Found  /  Narrative

The Dentist Who Defrauded Two Governments—and a Historian, Part I

What happens when forged documents enter the historical record?

Washington, D.C., United States, Fall 1852

On an early fall day in 1852, Abner Doubleday strolled down F Street in Washington toward the home of Secretary of War Charles Magill Conrad. By this time, Doubleday—later known as the fictitious inventor of baseball—was a ten-year veteran of the U.S. Army. He wondered why the Secretary, who “scarcely has any special orders for lieutenants,” had summoned him specifically. Perhaps his gaze turned a block north, to the new Church of the Epiphany, where he had married Mary Hewitt earlier that year. Was the Secretary about to send him away from his new bride?

Doubleday soon learned that he was to travel. Conrad ordered him to investigate what the July 7, 1851 New York Herald suggested was, “if a fraud, one of the most splendid that has been perpetrated since the organization of the government.”1 He was to go to Mexico, where he had been an occupying soldier a few years before, to find out whether the silver mine for which U.S. citizen dentist George Gardiner had received $480,000 from the U.S. government actually existed.

College Park, Maryland, United States, 2018

While Doubleday first encountered Gardiner through his meeting with Conrad, I first made his acquaintance 167 years later and a few miles away, in the light-filled manuscript reading room of the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland. For several summers, while researching for my dissertation on U.S. citizens who moved to Mexico’s interior between 1821 and 1846 and working a full-time job, I took advantage of half-day summer Fridays to photograph 45 boxes of claim files that U.S. citizens filed against the Mexican government. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the U.S.-Mexican War, the United States agreed to assume $3.2 million of claims that U.S. citizens like Gardiner had filed against Mexico for compensation for a range of issues, from ship confiscations to unpaid loans and arrests.

Like many researchers trying to maximize archive time, I took a quick glance at each file to see if it was worth exploring further. This involved looking at the claimant’s memorial, or statement, to see if the person had lived in Mexico, versus merely traveling or trading there. Gardiner’s statement noted that he owned a mine in San Luís Potosí until Mexican soldiers destroyed his mine and expelled him just after the U.S.-Mexican War broke out. This made Gardiner’s file worth photographing before moving on to the next.