STEALING ABRAHAM LINCOLN

 

I would say, to use the criminal vernacular, that Big Jim Kinealy went 'Chinese angle' when the 'buttons' nipped his 'boodler'.

Benjamen F. Boyd was the Midwest’s foremost boodler, and maybe the finest engraver of counterfeit printing plates outside of the U.S. Treasury Department. Boyd’s queer fin was so good that by 1875 there were more than 300,000 examples floating about, maybe half of all five dollar notes in circulation. The treasury stopped issuing legitimate fins out of the Chicago branch entirely.

Then, in October, the Secret Service descended upon the little Mississippi river town of Fulton, Illinois and before Ben Boyd could slip across the railroad bridge to Iowa, slapped the bracelets on him right in front of his outraged wife. And that left Big Jim squarely behind the eight ball.

Big Jim owned a stable in St. Louis, but that was just his dodge. He was “a born crook” and the high pillow to hundreds of finders, passers, runners, smashers, bindle stiffs, butter and egg men and fake-a-loo artists, in short everyone and anyone who passed the queer soft on to unsuspecting marks. So with Ben doing a decade in the Joliet caboose (above) you would guess that Big Jim would to be looking for a new slant. Instead he came up with a plan that was a real bunny; he would steal the body of Abraham Lincoln, and exchange it for the live body of Benjamin Boyd - plus $200,000, just as an afterthought.

Late in January of 1876 Big Jim reached out to one of his Chicago passers, Ben Sheridan, who was looking for a vacation, after getting pinched and jumping bail.  Ben was a cool customer and played the Jasper in his fancy suit with a full beard. Big Jim figured him as the man who knew just how far he could push the bulge.

So he set Sheridan and his four man crew of goons up in a tavern in Springfield, Illinois (above), complete with a full liquor stock, and they spent a couple of months just taking the lay of the land. They played tourists at Lincoln’s tomb in the Oak Ridge Cemetery several times and it looked like an eggs-in-the-coffee job to them.

The rectangular granite monument sat atop the highest point in the cemetery. Two curving, confusing corridors met in the center of the marble monument at two rooms. In one room rested the body of Mary Todd Lincoln. In the other rested the Abraham Lincoln's sarcophagus.

The monument itself was surrounded by tall oaks that would hide any nighttime visitors. The cemetery was two miles outside of town, the room containing the sarcophagus had but a single padlock on its gate, the groundskeeper lived elsewhere, there were no bulls on duty at night and questioning a custodian revealed that the casket itself had been sealed with simple plaster of Paris.

By the end of June things looked so Jake to Sheridan that he took a night off to relax. And that was when he stuck his foot in it. Drunk on corn in a local "can house" (above), Sheridan boasted to a chippy that on the night of July the third he was going “steal old Lincoln’s bones”. Well, the chippy called copper, which is to say she notified the local bulls, and in the morning the buttons paid a visit to Sheridan’s establishment just to let him know the caper was blown. Big Jim was not happy. He repossessed the liquor stock, locked the tavern tight and ordered the whole crew back to Chicago.

The truth was, Big Jim might have been lucky things went adrift at this point, because when John Carroll Power, the custodian, was interviewed later he described in detail the entire gang and offered the opinion that Sheridan was “of more intelligence “than all four goons “combined”, but “of exceedingly depraved morals”. Obviously Mr. Power was an observant judge of character and a powerful witness.

That fall, in the back room of The Hub, a saloon at 294 West Madison Street in Chicago, Big Jim met with his second choice of conspirators; Terrence Mullen (above), the bar owner, and a passer named Jack Hughes (below).

But Big Jim decided that this time they needed an actual resurrectionist, a man familiar with the problems of body snatching. And he was lucky enough that just such a man had recently started hanging out at The Hub, an ex-sailor and life long bundle stiff and body snatcher by the name of Louis C. Swegles. Swegles knew the right people and they seemed to know him, so Big Jim brought him into the plot, now laid on for election night, “a da-ned fine elegant time to do it”, as Jack Hughes said.

