The Footnote

A fake Scottish lord conned Jay Gould out of nearly a million in Erie stock, then Minnesota sent a posse over the Canadian border to grab him back. Horace Greeley vouched for him. Jay Gould handed him $40,000 as pocket-money commission. When 'Lord Gordon-Gordon' skipped to a Manitoba farmhouse in 1872, a group of Minneapolis worthies — including a future governor — crossed the border, ba...

For twenty-six years he sold Philadelphia investors a motor that ran on vibration and willpower. When he died, they pulled up his floorboards. John Keely spent 1872 to 1898 charging Philadelphia's rich to watch his 'vibratory liberator' hum along on nothing but water and good intentions. Clara Bloomfield-Moore, the paper-magnate widow bankrolling him, poured roughly $100,000 into th...

For forty years, historians swore Sir Francis Drake himself nailed this brass plate to a California oak in 1579. A bunch of Berkeley faculty knew otherwise and kept laughing. In 1936 a chauffeur pulled a battered brass plate from the dirt near San Francisco Bay and Herbert Bolton, the most powerful historian in California, declared it Drake's lost claim on New Albion. The catch: Bolton's...

A Wapping butcher from the Australian outback walked into a London courtroom and swore he was the missing heir to one of England's oldest baronetcies. His mother believed him. Roger Tichborne drowned at sea in 1854, or so everyone assumed until a 25-stone Wagga Wagga butcher named Arthur Orton answered Lady Tichborne's newspaper ad and got a kiss on the forehead. The civil trial ran 102...

In 1817 a barefoot woman knocked on an English door, spoke a language no scholar could place, and bewitched Bristol society for ten weeks before a neighbor recognized her. She called herself Princess Caraboo of Javasu, fenced with a sword, climbed trees, prayed to Allah Tallah, and wrote in a script Oxford linguists pretended to decipher. She was Mary Baker, a cobbler's daughter from Devon wh...

P.T. Barnum took the stand against a Boston engraver who sold grieving mothers $10 photographs of their dead sons standing behind them. William Mumler charged Civil-War widows ten dollars a portrait and threw in a smudgy son, husband, or brother thrown in over their shoulder for free. The Tombs courtroom got Barnum testifying for the prosecution and a former New York Supreme Court justice swearing...