James Reavis

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James Reavis

James Addison Reavis (1843-1914), the self-styled Baron of Arizoniac, was an imposter of grand scale who claimed to own much of Arizona in the late 19th century.

Reavis joined the Confederate army during the American Civil War, but when Vicksburg, Mississippi fell he saw the writing on the wall and changed sides and joined the north. After the war he travelled widely before settling in St. Louis, Missouri and going into the real estate business. In 1871 he met Dr. George Willing, who had purchased a bag full of Spanish land deeds from a Mexican, Miguel Peralta, for $1,000.

Spanish deeds to U.S. territorial land were valid under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and these were for almost 2,000 square miles (5,200 km²) of Arizona. At the time Reavis was sceptical of the deeds, as Willing was a known as a bit of a "scammer". But in 1873 the real estate market in the west crashed, and Reavis' business failed. He moved to San Francisco, California where he found a job at a newspaper. There he soon met two burgeoning railroad barons who ran the Southern Pacific Railway, and told them about the Peralta deeds. With these deeds in hand the Southern Pacific would be able to own much of the land currently being developed by rivals. After arranging to pay him $2,000 to study the claims, Reavis travelled around the southern U.S. and Mexico tracking them down.

He soon found the deeds and quickly realized they were worthless. Not to be stopped there, he spent the next few years slowly forging a series of titles and diaries to build up a complete history of the fictional Peralta claim. It included no less than three generations of the Peralta family, starting with Don Miguel who said to have lived to 116, and ending with Don Miguel Jr. who ended up destitute and was forced to sell his US holdings to George Willing – who had conveniently died in 1873.

Reavis first travelled to Tucson to make his claim, but found to his dismay that the land office was already swamped with similar claims, many equally fraudulent. He then returned to San Francisco where he lined up a number of powerful backers willing to fund his attempts to make the claim in order to gain railway or mineral rights. This group included George Hearst (William Randolph Hearst's father), who was looking to solidify his own mining interests.

Reavis returned to Tucson with an ever-growing set of claims, which were no longer for 2,000 square miles (5,200 km²), but now included over 18,000 square miles (47,000 km²), a good chunk of Arizona. They dropped the lot in the land office in March 1883, demanding that the Surveyor General pass judgement on them. Meanwhile he used his backers' money to send out gangs of men to start asking for people to "settle up" their land claims with the new Baron. Over the next few months things started coming to a boil. Various landowners from large to small started making noises to the government, and after Grover Cleveland won the election in 1884 he made it clear he wanted Reavis gone. The timing was perfect, because that same month the new Surveyor General, Royal Johnson, pronounced the deeds a fake. Reavis ran back to California.

This wasn't enough to end the story. Over the next two years he put together another series of even richer and more powerful backers. In order to give the claims added legitimacy, he invented a new heir, who he married to become James Addison Peralta-Reavis. Reavis re-submitted his claim in 1888 but didn't stick around to watch the fireworks. In 1889 Royal Johnson submitted his own report, a massive six-year study that pointed out a number of problems in the deeds that clearly showed them to be a fake. Many of the issues were technical, including many of the papers being written with pens and ink that would not have existed in that era. Johnson became a hero in Arizona.

But even that wasn't enough to make Reavis give up. He re-submitted the claims once again in 1893, this time in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he wasn't so well known. But this plan backfired; Santa Fe was in fact founded by real Peralta family members, who immediately set out to get the deeds for themselves. The land court finally heard the claims in June 1895, and the government ravaged them for a full week using many of Johnson's original (and still valid) arguments. Reavis had sat out most of the case, but showed up on the fourth day to conduct his own defense and proceeded to demonstrate no courtroom ability at all. At the end of the month all his claims were dismissed.

He stepped out of the court only to be arrested for fraud. He spent a year in jail awaiting trial, then lost the case and spent another two years in a penitentiary. He was released in 1898 and found himself an outcast. He spent the opening years of the 20th century as a drifter, apparently reading about himself at various libraries.