They caught the night train for Springfield and arrived at six on the morning of November seventh, and checked into the St. Charles Hotel. In their luggage they brought a can of blasting powder, a six foot fuse, a small file and a saw. They gang caught some sleep, leaving a call for 10:30 A.M. After breakfast Louis Swegles and Jack Hughs paid a visit to the monument. Hughes assured his fellows they wouldn’t need their tools to open the locked gate on the tomb. “I could fall against it and open it,” he boasted. Terry Mullen wanted to be certain, so that afternoon he stole an axe from a hardware store.

About nine o’clock that night they slipped into the looming silent monument. While Swegle held the lantern, Mullen began to saw through the padlock that Hughes had shown such disrespect for. And almost immediately the saw blade broke. Mullen was reduced to working the padlock with the file. It felt like it was going to take forever.

Finally the padlock fell apart and the three then prepared to attack the sarcophagus itself. Mullen wanted to use a sledge hammer but Swegles pointed to the copper dowels that were all that held the lid on. Having removed the lid (the open sarcophagus, above) they slid the President’s cedar covered lead coffin out. Swegles handed the lantern to Hughes and slipped back outside to bring the wagon up to the service door.

After waiting a few moments for Swegles to reappear, Hughes and Mullen decided it would be better if they waited outside. They were standing under an oak tree a hundred feet away from the service door when they heard the crack of a gunshot echoing from inside the monument. Being experienced thieves, they ran for it. Outside the cemetery walls they boarded the last streetcar for the night,  bound for downtown Springfield, and heard more shots and shouting behind them. Hughes and Mullen did not return to their hotel, but split up and made their separate ways out of Springfield on foot.

By 9 November Mullen was back in Chicago, tending bar at the Hub as if nothing had happened. Two days later Swegles reappeared with a harrowing tale of having escaped the bulls by the skin of his teeth. A week afterward Hughes showed as well. They were all thinking themselves very lucky to have escaped the Bulls.

But just as Mullen and Hughes started to ask themselves what had gone wrong, that was when the bulls swept them up. Both Hughes and Mullen were arrested and transported back to Springfield.  Swegles was not arrested because he had been a stoolie for the Treasury bulls from the very beginning. From the second he had been asked to join the scheme, the bulls had been kept apace at every step of the plan.  Swegles had not gone for the wagon, he and alerted the bulls waiting in tomb to make the arrest. But instead they had ended up fighting a gun battle with themselves in the dark. And Big Jim? Well, he never liked to be close to the actual crime, and immediately made himself scarce. The last he was heard of, Big Jim was heading for New Mexico territory.

Oddly enough there was no law in Illinois against grave robbing, so Hughes and Mullen were convicted only of the theft of Lincoln’s coffin, value set at $75.00. They were sentenced to one year each at hard labor and then disappeared from the pages of history. Big Jim would be convicted in 1880 of a land fraud in New Mexico Territory, and end up serving his time in the Joliet prison, the same institution once occupied by his onetime printer, Ben Boyd.

As for the corpse of President Abraham Lincoln, the unwilling player in this farce, Mr. Power had him secretly reburied in the basement of the tomb. And there he resided in obscurity until 1901 when Lincoln's son, Robert, had his father's coffin reburied. But this time it was placed inside a steel cage, lowered into a new 10 foot vault dug into the Illinois soil, into which was poured several tons of concrete and then the original stone sarcophagus was placed on top of it all, making it very unlikely anyone would ever try to steal Lincoln's corpse, ever again. And as far as any one knows, they haven't.

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EARTH MOVEMENTS

 

I want to end this story at a specific moment:  Monday, 12 May, 2008, at exactly 2.28 pm local time. The place is 942 miles west southwest of Beijing, in the capital of China's Sichuan province. Chengdu was a modern city of sky scrappers and ancient temples, universities and industry, home to 7 million people.  And one and one half seconds later almost all of that was destroyed. At the end.

The earth underfoot jerked and vibrated for four interminable minutes. Office and apartment towers were whipsawed back and forth until they crumbled. Eighty percent of the structures in Chengdu collapsed.

