Memorials › James Addison Peralta Reavis

James Addison Peralta Reavis

10 May 1843 – 20 Nov 1914

Birth	10 May 1843
Death	20 Nov 1914
Cemetery	Riverside Cemetery Denver , City and County of Denver , Colorado , USA
Added by	Cris on 11 Aug 2011
FaG	https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/46134230

Bio

James Addison Reavis, a nobody in the American West a century ago, came to be called the "Baron of Arizona," claiming 18,500 square miles including Phoenix and the Southern Pacific's right of way in what was the largest land swindle in U.S. history. He actually almost pulled it off! Before it was over, it involved the great of Wall Street and Washington as well as the nobility of Europe. Reavis, the son of a Missouri frontiersman, had been a Confederate soldier, a tram conductor, a clothing store clerk, and a real estate agent before his great inspiration opened before him. In handling land claims for clients, he saw how dubious some of them were; and having toyed with minor jobs of forgery while in the Army, he now began to see what wonders could be conjured up with land claims. He set about painstakingly to improve his forgery and to make himself an expert on old documents. The end result was that with the aid of a crooked Spanish lawyer and other associates he produced a claim to a gigantic property in Arizona and New Mexico, worth billions of dollars in today's money, which had been granted by the crown of Spain in the eighteenth century to one "Don Miguel Nemecio Silva de Peralta y de Cordoba." To bolster his claim, he "discovered" a direct descendent of the Peralta family and married her, calling himself thereafter Baron de Peralta y Cordoba: actually, she was a part-Indian waitress from Oakland, California, upon whom he performed a Pygmalion act so successful that he passed her off as genuine in the royal courts of Spain and England. His tale shows a picture of pioneer life in the West, of the founding of the Arizona territory, the early days of Phoenix, the growth of California, the great railroad battles of Huntington and Gould, and many sidelights. Reavis's claims against the United States government were supported by such men as Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, the lawyer Robert G. Ingersoll, and the railway tycoon Collis P. Huntington, not to mention the great Southern Pacific railway itself, and over a period of years he amassed a fortune in rents that he collected from his vast estates. It was a small-town newspaperman, suspicious of the type face on a certain "ancient" document, who stuck the first pin into Reavis's bubble. Its collapse was as intriguing as its inflation. And perhaps, most of all, is that Reavis died in prison-a pauper, in 1914 without ever fully disclosing the secret of his monumental hoax. Inmate # 964

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Family

Parents

• Fenton Goss Reavis 1817–1898
• Mary Isabell Lane Dickson Reavis 1822–1903

Spouse

• Wealthy Ada "Addie" Pope Reavis Pierce 1856–1931 FaG
• Sofia Loreto "Lola" Maso Reavis 1863–1934 FaG

Siblings

• Julia Ellen Reavis Smith 1844–1916
• Infant Reavis

Children

• LTC Carlos Loretto Reavis 1893–1963 FaG
• Miguel Nemecio "Mack" Reavis 1893–1971 FaG

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