James Addison Reavis duped railroads and gold mines, and lived like a king until his adventurous scheme was unmasked. He served as a principal at Gallatin School for two years before he sprang his mega-scheme. Later, after six years in a Santa Fe prison, he returned to Downey where he raised vegetables and lived until 1913, often in the county poorhouse.
At the height of his scheme, Reavis cut a powerful figure. He proclaimed himself, "The Baron of Arizona" in the 1880s, and might have duped everyone. It took a special federal court and years of investigation to unmask him.
His story is so colorful it was dramatized in a motion picture, "The Baron of Arizona," starring Vincent Price.
But the real story is richer than any Hollywood movie. Reavis actually negotiated with the United States Government for a settlement of $25 million for his claim that he was the husband of the heir to the Peralta Land Grant. The Gadsden Purchase, by which the U.S. acquired title to Arizona from Mexico, guaranteed such old deeds. And Reavis tied the U. S. Government up in knots for seven years with his bogus document.
Historians suggest Reavis, a native of Missouri, apparently learned to forge papers while in the Confederate army. His popularity was based, it is said, on his ability to forge military passes for his friends.
After the war he appeared in Santa Fe, where he told the locals he had been sent by the San Francisco Examiner to look into "business possibilities."
The Territory of Arizona was vast, and there was obvious difficulty in determining just how far some of the old hidalgo grants extended.
Reavis was a stickler for detail. He studied old land grants and worked out a plan to fake one. Not a land grant that was already known, but a new one created by his imagination combined with hard work and skill at forgery.
He even forged a stone monument in a remote area of the desert. But he needed a grantee to whom he could link his claim. From the myths of the past he invented Miguel de Peralta, an alleged friend of King Ferdinand of Spain.
For seven years he crossed Mexico, Portugal and Spain. Even the monks and holy fathers who guarded the documents of old Spain were duped into granting him access.
Eventually he spotted documents on two continents to authenticate Don Miguel and the fake family tree that allegedly sprang from him.
But he still had to establish a connection between the bogus noble family and himself. Reavis had no Spanish blood.
He used George Willing, a man he met in Prescott, Ariz. He created a story that Willing had bought the deed to the vast land grant for $1,000 from a poor Mexican, who was allegedly the rightful heir to the fake grant.
Then Reavis claimed Willing had sold it to him for $30,000.
Curiously, Reavis recorded his deed, Willing died that night, and Reavis "found" papers in Willing’s attic the next morning substantiating the claim, according to later investigators.
He then began to terrify the landowners for hundreds of miles by posting his bogus claim. He ordered them to settle with him at once for the rent of their land, or face eviction.
The ruse was nearly perfect. Even the mighty Southern Pacific Railroad and its lawyers blinked.
The Reavis claim was 225 miles long and 75 miles wide, and was equivalent to half of the state of Indiana. Lawyers looked into the case and shook their heads. They were attorneys, not experts on Spanish nobility.
The railroad and Silver King Mine actually capitulated. Many major ranchers did as well. They began to pay, and some major interests in the territory actually became Reavis’s allies, hoping to benefit from his expected victory.
But he still needed a final piece for the puzzle. He hoped to end any question of his purchase of the grant. He did it through marriage, picking a 14-year-old waif from a San Bernardino, Calif., ranch. He made her his bride, and set about authenticating a claim in her name that she was the last Peralta.
He trained her to act as a noblewoman, a heritage she wasn’t entitled to at all. And he then laid claim to the title he said was due him through the marriage-Baron of Arizona.
It was 1884. While Reavis traveled the world spending the money frightened landowners paid him, the U.S. Surveyor General studied. And studied. Finally, in 1890, it published a critical report pointing up certain errors in Reavis’s documentation.
In 1891 the U.S. Court of Private Land Grant Claims was established. It was the beginning of the end for Reavis.
The camera proved useful. The court’s investigators traveled to Europe and photographed and tested documents that Reavis had handled years before.
Chemicals were used to test parchment. Marks of a steel pen were found where a quill should have been used. And most damning of all, certain documents carried modern water marks.
Reavis was brought to trial in 1895 and was sentenced to six years in the Santa Fe penitentiary.
The story does not end there. On his release, Reavis came to Downey, living for many years in the county poor farm which later became Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center.
William McKellar, lifetime resident, wrote in his memoirs, "About 1913 James Addison Reavis, former claimant of the Peralta land grant, was residing in Downey where he made his living growing vegetables and doing odd jobs.
"The school boys in town used to, upon meeting Reavis, mock him and call him ‘The Baron.’ I recall him well . . . we boys always considered him crazy, for he still talked of his huge estate."
Reavis had first come to Downey during his wanderings when he was still putting together his land grant plot.
Judie McKellar, also a lifelong Downey resident, recalled Reavis when he first came to Downey in 1876. He was principal of the old Gallatin School here.
She wrote that Reavis taught history, math and other subjects, and was very proud in his appearance.
Reavis taught a while in Gallatin’s two room school house, then left to make his outlandish run at history.
He must have liked Downey. For after riches, after prison, he came back-to spend his later years on the poor farm which became the hospital we know today as Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center.