He skirted serious trouble with the law a number of times, and he and his hired goons were accused frequently of buying votes and physically attacking those who opposed him, including voters and opposing candidates.

In 1900 he placed candidates he'd personally selected for the positions of federal district attorney, Joseph K. Wood of Montana, and federal judge, Minneapolis lawyer Arthur H. Noyes, along with a handful of other choice positions in Nome, Alaska, which at the time was in the midst of a gold-rush boom.