9. A Great Plan, That Eventually Crashed Down
For years, an official named Royal Johnson had conducted an investigation into James Reavis’ claim. In 1889, he released a detailed report that labeled the Peralta Grant and all that was related to it a fake. Reavis had gone to great lengths to perfect his forgeries, but he had not been meticulous enough. Some of his documents used print styles different from those of the period they supposedly came from. Steel-nibbed pens – which did not come into use until the 1880s – were used instead of the quills that would have been employed in documents back in the 1700s. There were basic Spanish spelling and grammatical errors, unlikely to have been made by a government official. There was even a watermark from a Wisconsin mill in one of the supposedly historic documents. Reavis tried to brazen it out and even sued the US government for $11 million.
He lost the lawsuit. The court noted that Reavis’ claim was “wholly fictitious and fraudulent“, and that his documents had been forged and “surreptitiously introduced” into the records they supposedly came from. As he left the court, he was arrested and hit with a 42-count indictment that included charges of fraud, forgery, the presentation of false documents, and conspiracy to defraud the US government. Tried, he was found guilty on June 30th, 1896, and sentenced to two years behind bars, plus a $5000 fine. After his release, Reavis drifted around in poverty and pitched investment ideas that found no takers. His wife divorced him in 1902, and he eventually ended up in a Los Angeles poor house. He died in Colorado in 1914 and was buried in a pauper’s grave.
