Legends of the Old West - LEGENDS Ep. 2 | “The Baron of Arizona”

Episode Date: April 15, 2018

In the 1880s, James Addison Reavis attempted the greatest land fraud in American history. In a story that crisscrosses the United States and Mexico, and crosses the ocean to Spain, he tried to convince the U.S. government that he owned 18,000 square miles of the Arizona Territory. In the process, he anointed himself the Baron of Arizona. Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. In 1822, a banker's son in Scotland made an extraordinary proclamation. He was 36 years old and had lived a life of swashbuckling adventure. He'd been a military man who'd fought for the crown in Central and South America, and he was now ready to make his fortune. In October of 1822, Gregor MacGregor announced to the United Kingdom that he was the Kha'Zix of Poyais. He was the prince of a country in Central America. This new nation of eight million acres had the most fertile soil, the most gentle natives, and the most pure water. But not only that, there were chunks of gold just lying in the riverbeds. All he needed was 200,000 pounds of investments and some sturdy settlers to begin colonizing the

country and mining its resources. He quickly got both. But there was just one problem. Poyes didn't exist. It was actually Honduras. So when the first two ships of settlers arrived in this new land, they quickly discovered that everything they'd been told was lies. As you might imagine, McGregor's scheme quickly collapsed. The settlers who survived their ordeal in Honduras returned to England. McGregor died in ruin, but the initial investment he received grew in value over the course of his life, and today it would be worth over $4 billion. McGregor's fraud was incredible, it was huge. But the scheme concocted by James Addison Rebus exactly 60 years later in Arizona territory was an all-timer.

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to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash realm. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws. Like Fresh Promise. Produce is carefully selected and checked for freshness. And if it's not fresh, it's free. Yes, you heard that right. From the crispest lettuce to the juiciest apples,

Loblaws is committed to fresh. So you get the best fruits and veggies. Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. Welcome to the Legends of the Old West podcast. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. And today we're telling the story of one of the most brazen conmen of the West, James Rebus, the self-proclaimed Baron of Arizona.

Settle in for the tale of one of the all-time great swindlers. James Rebus had a love-hate relationship with the Army. He was 18 when the Civil War broke out, and like most young men of military age in the South, he joined the Confederate forces. He was born near Clinton, Missouri, and enlisted as a member of the 8th Division of the Missouri State Guard. But he quickly found out that the reality of military life was nowhere near the romanticized version that existed in his head. It was full of monotony and drudgery and living in foul-smelling camps. Plus, the Union Army shot at you.

Before long, Rivas realized something else. He could mimic his commanding officer's signature. He began writing passes for himself to take leave to go home to visit his family. Soon enough, his fellow soldiers started to notice that he was absent a lot. And they started to wonder how he was pulling it off. How was he able to get all these passes? Of course, instead of stopping when the other soldiers found out his scheme, he began selling them passes of their own.

As is expected, it didn't take long for the army's superior officers to figure out that something weird was going on. All of a sudden, a whole bunch of soldiers were on leave with passes written by the same captain. As the walls started to close in on Revis, he dipped into the well again. He wrote himself one last pass, this time to get married, and then promptly surrendered to the Union Army. These experiences in the Civil War turned out to be one of two pivotal points in the early life of James Rebus. The second came after the war when he moved back to Missouri. Near the end of 1866, he arrived in St. Louis and worked a series of jobs. He was a streetcar conductor and a traveling salesman and a clerk at several

different shops. But his first real success came as a real estate agent. He made a couple small deals and earned enough money to open his own office. It was here that he learned his skill for forgery could make him a lot of money. A few simple adjustments to the paperwork could produce clean titles for his clients and earn him nice commissions. The big one came when a man wanted to purchase attractive land outside St. Louis. The sellers had three generations of papers associated with the land, but they still couldn't establish clean title to sell it to the man. Then, miraculously, Revis found an old, faded document from the 1700s that perfectly filled in the holes of the family's ownership so they could sell the land to his client. Somehow, no one had found this precious document in any of the other searches.

But everyone accepted it as valid, and the transaction went through. The sellers were happy, the buyer was happy, and Revis was very happy. Then, in 1871, Rivas met a man who changed his life forever. Dr. George Willing strolled into the real estate office one day with a proposition that put Rivas on the path toward one of the largest and craziest schemes of all time. Dr. Willing was just as much of a con man as Revis. He'd been a physician who turned himself into a prospector in Arizona Territory. He made extra money by selling his cure-all medicine, which of course, was completely fake. Willing had met a man named Colonel Beiser, who'd been a client of Revis.

