The Baron of Arizona

The Baron of Arizona by E. H. Cookridge

If you ever wanted to know about the granddaddy of Arizona's venerable heritage of land swindles and get-rich-quick development schemes, or the background for the spurious Peralta family connection to the Lost Dutchman mine, here's your book.

James Addison Reavis (nothing to do with Reavis Creek nor with the Reevis Mountain School of Self-Reliance) began his career of petty crime in the Civil War Confederate army, forging leave papers for himself, then (for a price) for his fellow soldiers. He went into the real estate business in St. Louis after the war and began to dabble in forged documents again, including spurious "floating" Spanish Land Grants. These could be used in a species of extortion racket, wherein scared landowners who saw their holdings jeopardized (under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, authentic Spanish and Mexican grants were recognized, but had to be adjudicated by the courts and, if approved, had priority over later claims) and would pay the holder of the grant for a "quitclaim" deed to clear title. He met a character by the name of "Doctor" George Willing, supposedly a medical man, but assuredly a heavy drinker, gambler and purveyor of patent medicines, who told Reavis that he had purchased a land grant covering a good part of Arizona and New Mexico from a Mexican named Peralta, while prospecting near Prescott. He offered to sell it to Reavis, but the latter was in some financial difficulty himself and didn't bite. However, he and Willing agreed to meet in Arizona and pursue the business further. Reavis went to California via the Isthmus of Panama route and found employment with the San Francisco Examiner, one of the two leading newspapers there. One day he received the bad news that Willing had died in Prescott. Two years later (which lapse of time is rather odd in and of itself), backed by Central and Southern Pacific railroad baron Collis Huntington, who recognized at least the potential nuisance value of his claim, Reavis went to Arizona and tracked down Willing's humble estate, which consisted of a gunny sack containing his remaining worldly goods, in Prescott. Therein was an envelope stuffed with the documents relating to the supposed Peralta Grant. Back in St. Louis he bought the rights to the grant from Willing's widow for the promise of $30,000, to be paid if he were successful getting it adjudicated favorably. 

Obviously Reavis wasn't overly impressed with Willing's documents, because now he really put his criminal talents to work, and over the next few years invented and forged the Peralta family pedigree and all of the supporting documents he thought necessary to legitimize the grant and his claim to it. He even made trips to Guadalajara and Mexico City to steal authentic documents from the colonial archives, modify then to suit his purposes and either add them to his collection or reinsert them into the original files! Reavis submitted his claim with the US Surveyor General's office in Tucson, in 1883. He then set himself up in a palatial house near Casa Grande and began to actively extort money from the worried inhabitants of his supposed domain, enough of whom paid to give him a resectable income. The citizens and press of Arizona formed committees and mounted campaigns against him, crying "fraud"!, but without much concrete evidence to go on. Reavis' initial claim collapsed when the Arizona Territorial Attorney General won a case against him confirming his personal real estate as exempt from the Peralta Grant and the US Land Office instructed the Surveyor General to halt consideration of his case.

Apparently realizing that his documents wouldn't stand up to very close examination, he now took an even more audacious step. He found a beautiful mestizo girl named Sophia working as a domestic servant in California and, Pygmalion-like, recreated her as the heiress to the Peralta family and married her! Together they toured the east coast and Europe, dined with American plutocrats and European royalty, and got acquainted with titled Spaniards whom Reavis thought would be useful to back his case. He also took advantage of his time in Spain to steal more documents from the Archives of the Indies in Seville, doctor them to support his claim and reinsert them. He even changed his name to James Addison Peralta-Reavis to add some hispanic splendor to it! He set his sights higher now, and instead of pursuing small scale extortion of residents on his "grant", he began to promote large scale irrigation and agricultural development schemes to well-heeled backers on both coasts.

 In 1887, he filed a second claim for the grant in Tucson. The Surveyor General doggedly pursued his investigation and made a negative report on the authenticity of Reavis' documents and his claim was dismissed again. Reavis continued to line up spurious evidence, including paying witnesses to perjure themselves relative to the invented pedigree of his wife Sophia. Ultimately, in 1893, he submitted his final claim to the Court of Private Land Claims, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At this point, he was broke and all of his well heeled supporters and lawyers (including Huntington and Robert Ingersoll) had abandoned him;  he had to face the court alone. The trial drew national attention but, in the end, the claim was thrown out due to the diligent efforts of a group of gov't investigators and lawyers who systematically destroyed the house of forged cards Reavis had built up over decades. In a subsequent criminal case, Reavis was found guilty of fraud, but only sentenced to two years in prison, after which he was back out on the streets promoting Arizona irrigation and development schemes, but with no takers. He died a pauper, having exhausted the estimated $5.3MM he'd extorted from landowners or fraudulently raised from investors over the years. Sophia had divorced him long before and raised their twin sons working as a dressmaker in Denver.

So what's the connection with the Lost Dutchman Mine? Later authors (Pierpont Bicknell and Barry Storm?) claimed that Jacob Waltz's legendary mine had originally been worked by the equally legendary Peralta family in Spanish colonial times, only to be lost to Apache depredations and later rediscovered by Waltz.

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the general history of Arizona, especially the state's penchant for attracting and producing unscrupulous promoters and developers and for those who are interested in how the name "Peralta" came to be associated with landmarks and legends in the state.