THE END OF AN IMPOSTOR.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 115, 13 October 1874, Page 3

THE END OF AN IMPOSTOR.

Amongst the items of news from America by the last Californian mail is the following : “Lord Gordon shot himself in Canada after being arrested by English detectives.”

The Melbourne Argus has the following in reference to this event :

“ The 1 Lord George Gordon’ who has just closed his career by suicide was au impostor of the Cagliostro stamp. Ho was a native of Orange, New Jersey, and his family belonged to the same clan as the Earl of Aberdeen. When the heir to the earldom, who had shipped himself as mate, under the name of G. H. Osborne, in January, 1870, on board the Hera, a small vessel bound from Boston to this port, fell overboard and was drowned, and the news reached America, young Gordon took it into his head to represent himself as the missing man. He found plenty of tuft-hunters who not only believed his story, but advanced him money. He took up his quarters at the Metropolitan Hotel, in New York, where his lordly bearing and aristocratic habits’ excited the admiration of all plebeians, who listened to his conversation about his titled relatives with that eager interest which democrats always exhibit in regard to high life. In the summer of 1871 he visited the Western States in company with a “ Colonel Loomis,” another adventurer of his own kidney. Here he announced his intention of taking up a large tract of country, and of expending some of his immense wealth in bringing out the poorer tenantry of his vast estates in Scotland. On his return to New York, he kindly allowed some of his intimate friends to purchase from him—as a particular favor —corner allotments in the Scotch city he was about to build. Strange to say, Jay Gould gave Gordon 600 shares of Erie for eighty acres of real estate in Westchester County, New York, to which the vendor had about as much title as he had to the White House at Washington. Gordon had broached a great project for consolidating the Erie and New York Central Railroads, for building a bridge across the Hudson, and for erecting a great depot in Westchester County. Even Vanderbilt was drawn into the scheme, for Gordon had succeeded in convincing the capitalists that he controlled the press of New York, and more particularly Herald , because the late James Gordon Bennett “ used to be one of our tenants, and took our family name.” Latterly, the audacious adventurer—who, previous to his assumption of the title, had led a wild roving life in California, Mexico, and South America—had been playing hide and seek with his creditors, and with the officers of justice, and, finding their toils closing round him, he was probably impelled to take a leap in the dark to escape the like exposure and punishment which have befallen Arthur Orton.