Willing told Beiser that he needed help with a land transaction, and Beiser recommended Rivas. Willing walked into the office and spun a fantastic tale for Rivas. Willing said he'd met a man named Miguel Peralta at the mining site of Black Canyon, which is about 30 miles north of Phoenix. Peralta was down on his luck, but he had one thing of value left to sell, a huge Spanish land grant. The United States was bound by two agreements to honor old Spanish and Mexican land grants, the Gadsden Purchase and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. If you could prove your claim was legit, of Guadalupe Hidalgo. If you could prove your claim was legit, the U.S. government had to give you the land. According to Willing, he bought the rights to Peralta's land for $20,000 in gold dust.

They scribbled out their agreement on a greasy piece of paper in the camp, and the deal was done on October 20, 1864. It took Willing three more years to actually record the transaction. In 1867, he arrived in Prescott to make his claim official, but he was short on money. So he offered to sell half his rights to a local stable owner. Willing said that this land grant gave him ownership of places where people already lived and mines that had been in operation for years. He told the stable owner that they could make big profits by selling the mines back to the people who already owned them. The stable owner said absolutely not, and it didn't take long before Willing found out that the townsfolk didn't want him around. He bailed out the next

day and headed for Santa Fe. Willing eventually drifted into Rivas' real estate office four years later. Rivas was interested in Willing's documents about the grant, and he asked the doctor to leave them so he could inspect them. Willing said no, but he came back the next day with a new companion, William J. Gitt. Gitt was an unscrupulous lawyer who was supposedly an expert in Spanish land titles. He was creatively nicknamed the Old Spanish Land Title Lawyer after some less than reputable deals in Illinois and Missouri. In fact, Gitt had recently returned to the United States after spending 20 years in Mexico. He'd fled to avoid a bench warrant that had been issued for his arrest in the wake of a dubious deal in 1847. So now we basically have the three stooges

in Rivas's office. A doctor turned con man, a sleazy lawyer, and a crooked real estate agent. They poured over Dr. Willing's documents and began to make a plan. In addition to the original agreement with Peralta, Willing had some copies of legal papers related to the land grant and a copy of a letter that was dated 1853. It was supposedly signed by Mexican President Santa Ana himself. The letter stated that a thorough search had been done for documents pertaining to the Peralta land grant and the title was secure. During the review process, Rivas got a crash course in old Spanish and Mexican documents.

After a while, he and Willing decided to form a partnership to capitalize on Willing's land grant. In January of 1874, three years after they first met, they were ready to head to Arizona. Dr. Willing left first. He took the Overland route and arrived in Prescott in March to file his claim in the Yavapai County Courthouse. Revis was going to travel by sea to California to pick up some more documents that Willing said he'd left with a merchant as collateral for a loan he'd taken out. In May, two months after Willing made it to Prescott, Revis still had not left St. Louis.

In fact, he was about to get married. He got hitched to Ada Pope on May 5th. They had a brief honeymoon and then he took off for California. And they didn't see each other again for six years. Ada got frustrated with their marriage. She filed for divorce in 1883 on the grounds of desertion. Revis didn't really mind. He was totally consumed with his plan. Finally, Revis arrived in San Francisco, and when he did, he received incredible news. Dr. George Willing had died. Willing had been found dead in his room the very next morning after he arrived in Prescott to

file his claim. Foul play was suspected, but there was no official investigation. That meant James Addison Revis was just one step away from being the sole owner of the Peralta land grant. But then the timeline gets weird. Revis learned about Dr. Willink's death sometime in the early summer of 1874, but it took him six years to travel to Arizona to take advantage of the land grant. When Rivas arrived in California, the trip had taken its toll. He was out of money and in bad health. So he took a job as a school teacher in Downey, California for two years.

Then he worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Call. Even though he seemed to be taking a long time to finish what he started with Dr. Willing in St. Louis, his time in San Francisco paid off in the long run. He got to know railroad tycoons Collis Huntington and Charles Crocker. They were two of the big four, along with Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins, who built the Central Pacific Railroad, which was the western half of the Big Four along with Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins who built the Central Pacific Railroad, which was the western half of the Transcontinental Railroad. They were good men to know. And Rivas was able to study the operation of the Public Land Commission in California, which handled titles and land claims. He learned that even frivolous claims were reviewed,

