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The Scheme to Hook Up a King With the Wasp Woman and Other Wild Plans

Khalid Elhassan August 31, 2020 34 min

Susan Cabot - Hussein of Jordan — Susan Cabot and King Hussein. Veja

8. Getting Creative in the Mexican Archives

A depiction of Don Nemecio Silva de Peralta de la Cordoba, the fictional 1st Baron of Arizona. Wikimedia

According to documents inserted by Reavis in the Mexican archives, the eighteenth century Don Nemecio Silva de Peralta de la Cordoba had been granted the title of Baron Peralta de Los Colorados by Spain’s King Ferdinand VI in 1748. Along with the noble title came a huge grant of land in Arizona – the Peralta Grant out of which Reavis intended to make a killing.

To further buttress his scheme, Reavis added more fictitious documents in the Mexican archives, creating a family tree of the descendants of “Baron Peralta”. They eventually included an impoverished great-grandson, Miguel Peralta who sold the claim to George Willing, from whom James Reavis acquired the huge chunk of territory in central Arizona.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.