SPEAKER_00 0:17

If history has a margin, this is where it lives. I'm Wendell Marshant, and this is the footnote. Headingly, Manitoba, summer 1873. A small farmhouse on the Assiniboyne River, perhaps 10 miles west of Fort Gary, which the locals were only just beginning to call Winnipeg. Inside, a man with a very carefully trimmed beard has been reading, or pretending to read, by lamplight. He calls himself Lord Gordon Gordon. He has been calling himself that in one variation or another for years. Somewhere between two and five of his aliases have been used up already, and one of them, in Scotland, cost a jeweler in Edinburgh a fortune in emeralds. The Edinburgh business was in 1868. Under yet another name, Herbert Hamilton, or something like it, he had walked into a firm on Princess Street, presented papers claiming an aristocratic bride and a substantial dowry, and left with roughly 25,000 pounds in loose stones. The Scotsman ran the swindler's description through the autumn of that year. No one who read the same description in New York three summers later connected it to the fair-haired Highland Lord at the Metropolitan. The door comes in. Five men from Minneapolis are on the other side of it. They have crossed the border without a warrant, without a writ, without a word to the Canadian authorities, and they are carrying revolvers. They gag Gordon Gordon, tie him with cord they've brought along for the purpose, throw him into a buckboard, and start driving south. Hard, for the international line, ninety odd miles away. They believe, or have been told, that if they can get him to Pembina, Dakota Territory, before the Manitoba Constabulary catches up, they can put him on a train to Minneapolis and settle the matter of the missing million dollars in their own courtroom. They are wrong about this. They are wrong about almost everything, and that is why we are here. To understand how five prominent Minnesotans came to be committing a felony in a foreign country, we have to go back roughly two years, to the spring of 1871, and to a man who, as far as anyone in America knew, had descended from a train in New York with the accent of a Highland laird and the manners of a very tired Duke. He presented himself as Lord Gordon Gordon of Aberdeen, an heir to enormous Highland estates. He was traveling, he said, to scout land in Minnesota. His tenants back home were being crowded off the moors. This was the tail end of the clearances, a piece of English language history most Americans knew only vaguely, and he intended to resettle them on the American prairie. He would need, he estimated, several hundred thousand acres. Perhaps more. He was prepared to buy the land in cash, provided the Northern Pacific and the Associated Land Agents dealt with him honestly. The New York Tribune, in its coverage that August, treated the news the way a small town society page treats a wedding announcement, uncritically, warmly, at length. Horace Greeley, the paper's proprietor, was seventy years old, sixteen months from his own death, and about to run for president as the Liberal Republican challenger to Grant. He had opinions on the Highlands, on immigration, on railroads, on nearly everything. He liked the sound of Lord Gordon Gordon. He liked the beard, the accent, the letters of introduction, which, we now know, were forged in London by a man Gordon Gordon had paid in advance. Here is the thing about Greeley. He was not a stupid man. He had built the Tribune from a single sheet into one of the most influential papers in the Republic. But he had a weakness, a productive weakness from a con man's perspective, for what he considered improving schemes. If you told Horace Greeley that you had come to America to save the poor of Scotland from starvation by planting them on the black soil prairie, he was already halfway to writing you a letter of introduction. Which is exactly what he did. The letter Greeley wrote was to Jay Gould. That name still means something. In 1871, it meant everything. Gould, along with Jim Fisk and Daniel Drew, had spent the previous three years wringing the Erie Railway dry, inflating its stock, watering it, running it as a private cash spigot. When the state tried to intervene, they simply bribed a legislature. When Cornelius Vanderbilt tried to buy them out, they printed more shares. Fisk was dead by the spring of 1872, shot on the staircase of the Grand Central Hotel in January in a squalid affair reported in every paper east of the Mississippi. Drew was ruined and would die insolvent. Gould was alone at the top of the Erie and vulnerable, for the first time, to the kind of shareholder revolt that a well-placed European syndicate might actually deliver or prevent. By the summer of 1872, Gould was president of the Erie, holder of the largest single block of its stock, and, depending on the mood of the New York Times, which by then loathed him, either a titan of finance or a species of well-tailored parasite. Gould read the letter from Greeley. Then he read a second letter from a New York broker who was, as it