The Fake Nobleman Who Scammed Millions in the Wild West

17. Reavis the Rebel

When the Civil War broke out, an eighteen-year-old James Reavis enlisted in the Confederate Army. However, he soon discovered that the tedium and travails of real soldiering were nothing like his romantic image of war. It was right around then that Reavis discovered he could perfectly copy his commanding officer’s signature. So he started to issue himself passes, with a forged signature, to escape the drudgery of soldiery and visit his relatives.

16. Conning the Confederate Army

When other soldiers noticed that Private Reavis was getting a whole lot of leave, he launched a sideline business of selling them forged passes. When the chain of command got suspicious and began to investigate, Reavis finagled a quick leave, ostensibly to get married. He then promptly hightailed it out of Confederate territory, and surrendered to Union forces. He even switched sides, and served for a while in a Union Army artillery regiment.

15. A Talent for Forgery

After the Civil War, Reavis traveled to Brazil, then got into real estate when he returned to America. In that line of business, Reavis discovered that the talent for forgery that he had discovered in his Confederate Army days could come in real handy. Especially when there was need to clear up messy paperwork and fix vague property titles. Clients sought Reavis when they had difficulty selling land because they were unable to establish clear ownership. He would magically produce some document that everybody else had somehow “missed” before, to clear up ownership in no uncertain terms. The “discovered” documents were forged by him, of course.

14. Heading West

In 1871, a prospector named George Willing sought Reavis’ help with a large Spanish land grant – 2000 square miles, about the size of Delaware – in the Arizona Territory. Reavis partnered up with Willing to develop the grant, and in 1874, the duo decided to head to Arizona. Willing got there first, filed a claim in the Yavapai County courthouse, and was found dead the next day. Foul play was suspected. Reavis had made it to California by then, and it was there that he got the news of his partner’s death. Low on funds, he got a job as a journalist, which put him in contact with some railroad magnates.

13. The Corrupt Public Lands Commission

Reavis also came into contact with the Public Lands Commission – an entity established per the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Its missions was to determine the validity of Mexican and Spanish land grants in the territories won by America in the US-Mexico War. The Commission was corrupt to a fare-thee-well. Reavis learned that the Commission approved most claims submitted to it, even frivolous ones, provided that a filer paid the examination expenses, coupled with a bribe. That was good news, because the land claim of Reavis’ deceased partner, George Willing, was weak.

12. The Peralta Deed

George Willing claimed that in 1864, he had paid $20,000 in gold dust, mules, and other goods, to a Miguel Peralta for the land in question. Unfortunately, the deed of transfer was highly irregular. Among other things, it had been on a sheet of greasy and marked up paper, without a notary or justice. However, once Reavis discovered how easy it was to get the Public Lands Commission to approve a claim, no matter how iffy, provided bribes were paid, he decided it was time to head to Arizona. As a start, he “tipped off” his railroad tycoon acquaintances to the deceased Willing’s land – without disclosing his interest in it. Reavis told them he could negotiate right-of-way privileges for their proposed Southern Pacific line through Arizona. He then traveled to Kentucky, where he met the deceased Willing’s widow, and bought his late partner’s interest in the land.

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.

10. The Fake “Baron Peralta”

Per the documents inserted by Reavis in the Mexican archives, Don Nemecio Silva de Peralta de la Cordoba was 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. He added more fictitious documents in the Mexican archives, to create a family tree of the “Baron Peralta” descendants. They eventually included an impoverished great grandson, the Miguel Peralta who sold the claim to George Willing, from whom James Reavis acquired the huge chunk of territory in central Arizona.

9. Creating a Noble Family Tree

Reavis worked hard to create the documentary trail of the aristocratic Peralta family. He traveled to Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Spain, where he spent days on end in museums and archives to learn the style and feel of old documents. He experimented tirelessly with various inks and chemicals and papers, to figure out the best materials and processes for producing forgeries that would seamlessly fit in with original old documents. He even scoured Spanish flea markets, where he bought old portraits of random people, whom he then designated – with the requisite forged documentary support – as members of the Peralta family.