Some 90,000 humans were killed during those four minutes, including five thousand  three hundred children, most killed when their schools collapsed. Five million in all were left homeless. 

As such things are measured, the event was recorded as a 7.9 on the modified Richter scale, "Very Destructive" on the European Macro-Seismic scale,  and "Extreme" on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale. The shaking produced 200,000 landslides across 170,000 square miles spread across three Chinese provinces. That was the end, which was a product of the middle of this story.

Some 66 million years ago, about the time the Chicxulub impact killed off the dinosaurs,  a 140 mile long single cohesive slab of magma was exposed near the surface of the Euro-Asian tectonic plate.  It cooled to 850 degrees Fahrenheit so quickly it's crystals were locked rigidly together. Over eons it was then buried under layer upon layer of sediment, until it was 12 miles below the surface.

Then, beginning about 10,000 years ago, new pressure from the north and west against the Chengdu Plain, bulldozed  up "...one of the world's most remarkable continental escarpments",  the 250 mile long Longmen Shan, or "Dragons Gate", Mountain range. (above). 

This northeast by southwest escarpment piled up 16,000 feet high over less than 30 miles of width, directly above the long buried slab, while the pressure from the northwest grew and grew.

And when that 140 mile long slab of bedrock could no longer withstand the pressure, it snapped like a twig, fracturing at exactly 2:28pm and one and one half seconds, 2008, releasing the equivalent of 25,000 nuclear bombs, its destructive waves racing outward through the surrounding bedrock at 7,200 miles an hour, covering the 50 miles to Chengdu in one second , destroying that city and every town and village  in between. 

What was squeezing the Dragon's Gate escarpment upward against the Chengdu Plain was the rising of the Tibetan Plateau, described by Andrew Alden, of About.com as what maybe   "...the largest and highest in all of geological history…."  It is an area five times the size of modern day France. 

The average elevation of the Plateau is 14,800 feet above sea level. It's 46,000 glaciers are the third largest supply of fresh water on the planet, which gives birth to seven of the world's greatest rivers;  the 2,000 mile long Indus in Pakistan, the 1,600 mile long Ganges in India, the 1,400 mile long Irrawaddy in Myanmar , the 2,700 mile long Mekong of Thailand and Vietnam, the 3,900 mile long Yangtse and 3,400 mile long Yellow rivers, both in China. 

The Tibetan Plateau has bulged because the entire Indian tectonic plate, 6,000 miles long by  2,000 miles wide and sixty-two miles thick, encompassing four billion six hundred thousand square miles of rock and earth has been slamming into the Eurasian plate at a speed of about 2 inches a year for the last fifty-seven million years.  

Like the crush zone on a automobile,  the front bumper of India has crumpled and thickened on impact, producing first the Karakoram - or black gravel - mountains (above, center left) and secondly the Himalayan - or abode of snow - mountain range, including Mount Everest (above, left center). And that is why there are fossils of ocean creatures just below the peak of the highest mountain on earth.

This collision was so fast it forced the thinner and thus lighter Indian plate to subduct under the Tibetan Plateau, shoving in up rather than aside. 

It appears the Indian plate  did not "drift" into a collision with the Eurasian plate, but rather was pulled north 3,700 miles by two smaller plates carrying volcanic island arcs which India ran over. As those plates were shoved into the mantle they pulled the Indian plate northward, speeding it up in the process.   

By about 550 million years ago some 20% of the earth's surface - 39 millions square miles - was joined together into a supercontinent called Gondwana (above). It included the tectonic cratons of South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia,  Zeelandia, Arabia and India (with the Red Dot).  This chunk of the dry surface remain joined until the start of the Jurassic Age -  about 180 million years ago - when heat trapped beneath it's thick surface finally drove the individual cratons to break apart.   