happens, another Gordon Gordon accomplice. Then he sat down with Gordon Gordon himself in a suite at the Metropolitan Hotel on Broadway and listened. Gordon Gordon's story to Gould was ingenious. He represented, he claimed, a syndicate of European aristocrats who together controlled 60,000 shares of Erie. This syndicate, dissatisfied with Gould's management, was on the verge of joining a shareholder revolt against him. Gould, at that moment, was fighting for his life against exactly such a revolt. His enemies in the Erie boardroom were counting votes daily. If Gordon Gordon could be persuaded to stay loyal and to bring his aristocratic friends along, Gould's presidency was safe. If not, it was over by Christmas. Gould understood the transaction. He offered Gordon Gordon what a later prosecutor would call, indirectly and in summation, not on the paper's editorial page, a bribe of extraordinary size. Roughly a million dollars in a combination of Erie common stock, eerie preferred, cash, and negotiable notes. In exchange, the syndicate would vote with Gould at the next stockholders' meeting. Gordon Gordon took the papers, took the cash, took the notes, and walked out of the Metropolitan Hotel a rich man. He then did something that ought to have tipped Gould off immediately. He began, quietly, to sell. The stock hit the market in small parcels, a few hundred shares here, a few hundred there, through brokers who did not know each other and could not have described the seller if pressed. The New York Herald, in its financial column that spring, noted the unusual softness in Erie without being able to name a cause. The Times, more suspicious as always, wondered aloud whether some large holder was quietly liquidating. The paper stopped short of naming names. It did not yet know the name to give. By the time Gould realized what was happening, Gordon Gordon had converted a substantial portion of his stock into cash, and, more importantly, had begun to disappear. Gould did what men like Gould do. He sued. The suit, filed in New York in the spring of 1872, alleged fraud, misrepresentation, conspiracy, the usual menu, and demanded the return of the stock and the cash. The trial opened in the New York Superior Court that March and ran for the better part of two weeks. Gould testified for the better part of two days, at length, and, in the assessment of the Herald's court reporter, badly, betraying the impatience of a man unused to being cross-examined by anyone he had not previously bribed. Gordon Gordon, called to the witness stand, gave a performance so composed that the courtroom reporter for the Tribune, Greeley's own paper, which by this point was in the awkward position of having introduced the defendant to the plaintiff, described him as bearing himself with the calm of a man who felt no fear of the outcome. He was, in fairness, entitled to feel that way. The bail was set at a sum he could easily meet from the proceeds of the fraud itself. He met it. He left the courthouse, and within days he had left New York, then Minnesota, then the United States entirely, and set up a comfortable residence in the newly organized province of Manitoba on the Assiniboine River at Headingley. Manitoba, in 1872, was a place where Gould's writ did not run. Extradition between the United States and British North America, this was four years before the Treaty of Washington's fugitive offenders provisions had fully bedded down, was an uncertain, slow, and diplomatically fraught process. Fraud, in particular, was not clearly an extraditable offense. If you had committed murder, the crown would send you back. If you had merely stolen a million dollars from Jay Gould, the Crown was, at best, apathetic. The Minnesotans were not apathetic. Here we have to introduce our second rank characters, because the men who eventually crossed into Manitoba were not agents of Gould. Gould, by then, had written the loss off and moved on to other frauds. The men who came for Gordon Gordon were Minnesotans who felt personally aggrieved. A Minneapolis flower merchant, later sent to Congress, a state politician, and three others whose names appeared in the Minneapolis Tribune's coverage of the following month with varying degrees of embarrassment. The flower merchant was Lauren Fletcher, who would later serve four terms in the House. There was a Minneapolis alderman named Michael Hoy. There was an oil man. There was a young attorney whose name the Tribune rendered differently in every dispatch. And there was a private detective they had hired in St. Paul, whose real name may never have been the one on his hotel register. Their grievance, as best I can reconstruct it from the papers of July 1873, was that Gordon Gordon, before the Erie affair, had also swindled several of them personally in the earlier Minnesota land scheme. Small sums by Gould's standards, 20,000 here, 30,000 there, but personal and unrecovered, and, in the arithmetic of prairie honor, unforgotten. They tried first the legal route. They petitioned the government of Minnesota. They petitioned