18. The Man With the Plan – to Steal a US Territory
James Addison Peralta-Reavis (1843 – 1914), better known as “The Baron of Arizona“, might be the greatest conman that you have never heard of. He defrauded thousands of people, and literally stole most of the US Territory of Arizona from its legal owners. Reavis’ father was a Welshman who arrived in America in the 1820s, and his mother was part Spaniard, and proud of her Iberian heritage. He grew up in Missouri, and in his childhood, Reavis’ mother fired up his imagination and filled his head with Spanish romantic literature. As a result, he grew up with grandiose notions of himself as a hero in a melodramatic novel.
That was reflected in how he spoke and how he wrote, both of which were reportedly overly grandiloquent and bombastic. When the Civil War broke out, an eighteen-year-old Reavis enlisted in the Confederate Army. He served in the 8th Division of the Missouri State Guard, and it did not take long before he realized that the military was not as glamorous as he had imagined. The tedium and travails of a soldier in real life were not remotely close to his idealized image of war. It was right around then that Reavis discovered he could make a perfect reproduction of his commanding officer’s signature. So he came up with a lucrative plan.