The Baron of Arizona by E. H. Cookridge (review)

Reviews 73 The Baron of Arizona. By E. H. Cookridge. (New York, John Day Co., 1967. ix -j- 304 pages, illus., $6.95.) It was a fantastic fraud even for an age when public deceit on the grand scale was not uncommon. At the close of the trial of James Addison Reavis the U. S. Attorney General wrote, ‘‘The case is remarkable as probably the greatest fraud ever attempted against a government in its own courts.” In the Land Office in Tucson, in 1883, Reavis filed a claim to some 12,000,000 acres of land in central Arizona from just west of Phoenix eastward into New Mexico known as the Peralta Grant. Based though it was on a series of documents of Spanish grant anda series of conveyances of an ex­ tremely shaky nature, the fact that the Southern PacificRailroad and the Silver King Mine had come to temporary terms shed an aura of legitimacy over the claim. For a time he attempted to peddle quit claims in the Salt River Valley but without much success, while so unfavorably did the Arizona Surveyor General look on the case that the Commissioner of the General Land Office ordered all work stopped on the claim. After an absence of two years Reavis again appeared in Arizona in 1887 to file a second claim to the Peralta Grant. This time he had additional documents he claimed were discovered in the archives of Spain and Mexico. His trump card however, was his discovery of the missing Peralta heiress, Sofia Micaela, whom he had wooed and made Mrs. Reavis. Checked once more by the General Land Office, which ordered the case stricken from the docket on the basis of an adverse report from the Surveyor General in Tucson, he filed suit in the Court of Claims, and finally when the Court of Private Land Claims was created to settle the Spanish and Mexican claims in the Southwest, he filed his case before that body. It was the special agents of the Court of Private Land Claims who finally traced Reavis’ steps through Arizona, California, Spain, and Mexico to uncover the series of forgeries, petty thefts, perjury, and general chicanery that toppled the paper empire. By the time the case came to trial his lawyers had deserted him, his documents were known to be not genuine and, most damaging, the surviving Baroness, Mrs. Reavis, was revealed to have been the child of an American adventurer and a California Indian woman. Mr. Cookridge has told this story in great detail basing it on the records but using fictional devices to make the tale of greater interest to the general reader. While his prose style is generally smooth and clear he does not have a particularly good ear for dialogue which is sometimes stilted and awkward. To heighten the drama the author has resorted to a good deal of padding. There is much about Reavis’ youth and his development of the art of forgery not substantiated by any material which this reviewer, who has made a fairly careful study of the Peralta Grant, was able to discover. There is much about 74 Western American Literature the Reavises’ activities among the nobility of Spain, and almost a whole chapter is devoted to a trip to England where they were received at the court of Queen Victoria. Since there is no evidence that they ever went to England, this much would seem to be pure embroidery. Then there is the matter of the building of the walled Hacienda de Peralta and the sinister bodyguards, dramatic, but unsubstantiated. There is no evidence he ever owned a home anywhere, much less in Arizona. Possibly the chief defect of the book is its presentation of Reavis as a master forger. This is to distort the facts and Reavis’ character. His imagina­ tion was fertile but his technique was faulty. His forgeries were often crude, sometimes illiterate, as Mr. Cookridge has to admit tacitly in his account of the trial. His translations of Spanish documents were inaccurate to a high degree. All this was recognized from the very beginning by every government official who studied the papers. Most of this will hardly matter...