Washington. They received the standard courteous non-answer from the State Department. Extradition was under discussion, matters were delicate, please be patient. This did not satisfy them. So, on the evening of the 2nd of July 1873, I have the date from the St. Paul Pioneers coverage the following week, a party of five armed Minnesotans crossed the border into Manitoba, drove to Headingley, forced the door of the house Gordon Gordon was renting, gagged him, tied him, and started south. They were caught about 20 miles from Winnipeg by a detachment of Manitoba constables and returned under arrest to Fort Gary. The Canadian authorities were, in the phrase the Manitoba Free Press used the following week, less than amused. The Minnesotans were charged with kidnapping, a capital offense at that time and place, and locked in the Fort Gary Jail to await trial. The Fort Gary Jail, in the summer of 1873, was a plank and clapboard building with a single stove and a barred window looking onto the parade ground. The lieutenant governor of Manitoba, Alexander Morris, was a lawyer by training and a temperate man by disposition, and he spent much of that July drafting careful telegrams to Ottawa explaining that the province could not, in fact, simply release five American felons because a state governor a thousand miles away had lost his temper on the front page of a newspaper. This is where the story stops being about a Scottish nobleman and starts being about how easily two friendly countries can walk to the edge of a war over a well-dressed thief. The reaction in Minnesota was, I am choosing this word carefully, hysterical. Not the men themselves, who were quiet and in captivity, thoughtful. The reaction in the state was hysterical. The Minneapolis Tribune ran editorials day after day demanding the release of the prisoners and denouncing Canada in language that ought to have embarrassed a paper of its standing. The governor of Minnesota threatened to raise the state militia and march north to free them by force. Volunteers, several thousand of them by some accounts in the papers of late July, actually signed up. Trains were quietly readied at St. Paul. President Grant, this was still the first Grant administration, not the disastrous second, was informed. Grant's Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, sat down and did what Hamilton Fish did best, which was to send a very polite, very firm cable to London. The situation, as reported in the New York Times on the 21st of July, was this. Five American citizens were in a Canadian jail on charges of kidnapping a man who had defrauded a substantial portion of the New York financial establishment. Minnesota was proposing to invade Manitoba to free them. Canada, which was in 1873, only six years old as a confederation and still finding its footing, was in the awkward position of appearing to protect a fugitive swindler against the wounded honor of American businessmen. The British ambassador in Washington, Sir Edward Thornton, was riding to London twice a day. The Manitoba government, quietly, wanted the whole thing to go away. So did Fish. So, eventually, did the Minneapolis grandees themselves, who had been in the Fort Gary jail long enough to appreciate the appeal of a diplomatic solution. A deal was struck. The Minnesotans were released on bail. Bail posted, in a detail the Manitoba Free Press recorded with some satisfaction, by a private subscription in Winnipeg from citizens who preferred a peaceful resolution to a war. In exchange, the United States government undertook to press extradition against Gordon Gordon through proper channels. Which is where, if this were a novel, the story would resolve with Lord Gordon Gordon on trial in New York. It is not a novel. The extradition process crawled forward through the autumn of 1873 and into the spring of 1874. Manitoba magistrates heard evidence. The Crown ruled at various points, both for and against extradition. Appeals were filed, motions were entered. By the summer of 1874, Gordon Gordon had been in Manitoba for nearly two years and was, by all accounts, comfortable. He had a housekeeper, he had a small library, he had the manners, and by then very likely the belief, of a Scottish gentleman living in temporary exile. Winnipeg's society in that first winter was small enough that a plausible Scotsman with letters of introduction from a New York broker could reach its center in a week. He dined with Hudson's Bay Company Factors. He was received by the Anglican bishop. The free press, at that stage, referred to him with the deference reserved for genuine title. On the first of August, 1874, I take the date from the Manitoba Free Press of the following morning, a Winnipeg constable arrived at the Headingley House with what would prove to be the final extradition warrant. Gordon Gordon received him at the door with the courtesy he had always shown. He asked the constable to wait in the parlor while he retrieved certain papers from his room. He went upstairs. He closed the door of his bedroom. He wrote a short note. And then