as long as the expenses were paid by the person who filed the claim. And bribery was a common practice. Rivas thought this made his chances in Arizona look pretty good. Finally, in May of 1880, six years after Dr. Willing died in Prescott, Rivas arrived in Phoenix. He told people he still worked for the San Francisco Examiner, and he arranged tours of the surrounding area. He scouted the land, and more importantly, the rivers. Then he headed north to Prescott. He tracked down the probate judge who had handled Willing's case,

and Revis handed him a letter written by Willing's widow. She stated that all her husband's possessions in Arizona were to be handed over to Revis, which included, of course, the title to the Peralta Land Grant. The land grant was an evolving thing. The initial claim was for an area of about 2,700 square miles, which is huge itself. It was called a floater because it didn't specify exactly where the land was, just that the title holder had a claim for that amount of land. Rivas decided to set fixed boundaries for his claim, and as he did, it grew in size. Eventually, he outlined a massive rectangle of land that covered 18,635 square miles of Arizona and western New Mexico. His claim started west of Phoenix and extended all the way across Arizona to Silver City, New Mexico.

His claim gobbled up the towns of Phoenix, Globe, Casa Grande, and Tempe. He acquired, so to speak, the Silver King Mine, which was the richest silver mine in Arizona, and a section of land on which ran the Southern Pacific Railroad. In total, Rivas claimed he owned one-sixth of the present-day state of Arizona. But to actually take ownership of this massive tract of land, on which thousands of people already lived and worked, he knew he would need additional documentation. Rivas traveled to Philadelphia, Guadalajara,

and Mexico City in search of more documents. In Mexico, he made friends with the archivists who supervised the libraries of old papers. He said he was still a reporter from California, and they let him inspect the records. This was when Rivas kicked his plan into high gear. He needed to establish the chain of custody of the Peralta land grant from its first owner all the way up to Miguel Peralta, whom Dr. Willing met in Black Canyon. Rivas went into extreme detail as he forged dozens of documents in Mexico. Here's the broad summary of the lineage he created for the Peralta family.

It began with the first Baron of Arizona, Don Miguel, who was born in Spain in 1708. Don Miguel joined the military and was eventually sent on a secret mission to New Spain, which is Mexico, by King Philip V. After Don Miguel successfully completed his mission, which was never explained, he was given 300 leagues of land for his service. Rivas wrote that Don Miguel traveled to his new land in 1758 with a local priest and two officers from the local Spanish viceroy. Together, they located a big rock on a hill and declared that that rock marked the center of the western boundary of Peralta's land. According to the legend, Don Miguel tried to settle on his land near present-day Casa Grande, but the Apaches ran him off. He returned to Mexico, got married, and had his only child, a son, at the young age of 73.

Of course, Don Miguel wanted to make sure his son inherited his land someday, so he wrote a will and had it notarized. Don Miguel was a tough fella, because in Rivas's fake documents, he lived to be 116 years old. With that, Rivas's trip to Mexico was complete. He'd created a family tree for the Peraltas that established the transfer of the land all the way up to himself. Il a établi le transfert de la terre jusqu'à lui-même. Oui, ils magasinent les marques qu'ils aiment et font d'importantes économies, en plus des remises en argent. Et vous pouvez aussi commencer à gagner des remises en argent dans vos magasins préférés, comme Old Navy, Best Buy et Expedia, et même cumuler les ventes et les remises en argent. C'est facile à utiliser et vous obtenez vos remises par PayPal ou par chèque.

L'idée est simple, les magasins paient Rakuten pour leur envoyer des gens magasinés. Et Rakuten partage l'argent avec vous sous forme de remise. Téléchargez l'application gratuite Rakuten et ne manquez jamais un bon deal. Ou allez sur rakuten.ca pour en avoir plus pour votre argent. C'est R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Rivas went back to San Francisco and wrote anonymous newspaper articles to support the validity of his claim. He met influential people and the validity of his claim. He met influential people and got them on his side. He went to the railroad executives, and they agreed to pay a fee for easement across his land. In the grand scheme of things, Rivas wasn't asking for a

lot, and Charles Crocker agreed to pay him $50,000 for the use of his land. Crocker may or may not have believed Rivas, but it didn't matter. Paying the money was a quick and easy way to get his railroad across Rivas' land, and, just as important, to stop the Texas Pacific Railroad from using it. That agreement paid big dividends for Rivas down the road. dividends for Rivas down the road. Now Rivas made the first official claim on his land in Tucson on March 27, 1883. He hauled two steamer trunks full of documents into the land office and presented them to Surveyor General J.W. Robbins. Robbins agreed to register the claim and begin the lengthy process of certification, which meant reading every document in the trunks.

