The Con Man Who Conned a Town
Before he was caught, a master swindler known as 'Gen. Ward' charmed the elite of Spokane Falls and eloped with a banker's daughter.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Herald recently published an account of the exposure of General Ward, who stumped the east for Harrison and proved to be Arlington Buckingham Wadsworth, an accomplished scoundrel who swindled the people of Spokane Falls and ran away with the daughter of a prominent banker of that city. Ward fled to Europe when he learned a detective was on his track. His history includes elaborate scams across Philadelphia, Washington D.C., the Confederate capital, New York, Providence, and New Orleans, where he once established a private bank only to bankrupt it. He moved through high society under various aliases, consistently leaving behind a trail of unpaid debts, stolen jewelry, and broken hearts.
“The man whom you know as Gen. A. B. Ward has a history that can hardly be equaled in the criminal annals of this or any other country.”
Long-con artists have always haunted the American frontier, trading on the desperate optimism of boom towns. This 1889 account of 'Gen. Ward' serves as a reminder that the 'get-rich-quick' schemes that built the West were frequently facilitated by charismatic impostors who leveraged local trust to manufacture authority.
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