The Land Office Conspiracy
A broken man returns to Tacoma to implicate prominent businessmen in a high-stakes scheme to forge property titles.
The sensational charge of stealing documents from the general land office in Washington D.C. for the purpose of securing title to nearly 200 acres of land worth approximately $250,000 in Tacoma has been revived. William Jameson, who escaped authorities last winter, was arrested in Victoria and brought back. At the marshal's office, Jameson appeared a wretched, broken-down man, both mentally and physically. He claimed that Littlejohn, a prominent Tacoma real estate man and banker, promised to pay him $2,000 for abstracting the papers. Jameson refused to say who performed the actual theft or who helped counterfeit the records in New York, but he implicated Elder and suggested that the documents vesting title to the land were forged. Jameson fled to British Columbia two weeks before the story broke, where he suffered a stroke that left his left side paralyzed. He claims he wants others to suffer for the scheme because he has been ruined by the business.
“I have suffered enough. I have destroyed myself mentally and physically in this business, and now I want some of the others to suffer some.”
Land speculation was the engine of 1890s Seattle and Tacoma, often fueled by 'paper title' schemes that bypassed federal oversight. This story captures the era's frantic, often criminal, race to secure waterfront and urban property before the city's economic boom leveled off.
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