Meanwhile, Rivas got to work in Arizona. He found some old ruins near Casa Grande that he claimed were the remnants of Don Miguel's attempt to settle in the area. Rivas built a mansion and a sprawling estate and then got into the real work of his land grant. Rivas claimed he basically owned all of central Arizona, a total of 12 million acres. That meant that everyone living and working and mining on his land now owed him money. They were his renters. Of course, they'd never heard of James Rivas or Miguel Peralta or an old Spanish land grant. But Rivas hired rent collectors to get the money he was owed.

He put flyers up all over his land that told people to register themselves as tenants or he would sue them and throw them off his land. He started selling quit-claim deeds to people so they could buy back the land they thought they already owned. But the prices of these deeds varied like crazy. Sometimes he demanded a price of $1,000. Other times he did the deal for the price of a meal or a couple drinks. His biggest payday came from the Silver King Mine. It was the richest silver mine in Arizona,

and its owner, James Barney, agreed to buy a quit claim from Revis for $25,000. It wasn't necessary, but it was the fastest and easiest way to get Revis to go away. $25,000 was a drop in the bucket to Barney. But the effect it had on other residents was big. Now, the biggest mine in the territory and the biggest railroad in the territory had given legitimacy to Rivas' claim. Not everyone was so easily swayed, though. Many people were furious and skeptical. Two newspapers in Phoenix started campaigns against Rivas.

Then the Surveyor General sent a Spanish language expert to Mexico to inspect the documents Rivas had made copies of. And of course, Rivas and his lawyer went with the expert. In Guadalajara, Rivas kindly showed the expert the location of all the documents that proved his claim. And while they were there, Rivas just happened to discover another paper that helped solidify his grant. But they came up empty in Mexico City. Regardless, the group returned to Arizona, and the expert gave Revis a favorable report. But when they got back, they received a surprise. Surveyor General J.W. Roberts had died of tuberculosis.

He was replaced by his chief clerk, Royal Johnson. Johnson became Revis's nemesis and struck the first major blow to Revis's claim shortly thereafter. The Attorney General of Arizona Territory found himself living on Revis's land. He filed a lawsuit and forced Revis to explain himself in court. The process was long and drawn out, but it resulted in Revis giving vague answers that satisfied no one. The court ruled that the Attorney General had clear title to his own property. He owned it, not Revis. After that, the Commissioner of the Land Office told Royal Johnson

to stop the verification process of the Peralta land grant. Johnson happily complied. Residents celebrated. The tide was turning against Revis. Public meetings were held that called for the end of the whole fiasco once and for all. Revis saw he was in trouble and fled to California. Two weeks later, Geronimo led 144 Apache Warriors off a reservation and ignited the second round of Apache Wars. Revis was largely forgotten.

But he wasn't done. Not by a long shot. Now until this time, there's one part of the story that's been missing. Revis got married again. Six years before he made his first official claim on the land, he'd begun to realize that there were some holes in his plan. The biggest one was that he did not have a living member of the Peralta family to support him. In 1877, while he was in California, he spotted a young woman on a train. She bore a striking resemblance to the Second Baroness of Arizona,

who of course had been dead for a hundred years and had never existed in the first place. But this girl was the spitting image of her. They must be related. Rivas approached the young woman and told her that she was likely the heiress to a massive fortune. They began exchanging letters, and by December of 1882, they were married. Rivas was 39 years old. The girl, Doña Sofia Miquela Maso, was 16 or 17. The next year, Rivas made his official claim on the land and stirred up the hornet's nest in Arizona. By 1885, he'd been run out of the territory and was back in California with Sofia. In the meantime, he'd enrolled her in a convent school

to teach her how to be a proper lady. She was the third Baroness of Arizona, after all. So now, Rivas had a new mission. He and Sophia traveled to New York, armed with letters of introduction from powerful people Rivas knew in San Francisco. He introduced Sophia as his ward, and the pair met and mingled with senators and congressmen and the rich and powerful in New York. Rivas told everyone about Sofia's story as the heiress to a gigantic tract of land in

Arizona and that her claim had been thrown out. A man named John McKay was so impressed that he agreed to finance a trip to Spain for Rivas and Sofia so they could hunt for documents in the Spanish archives to help their case. The couple sailed to Spain in December of 1885. When Rivas and Sofia landed, Rivas got to work searching the archives in Madrid and Seville. Members of the Rio Peralta family in Spain believed Sofia was a long-lost relative and agreed to host her while Rivas searched. His painstaking work took months, but wouldn't you know it, it paid off.