And like the last act of our story, the first act began with an earthquake, some 180 million years ago along the border of the Madagascar plate and the Indian Plate, the very first moment they began to pull apart from Gondwana, some 3,500 miles south of where the story was to end, along the southern border of the Eurasian plate. Millions were thus condemned to suffer through the great Chengdu Earthquake of 12 May, 2008, because of the break up of Godwana 180 million years earlier. 

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TOMBSTONES Chapter Nineteen

 

I know what Billy Clanton (above) was thinking when the shooting stopped. When photographer C.S. Fly bent down to take the empty Colt revolver from his hand, Billy Clanton told him, "Give me more cartridges". A few moments later, when they lifted the 19 year old's bleeding body he cried out in pain, "They have murdered me. I have been murdered."  Of course, he was trying to murder somebody, when he was.

Inside the Harwood House, after Dr. Gibberson softened his pain with morphine, Billy was boastful again, threatening Wyatt - "If only I could get my teeth into that son-of-a-bitch's throat, I'd die happy." But when he realized he was slipping into the gentle night, Billy ordered the gawkers to, "Go away and let me die." But Billy was the appointed Hector of Tombstone, the last hero of the melodrama, and his public was not to be denied.

The funeral of Billy and the McLaury brothers was staged - and that is the right word - the very next day, a cold gray Thursday, 27 October, 1881. Andrew Jackson "Andy" Ritter propped the three caskets up in the front window of Ritter and Ream City Undertakers, behind a sign which read "Murdered on the Street of Tombstone" so they could be photographed (above). The Democratic Tombstone Nugget that day cried that “Three Men" had been "Hurled Into Eternity In the Duration of a Moment.” 

And at about 4:00pm - fashionably late - the 3 hearses, 22 carriages and 300 mourners,  all led by the volunteer firemen (above),  made their way to the Old Cemetery - it would not be called Boot Hill until the arrival of 20th century tourists. 

 Some 2,000 watched the procession, and even Cochise County Republicans were uneasy with the violence which had exploded on the streets of Tombstone..

It was lucky for the Democrats that Ike Clanton, the Paris in this Cow Boy Iliad, the man most responsible for the gun fight, ran away and lived.  Four days later Ike filed murder charges against the Earps and Holliday.  Older brother William McLaury, who was a practicing lawyer, came up from Texas to help prosecute the case. And a New York Democratic editorial cartoonist depicted wild man Virgil Earp, two guns blazing, trying to herd Arizona into statehood with violence (above).  In fact the shoot out helped delay Arizona statehood until Valentines Day, 1912 - making it the last of the 48 contiguous states to join the union.

The one clearly disinterested witness at the Earp's trial, a tuberculosis sufferer named Henry F. Sills, who was a fireman on the Atcheson, Topeka and the Sante Fe Railroad and had only arrived in Tombstone the day before.  He supported the Earps in all important details. The hearing judge decided the Earps had done nothing illegal. But like all violence, the shoot out did not merely end. There were aftershocks.

Half an hour before midnight, on Wednesday, 28 December, 1881, Virgil Earp (above) was shot from ambush while walking into the Cosmopolitan Hotel.  Dr. Goodfellow had to remove 4 inches of Virgil's left humerus, making him a cripple for life. The suspected shooters were Phin and Ike Clanton, Cow Boys Johnny Barnes, Johnny Ringo, Hank Swilling and Pete Spence. Although arrested, all 6 were released on $1,500 bail. No trial was ever held.

Ten minutes before eleven on the evening of Saturday, 18 March, 1882,  Morgan Earp (above) was shot through the spine while playing billiards. He died soon after. A coroner's jury would conclude the assassins were Pete Spence, Frank Stillwell, Frederick Bode and Florentino "Indian Charlie" Cruz. Convinced the Republican Party had abandoned his family, and the local Democratic courts would never punish the Cow Boys the Earps had been sent to Tombstone to breakup, Wyatt gathered a small band of supporters, and rode out to punish those who had injured his loved ones. In true epic tradition, it would be called his vendetta ride.

