Before there was Mark Hofmann, there was “Jim the Penman.”
Jim – or James Townsend Saward – was an English barrister, active in the British law courts in the 1840s and ’50s. This legal gentleman had a profitable sideline as a forger of checks. He was even involved in the gold theft that formed the basis of Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery.
After Saward was convicted and transported to Australia, the nickname was bestowed on Emanuel Ninger, a New York counterfeiter who netted an estimated $50,000 profit in his short 1880s career. Continue reading “Jim the Penman” →
“Who’d ever think that Utah would stir the world so much? Who’d ever think the Mormons’d be widely known as such? I hardly dare to scribble, or such a subject touch, for all are talking of Utah.”
Mormons were fully aware of their prominence in the national press, as these lines from a popular folk song attest; they also knew that the more outlandish the report, the more the public was apt to believe it. Historians find ample proof of such public gullibility in Brigham Young’s incoming correspondence. Continue reading Brigham Young’s mailbag →
Where our past is never very long ago