8. Marrying Into Made Up Nobility

Reavis created the fictional aristocratic Peralta family, then decided to his bets by creating an even closer connection between himself and the Peralta land claim. So he married into the aristocratic Peralta family. The fact that the baronial brood was fictional was no problem for the ever enterprising Reavis. He came across a sixteen-year-old orphaned Mexican girl named Sophia, and convinced her that she was a descendant of the noble Peraltas. By then, Reavis had honed his skills to the point of being a master forger. So it was child’s play for him to alter church records and insert documents that made Sophia the “last surviving” member of the fictional but illustrious Peralta family. Then, having made Sophia the “Baroness of Arizona”, Reavis married her, and through that marriage he became the Baron of Arizona.

7. Putting the Con Into Action

After he carefully laid the groundwork, Reavis finally made his move in 1883. One fine morning that June, the inhabitants of central Arizona woke up to discover that their land had been stolen from under their feet. Notices plastered all over public places and printed in newspapers warned all and sundry: “to communicate immediately with Mr. Cyril Barratt, attorney-at-law and agent general, representing Mr. James Addison Reavis, for registering tenancy and signing agreements, or regard themselves liable to litigation for trespassing and expulsion when the Peralta Grant is, as it must be, validated by the U.S. government“.

6. Claiming Arizona

The land Reavis claimed was about twelve million acres, stretching from near Sun City, Arizona, to Silver City, New Mexico, and including Phoenix. Throughout the territory, people were bewildered and incredulous at first. Incredulity turned to panic when they read that the wealthy owners of the Silver King Mine, Arizona’s richest and most powerful mining corporation, had paid Reavis $25,000 – serious money back then – to avoid litigation. If such big shots had believed Reavis enough to pay him that much, it stood to reason that his claim really was solid. Suddenly, the threat that their land might get taken from them by this James Reavis seemed quite possible.

5. Extorting Arizonans

Reavis did not intend to actually evict the occupants of his “barony”. He simply wanted to extort as much as he could out of them in rent or quit claim fees, to support himself and his “noble” wife in a manner befitting an aristocratic land magnate. Surprisingly, large and wealthy landowners were the easiest marks: they figured it was cheaper to pay the Baron of Arizona, rather than risk litigation that might end in the loss of their valuable properties. Arizona’s biggest mining company paid him $25,000, and he got the Southern Pacific Railroad to cough up $50,000. Thousands of others paid smaller fees, that added up to a nice bundle.

4. Making Out Like a Bandit

At some point, even the US government fell for the con, and considered paying Reavis millions of dollars to settle the claim. All in all, Reavis collected about $5,300,000 in cash and promissory notes – the equivalent of about $180 million in 2024. That loot enabled Reavis and his wife Sophia to live it up in style. In addition to various ranches, they maintained nice homes in Arizona, New York City, Washington, DC, San Francisco, St. Louis, Madrid, and Chihuahua City. They traveled throughout Europe, and mingled with Spain’s aristocracy.

3. A Fake Spanish Baron in Spain

Many in Spain saw through Reavis and his scam, and figured him and his wife for frauds. However, they got a huge kick out of the brazenness of it all, and how he was tweaking the yanquis’ noses. So the Spaniards went ahead and feted the “Baron and Baroness of Arizona”. Things were going great for Reavis, but all good things come to an end. Even as he lived the high life and enjoyed being the nineteenth century version of a rich jet setter, the wheels of justice were grinding – slowly but steadily – to expose his fraud and bring it all crashing down.

2. The Net Closes in On a Conman

For years, an official named Royal Johnson had been investigating Reavis’ claim. In 1889, he released a devastating report that labeled it a fake. Despite his best efforts, Reavis had not been meticulous enough. His forged documents used printing 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 for writing instead of quills. There were basic Spanish spelling and grammatical errors, unlikely to have been made by a Spanish official. Reavis tried to brazen it out, and even sued the US government for eleven million dollars. It did not work out.

1.     From Riches to Rags

Reavis lost the lawsuit against Uncle Sam. The court noted that his 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, presenting false documents, and conspiracy to defraud the US government. He was tried, found guilty on June 30^th, 1896, and sentenced to two years behind bars, plus a $5000 fine. After his release, James Reavis drifted around in poverty, pitching 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.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Cookridge, E. H. – The Baron of Arizona (1967)

History Collection – 12 Notorious Wild West Outlaws

Powell, Donald M. – The Peralta Grant: James Addison Reavis and the Barony of Arizona (1960)

True West Magazine, November 21^st, 2017 – The Great Swindler James Addison Reavis