Rivas discovered documents that connected the dots between Adon Jesus Miguel Peralta and young Sofia. In addition, Rivas also found portraits and daguerreotype photographs of old Peralta relatives to put faces with the names. In reality, he bought the paintings and pictures at flea markets. He bought the paintings and pictures at flea markets. But everyone was convinced. The claim was proved. It was time to celebrate.

So Rivas and Sofia announced to the world that they were actually married and a new round of celebrations kicked off. They traveled the Mediterranean until November 1886 when they finally set sail for America. When they arrived in New York, Rivas and Sophia went on a whirlwind tour showing their documents to as many influential people as they could. They won numerous endorsements from the rich and powerful who all agreed that Sophia was who she said she was. From there, they headed to California where Rivas got an affidavit swearing he had known Sophia since birth. Now, it was time to go back to Arizona. And by this point, Rivas was introducing himself as James Addison Rivas Peralta.

On their way to Tucson, they experienced another stroke of miraculous luck. They just happened to stumble upon the very rock that Sofia's ancestor, Don Miguel, had used to mark the western boundary of his land in 1758. Rivas took a picture of Sofia standing next to the rock to further prove her legitimacy. You can still find that photo online today. You can still find that photo online today. On September 2, 1887, Revis filed his second claim on the barony of Arizona. The second claim detailed Sophia's history and her connection to the Peraltas all the way back to the second baron of Arizona in 1822.

More importantly, it explained how she became an orphan in California when she was young, and therefore she had no idea about her exalted family lineage. And of course, it proved, in quotes, that she was the rightful heir of the Peralta land grant. By now, Rivas and Sophia were living high on the hog. He was dressing in the finest suits, and Sofia wore the finest dresses. Ironically, they spent very little time at their mansion in Arizona. They now had residences in San Francisco, St. Louis, and New York, and they bounced around to those three places. And here's why. Rivas had formed three corporations all under the name Casa Grande

Improvement Company. Through these corporations, he received millions of dollars of investments to help develop his land. He was done with the penny-ante scheme of selling quick-claim deeds. He was going for the big time. The company planned to develop roads and railroads and dams and canals and telegraph lines. It was going to lease water rights and sell livestock and basically have a hand in every possible aspect of modernizing the frontier. He was raking in the money. And here's the most amazing thing. He still didn't own the land.

He was milking millions out of these investors. He made grand plans for development because he convinced people outside Arizona that his claim was legitimate and he'd either been certified by the government or would be shortly. But that hadn't The residents of Arizona were enraged to see Revis return. Newspapers openly called for the violent ouster of Revis, which is probably why he spent so little time on the land he had worked so hard to secure. Royal Johnson, who'd become Revis' nemesis during his first filing, was now the permanent Surveyor General of Arizona. He never stopped investigating Revis's claim.

He thought it was a fraud from the beginning, and he was desperate to prove it. In October 1889, Johnson put all of his findings in a report called Adverse Report of the Surveyor General, Royal A. Johnson, upon the alleged Peralta land grant, a complete expose of its fraudulent character. Here are some of the details of Johnson's report. They're incredible. Rivas was supposedly a master forger who'd been doing this basically his entire adult life. He'd made numerous trips to Mexico and Spain. He'd spent hours in archives studying documents and learning all the legal and cultural aspects of these societies from experts.

And with all that, here are some of the stupid mistakes he made. Most of the documents he presented as being from the 1700s were written with steel-tipped pens instead of quills. The styles of the letters used in Rivas' documents did not match other documents of the time period. There were multiple spelling and grammatical errors in supposed documents from the Spanish royal court. This was like a teenager forging a note from his parents to get out of school. One look at it, and you could tell it didn't come from the hand of an adult. Johnson's report was celebrated by people in Arizona, but Rivas wasn't going away quietly.

