The lustiest adventure a man ever lived
I therefore respectfully submit that this claim is entirely unsupported by any evidence
Nineteen years before his turn as showman Dan Ruffalo in the Robert Sparr-directed More Dead Than Alive, Vincent Price headlined another western. Filmed over the course of 15 days, The Baron of Arizona finds the horror icon in the titular role, starring opposite the once-prolific Ellen Drew.
The film earned some retrospective praise as an unconventional entry in an often conventional genre, but is otherwise largely remembered for its employment of first-time stuntman and budding young filmmaker Edward Wood Jr.
Director and screenwriter Samuel Fuller found inspiration in a magazine article published in The American Weekly a year prior to the film’s release. The piece was penned by Homer Croy, a biographer of James Jesse, Will Rogers and D.W. Griffith, who had written a trio of his own screenplays a decade and a half prior.
Three years after the film’s release, its real-life inspiration made posthumous headlines once again, when his Arizola, Arizona mansion was located by the National Park Service. It had changed hands to a local farmer, purchased from James Reavis’ creditors. “We used to live in the Baron’s palace for almost 40 years,” the farmer told a reporter, “and what a fine place it was. But the family grew up and moved away, and the house was too big for me and my wife and children. I had a smaller, snug stone house built nearby and used the big place for stabling animals.”
A decade after its rediscovery, the Parks Service evaluated a proposed renovation of the building, ultimately determining that the structure was simply too far gone after years of housing livestock.
Reavis had chosen the site 70 years prior. A portmanteau of Arizona and Ola (the daughter of the area’s early colonial settler), Arizola is situated in the Papago Desert, in the shadow of Antelope Peak. While remote, it was within a reasonable distance from Tucson (65 miles south) and Yuma (168 miles west). Of equal import were the Santa Cruz and Gila rivers, which flanked the town on the north and south, providing waterways that reached Phoenix less than 50 miles to the north.
Most importantly, however, were the of ruins Reavis insisted had been used as La Hacienda de Peralta by his predecessor, the first Baron of Arizona. This would be Reavis’ headquarters, situated in his 18,600-square-mile land claim, which stretched from Phoenix, Arizona to Silver City, New Mexico.
Like many prominent figures of the era, his road to power began in the military. Entertaining dreams of heroic exploits, a teenage Reavis twice enlisted in the confederate army, filled with romantic images from the Spanish novels his mother read to him in his youth. The realities of the American Civil War were a world away from such literary fancy, wholly menial when not horrifically violent.
He was, however, a quick study in the art of forgery, signing his commanding officer’s name on forms that allowed him to slip away from his post and spend time at home with his mother. Reavis grew so adapt that he soon developed an alternative income source forging signatures on forms for fellow soldiers. When the frequency of absences among his unit drew unwanted attention from the higher-ups, he had a final play and was granted a leave to get married to a fictional partner. He used his last bit of time off to surrender to Union forces.
His forgery skills would again come in handy not long after the war’s end. After bouncing around between retail jobs, Reavis opened a real estate office. Once again, false signatures began appearing on his documents for relatively innocuous reasons at first – effectively saving himself the headache of jumping through additional hoops to finalize incomplete paperwork. Within a few years, however, an encounter with a patent medicine salesman presented a far more lucrative outlet for his skillset.
In a previous life, George Willing was a respected physician. The product of a wealthy Philadelphia family, he would eventually flee town after catching heat for providing abortions. Making his way west, he was swept up in the Fifty-Niner gold rush that swallowed significant portions of the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Described in a contemporary report as a "good geologist and a most polished gentleman," Willing – who had previously claimed to have come up with the name Idaho, inspired by a woman he once knew – asserted ownership of a large Spanish land grant.
He had none of the proper paperwork to back up the claim. "When the trade was made, I had no paper on which to write the deed,” he said of the deal, “so I scoured the camp and found a sheet of greasy, pencil-marked camp paper upon which I wrote ... and as there were no justices or notaries present I had it acknowledged before witnesses."
After seeking out Reavis’ services, the pair created a trove of dubious paperwork to back up the claim. Traveling separately, Willing was found dead in Prescott, Arizona soon after filing his claim. The cause was never confirmed.
“The day after he had visited editor Beach at his office, he was found dead at the lodging house of Mr. R.E. Elliott, lying across the bed,” the Charles Beach-edited Miner paper reported. “The doctor had his faults, not the least of which was the habit of stretching the truth, but was on the whole a bold adventurer and intelligent man.”
Reavis soon departed for Mexico, forging documents detailing the history of the land grants, which had allegedly passed through the hands of the first two Barons of Arizona. A chance encounter on a train with a young house servant led to marriage. He sent his new wife to a convent school, where she received a training in upper class etiquette. Reavis would establish her as the last descendant of the second Baron, a claim backed up by a newly penned trove of old documents. The couple lived in decadence befitting wealthy owners of a massive stretch of the Southwest.
Newly inaugurated Benjamin Harrison soon made westward expansion a core component of his young presidency, and a surveyor general was appointed to explore the veracity of various land claims, including Reavis’. The government official pulled no punches with the release of “Adverse report of the Surveyor General of Arizona, Royal A. Johnson, upon the alleged Peralta Grant: a complete expose of its fraudulent character.” The report cited fictional timelines and a poor grasp of the Spanish language, among other glaring holes in the text.
“I therefore respectfully submit that this claim is entirely unsupported by any evidence,” it concluded, “and that it should be given no recognition by the government of the United States under the treaty between the Republic of Mexico and the United States.”
Reavis pled not guilty, and was sentenced to two years in prison, along with a $5,000 fine. He was released three months early for good behavior. Two years later, a San Francisco paper began serializing The Confessions of the Baron of Arizona. The intentionally cagey memoir opens with the declaration of his ambition to amass “greater wealth than that of a Vanderbilt.” He adds, however, “Now I am growing old and the thing hangs upon me like a nightmare until I am driven to make a clean breast of it all, that I may end my days.”
Soon after, Reavis moved on to an irrigation scheme, but ultimately failed to secure any funding from credulous individuals. The Baron of Arizona died penniless in Denver, Colorado.
Sources:
The Baron of Arizona by E.H. Cookridge
The bamboozling bogus Baron of Arizona https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2022/11/the-bamboozling-bogus-baron-of-arizona/
James Addison Reavis https://truewestmagazine.com/article/james-addison-reavis/