It began the night of Monday, 20 March, 1882. The wounded Virgil Earp, his wife and Morgan's widow boarded a Southern Pacific train to take Morgan's body to California for burial. The next morning, between the railroad tracks, the little dandy, Frank Stillwell (above), was found so full of lead the coroner described his corpse as "the worst shot up man I ever saw." Frank was the first. 

Indian Charlie died second, on 23 March. And on 24 March, Johnny Barnes was shot to death, along with William "Curley Bill" Brocius (above)  at Iron Springs, in the Whitestone Mountains, northeast of Tombstone. All of them were presumably murdered by Wyatt Earp, in revenge.

John "Johnny Ringo" Peters, so called "King of  the Cow Boys"  evidently committed suicide in July of 1882. 

Wanted for rustling, loudmouth, alcoholic Issac "Ike" Clanton was killed while avoiding arrest in 1887.  His elder brother, Phin Clanton,  served 17 months in the Yuma Territorial prison, also for rustling. He died in 1906. 

The ex-Texas Ranger and stage robber, Pete Spence (above),  aka Elliot Larkin Ferguson,  also did 18 months in Yuma, but for manslaughter. In 1910 he married Phin Clanton's widow, and died in 1914. Thus the villains of Tombstone.

The subterranean towers of this Ilium   -  the mines of Tombstone - were drowned in 1887 after fires destroyed the pumps that kept them workable, just about the same time the price of silver plummeted. Fire also destroyed Fly's Boarding House and the Harwood house as well. 

The dawning 20th century made copper the new gold, and by 1929 the Copper Queen mine in Bisbee drew the Cochise County seat there, leaving Tombstone to fade into the Sonora desert. During the 1930's Arizona politicians tried to kill the town by using New Deal money to "improve" Fremont Street, plowing over the site of the shoot out  (above) and obliterating the history. But Tombstone refused to die.

Tuberculosis killed 36 year old John Henry "Doc" Holliday (above), in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, in November of 1887.  He died alone, in the company of a hired nurse. 

Almost all of the stories of robberies and murders attributed to Doc Holliday and the Earps originated with John Harris Behan (above), the corrupt sheriff of Cochise County. When the mines failed, Johnny moved on, leaving behind debts and missing funds. He was the brutal superintendent of the Yuma Prison for 2 years, stealing an estimated $50,000. Always a Democratic appointee and always corrupt, by the turn of the century he was in Washington, D.C., but quickly returned to the Southwest. He died in Tucson in 1912, of heart failure brought on by 30 years of syphilis, which he had contracted in Tombstone. Like most villains, he was usually guilty of the very sins he attributed to others.

The Southern Pacific Railroad provided a California job for the handicapped Virgil Earp, and supported him until he died of his wounds on 19 October, 1905. 

Wyatt Earp died of a urinary tract infection in January of 1929, at the age of 80. 

His second common law wife, Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, died on 20 December, 1944. Neither of them suffered from syphilis. But like most gamblers "Sadie" died broke. Her funeral was paid for by silent movie cowboy William S. Hart, and Hollywood theater owner Sid Grauman. Thus the heroes of the Tombstone saga.

Between 1860, when Frederick Brunckow discovered silver ore along the banks of the San Pedro River, to 1890, when the mines drowned, something around $85 million dollars worth of silver was harvested from the black veins around Tombstone, Arizona. Figuring in the efforts of those who fed and entertained the miners, treated their wounds, physical and emotional, and buried their bodies, Tombstone's silver fulfilled thousands of dreams and millions of nightmares. Those who died in the effort in this desert would have died someplace else, at some other time. But this is where they died, and this was when, because the earth cracked here long before humans ever set eyes upon the place.

And asking why their tombstones were erected here, may not be worth the effort.

But nothing that happened in Tombstone was an accident, anymore than the way rocks crack along molecular lines is an accident, or the way greed drives humans to murder is an accident. But of the two ways to get rich, the fastest is to not bother with reason, and simply grab anything and everything you can. Reason is far slower to show a profit,  but it makes you far richer, and for far longer. As they said in the saloons and brothels along Allen Street,  "Name your poison, stranger."

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