He lobbied his political friends in Washington, but ultimately it didn't work. The commissioner of the land office was somewhat critical of Johnson, but he didn't dispute the report. He said the case was closed. Move on to other things. Revis appealed the decision and filed a lawsuit against the federal government. He had a team of lawyers on his side, some of whom were on the payroll of the Southern Pacific Railroad, so they definitely had a vested interest in the case. The back and forth between Rivas and the government went on for six years. Rivas continued to try to prove Sofia's legacy in the Peralta family. He paid

people in California to testify to various parts of Sofia's childhood. He forged birth records and baptismal records. He went to Mexico again. He discovered a previously unknown third cousin to Sofia, who of course only existed on paper, but helped prove her family heritage. During all this, Sofia gave birth to twin boys who were named Miguel and Carlos, which obviously honored the first and second barons of Arizona. And then finally, in February 1893, Rivas rolled into the land office in Santa Fe, New

Mexico and unloaded a wagon of proof. When all the evidence was laid out, it filled three large tables placed end to end. There were hundreds of documents with elaborate seals and signatures of kings. There were ancient books, pictures, and paintings Rivas had bought in Spain years before. This was the complete history of the Peralta family and its land grant. The government hired a special attorney to run its case against Rivas. The attorney hired a Mexican-born New York lawyer named Savaro as his chief investigator. Savaro embarked on a worldwide trip to disprove Rivas' claim.

He went to Mexico and found no evidence of the Peralta land grant. But he did find documents and signatures that would later be used in comparison to Rivas' documents. He went to Spain and had the same result, with an added bonus. Rivas' time in Spain was not quite as squeaky clean as he'd made it out to be. Savaro talked to the archivists in Seville, and they basically said, oh yeah, we were suspicious of that guy from the jump. Those archivists had spent their lives around the old documents, and there was Rivas somehow discovering papers they'd never seen before. The chief archivist put safety measures in place after Rivas' first visit. He had documents related to Rivas' search marked with numbers so they could keep track of them, and he had Rivas watched at all times by a staff member. So on Rivas' next

visit, he discovered a document in a bundle that was folded and in an envelope. No other documents in the bundle were folded, and the document did not have a number on it. The chief archivist and his clerks took their information to the authorities, and an arrest warrant was issued for Rivas. But Rivas had already fled Seville by that time, and his influential friends in Madrid quashed the investigation.

This was powerful ammunition for Savaro. Next, he traveled to California to validate the witnesses to Sofia's history. He discovered a trail of lies and bribes. Eventually, a trial date for Rivas was set for March 30, 1895. As his lawyers began to learn about the mountain of evidence against him, they suddenly found themselves busy with other cases or unavailable to help. By the time the trial started, Rivas had no lawyers and no money. He was destitute. So in true Rivas fashion, he just avoided his own trial. He'd brought a civil suit against the government, and it had called his bluff, and now he was nowhere to be found. He didn't show up in

court to defend himself, but the government continued with the case as if he were there. Witnesses testified to all the elements of the massive fraud. Finally, one week after the trial began, Rivas showed up in court. He testified in his own defense and unfurled his whole story from start to finish. The grant from Dr. Willing, the history of the Peraltas, and the lineage of Sophia. But when the government grilled him about specifics, his memory was faulty and his answers were vague. It was pretty clear he was lying through his teeth, and he had been all along.

On June 28, 1895, the Court of Private Land Claims officially rejected the Peralta land grant of James Addison Revis. One of the largest and most elaborate frauds of all time, and the biggest land scheme in the history of the United States was over. Almost exactly one year after Rivas lost his civil trial, he lost his criminal trial. He was found guilty of fraud and served almost two years in jail. Sophia moved to Denver during all the upheaval and raised her twin boys on her own.

Revis lived there for a time, but he couldn't stop his fraudulent ways. Even after he was exposed as a phony and served time in jail, he still tried to get his old cronies to invest in development opportunities in Arizona. Strangely, none of them accepted his offer. In 1900, he started a magazine called Peralta Rivas Real Life Illustrated that he said would provide readers with the whole inside story of the fraud. He quit after exactly one issue. story of the fraud. He quit after exactly one issue. Sophia finally divorced Rivas in 1902. After that, Rivas dropped out of the public eye. There are just two more pieces of information about him. In 1913, he was living in a poor house in Los Angeles, and he died in Denver

on November 20, 1914, and was buried in a pauper's grave. The mansion Revis built in Arizona was rediscovered by the National Park Service in 1953. It had been used as a barn for years by a local farmer. In 1963, the Park Service evaluated the mansion barn and decided it would cost too much to restore to its original form. It was the final act of the story of one of the most audacious conmen of all time, James Addison Revis, the Baron of Arizona.

Next time on the Legends of the Old West podcast, it's part one of a two-part series about the early days of the Texas Rangers. The closing song for Season 1 was composed and performed by The Mighty Orc, a great musician from Houston, Texas. Additional original music by Rob Valliere. Audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison I'm your writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening Check out our website, blackbarrelmedia.com And find us on social media

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