11. Fabricating a Family History
Next, Reavis used his newspaper connections to hype the Peralta land grant, and exaggerate the supposed “solidity” of the title claim. To buttress the solidity of the land claim sold by Miguel Peralta to George Willing, Reavis fabricated a family history for Peralta out of whole cloth. He went about it in a highly creative way. Reavis knew that the way claims worked, people would check the archives. So he went to Mexico, befriended people in its archives, and inserted forged and artificially aged documents into those archives. They established a fictitious family lineage of an eighteenth century Don Nemecio Silva de Peralta de la Cordoba.