he shot himself. He was, at that point, believed to be no older than about forty. His real name was, most probably, some variation of Hubert Hamilton, or possibly something else entirely. No one has ever established it with certainty. What passed for his estate was inventoried, sold, and largely absorbed by legal fees. His body was buried in the Kildonan Cemetery outside Winnipeg. It is, so far as I know, still there. The Gould stock was never recovered. The letters he had traded on, Greeley's letter of introduction, the forged Highland references, were pieced together over the following years by Pinkerton agents, whose reports to the New York Papers in the autumn of 1874 and the winter of 1875 provided most of what we now know about the man's methods. Greeley himself had died in November of 1872, six months after losing the presidency to Grant and about eight months before the kidnapping. He never learned that the Scottish laird he had championed was a common criminal, or that his own letter had been the passport that gave Jay Gould's fortune away. I keep coming back to Greeley. Not Gould, who deserved it. Not the Minnesotans, who were fools but recognizable fools. Not even Gordon Gordon, who was competent at his trade and no more interesting as a human being than a picked lock. Greeley is the character in this story who breaks my heart a little. He wanted to believe. He was a man who had spent his professional life arguing that America ought to be a place where the poor of Europe could come and remake themselves. And here, in the shape of a well-groomed imposter with a plausible accent, was that argument made flesh? Highland tenants, cleared from their glens by absentee English landlords, resettled on the free soil of Minnesota by a Christian nobleman who understood their language. It was almost too good to be true. It was, of course, exactly too good to be true. Greeley never asked the second question. He never asked, because the first answer was so satisfying. The papers of that summer are full of denunciations of Gordon Gordon. The papers of that summer are full of denunciations of Gould, who was Easy to denounce. The papers of that summer are noticeably quiet about Greeley, in part because he was newly and inconveniently dead, and in part because to admit that the great Horace Greeley had been played would have been to admit that his readership, the vast, earnest, self-improving readership of the Tribune, had also been played, and would have been happy to be played, and might be played again tomorrow by anyone with the right beard and the right letter. We don't like to think of ourselves as marks. We like to think of ourselves as skeptics, who occasionally, generously, extend the benefit of the doubt to promising newcomers. This is the same thing, described more flatteringly. There is one more scene worth putting on the record, because it did not make the New York papers, but the Manitoba Free Press covered it with what I take to be affection. About six months before his death, Gordon Gordon, who by then was a fixture of Winnipeg society, invited to dinners, consulted on questions of estate management, attended a small ball at the Fort Gary Hotel. He was reported to have danced well. He was reported to have spoken warmly of the Highlands. He was reported by one witness whose account survives in the free press of that February, to have grown briefly emotional when the fiddler played an air he identified as one his mother had sung to him as a child. He had no mother, in the sense he meant. He had no Highlands. The air, whatever it was, he had probably picked up in a public house somewhere in London. And yet the emotion, by every account, was real. He had lived the lie long enough that some part of him had begun to believe it. This is, in my experience of reading these old papers, the most reliable single fact about long-running frauds. The people who commit them do not, in the end, keep a careful distance between the character and themselves. They collapse the distance. They become the man they invented, or as much of him as circumstance requires. When Gordon Gordon shot himself at Headingley in August of 1874, it is not obvious to me that the man pulling the trigger fully remembered his own real name. The Minnesotans went home, quietly in the autumn. Fletcher went into politics, and in the years that followed represented a district that had once been perfectly willing to invade Canada on his behalf. The affair fed into the negotiations that eventually produced a supplementary extradition convention between Britain and the United States, in which fraud was, at last, named plainly. And the phrase the Gordon-Gordon business in the Minneapolis papers of the following decade became a shorthand, used dryly and by people who had learned something, for a certain kind of expensive civic embarrassment that respectable men had agreed among themselves not to repeat. It is a story told to someone who wants the story to be true. And the best con men, in the end, want it to be true almost as badly as their victims do.