THE ARCH-SWINDLER OF THE CENTURY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2375, 7 September 1899, Page 55

THE ARCH-SWINDLER OF THE CENTURY.

| STORY OF A CLAIM TO £20,000,000. The century has never known a swindles of such colossal ambition, patience, and skill as James Addison Reavis, who spent a quarter of a century in building up a. fie- ! titious claim to a territory three times as ! large as Wales, and worth £20,000,000 sterling, only to find his fabric swept away by a trivial accident, and himself sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. More wonderful even that the impudence of the claim was the plausibility with which Reavis enlisted on his side the keenest lawyers and most astute millionaires in America, who believed so implicitly in the man that the lawyers gave him their free services, while the millionaires supplied funds to the amount of a million dollars. Before Reavis embarked on his monu i mental swindle of the century he had been : in turn a car-conductor, a dabbler in real I estate, and a soldier. It was during his short military career that he first tried his prentice hand at forgery ; and 8 his success ' stimulated him to higher flights of crime. i It was after he had left the army that a Dr George Willing, who claimed to be the , heir to an- immense territory in .Arizona | and New Mexico, engaged Reavis to collect 1 evidence for him. It was quickly apparent that the claim could not be sustained, and i Dr Willing's death brought it to a definite | conclusion. I It was clear to Reavis that, if Dr Willing I were not the heir, there ought to be an | heir somewhere. The bait was a tempting ! one, consisting as it did of 12,500,000 acres | of the richest lands in New Mexico and | Arizona (equal to a strip of land 20 fcniles wide, the entire length of England and ! Scotland), on which 100 flourishing towns had sprung up. i This vast territory had be<m given by King Philip V of Spain, in the middle of last century, to Baron Miguel Peralta de la Cordova, in return for his services as Crown Commissioner to New Mexico ; and it still belonged by right to Don Miguel's heir, if he could be found. ; It mattered little to Reavis that the Spanish baron's family was extinct. - If there was no heir, it was easy to invent one ; and he speedily found a suitable subject in a beautiful young Mexican girl who had been adopted by a ranchero, and whose origin was unknown. She was a girl of surpassing beauty, with the dark eyes and black silken hair of a Spaniard; exquisite in shape and dignified in carriage, a splendid dancer and horsewoman; and, in short, a true daughter of a long line of nobles. Having found his heiress, Reavis induced John W. Mackay, the millionaire, to make him an allowance of £100 a month, and he forthwith went to Spain, professedly as a journalist, to prepare his evidence. His first step was to procure suitable ancestors for his beautiful Mexican heiress, and these he found "in two miniatures of last century which he picked up in a curio shop in Madrid. He then hunted up the records of the Peralta family, married Don Miguel by a forged certificate to a nonexistent daughter of another obsolete Spanish house, and thus had a foundation to work on. By further certificates of marriages and births, all carefully forged and inserted among the records, he brought down the descent to the father' and mother of the heiress, whom he drowned on manufactured evidence at a crossing of the Santa Anna River, while making their way back to Spain leaving behind them the little daughter, who was rescued as by a miracle. This child was destined to grow up into a lovely woman, and to be produced to the world as the heiress to a kingdom and twenty millions of money. This long process of fabricating evidence, which has only been sketched, in the barest outline, occupied Reavis many years ; and at an early stage the adventurer took care to marry his protegee, so that he might share her fortunes. When^ at last the evidence was ready, the | case known to fame as the " Great Peralta Claim" was brought before the United States Court of Claims. Money flowed .into Reavis's coffers like water from rich sympathisers, the most famous counsel gave him their services, and everything pointed to a triumphant conclusion to the case. At a critical stage, however, news came that a United States official, while looking up records in Madrid, had discovered that the original deed of gift to Don Miguel was a forgery. Other similar discoveries followed fast; counsel retired from the case, and Reavis was arrested. After a long trial he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, from which he. has just emerged a broken man, to spend his last days in poverty at Denver, in company with the wife who, in spite of all, has remained loyal to him.