A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (15 page)

Time and disappointment had not diminished Parker's voice of righteous indignation, and as if harking back to when the judge's sentences were final, the Supreme Court rejected Casharego's appeal. A month after the execution, the Western District's jurisdiction over the Indian Territory ended. Soon after that, on November 17, 1896, the Hanging Judge died at age fifty-eight. “I am glad to have the honor of knowing this alleged cruel judge,” a reporter wrote shortly before Parker's death. “It is darkly, indeed, the press and people view him through the glass of distance.”

The elderly lady made her way from the sparsely furnished flat she rented in Hoboken to the ferry that would take her to New York. Beneath her faded, outdated black dress were newspapers she used as leg warmers and a revolver she carried for protection. Upon docking, she rode a streetcar to the Broadway offices of the Chemical National Bank, where she tended to her financial affairs. It was a routine that rarely varied. Sometimes she carried a pail of dry oatmeal to which she would later add water and heat over a radiator for lunch. Other days she ate at a local restaurant and, almost without fail, haggled over the price. She never tipped.

“Her appearance would never cause the uninitiated to think she was anything more than an old fashioned woman of moderate means and simple tastes,” one newspaper reported. “Yet, if money is power, this same staid looking person is one of the most powerful human beings in the country.”

Hetty Robinson Green was indeed the richest woman in America, and perhaps the world. With a vast real estate and railroad empire, her fortune rivaled that of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Astor, and Carnegie. Yet while those giants of finance and industry gave the Gilded Age its name with their lavish spending, Hetty Green's penuriousness was legendary. Here was a woman, wealthy enough to have rescued New York City from financial ruin, who once spent hours in search of a missing two-cent stamp. Her real estate holdings stretched across the continent, yet she lived in near squalor and dressed in such shabby, old-fashioned garb that people dubbed her “the Witch of Wall Street.” Her meanness with money was rivaled only by her genius for making it.

It was a fortune built on a rich inheritance. Hetty's father, Edward Mott Robinson, had grown wealthy in whaling and shipping, and it was at his feet that she learned the fundamentals of finance. “When quite a child I was required to read reports of the stock markets and of various business transactions to my father who would carefully explain to me those things I did not understand,” Hetty told
Harper's Bazaar
in 1900. “I was obliged to keep a strict account of personal and household expenses. All these things were most useful in forming the mind for business responsibilities when it became necessary to assume them.” When he died in 1865 Edward Robinson left his daughter a large fortune and an enduring philosophy. “My father taught me never to owe anyone anything,” she said. “Not even a kindness.”

Hetty also stood to inherit a significant amount of money from her late mother's side of the family in the person of her invalid aunt Sylvia. She was determined not to see one dime of it wasted. When Sylvia decided at one point to put an addition on her home to house the staff required to take care of her, Hetty went ballistic. The young heiress, who saw the addition as an extravagant misuse of
her
money, dropped to the floor in protest and, according to one servant on the scene, “cried and boo-hooed the night out.” Her snit lasted for weeks; as she wrote in a letter, “It will take me two years at least to get over the shock.”

As offensive as the addition was to Hetty's miserly sensibilities, she was in for an even bigger jolt when Aunt Sylvia died and left a portion of her estate to her caretakers, as well as to various civic and charitable organizations. Hetty believed she was entitled to every penny and sued to have Sylvia's will overturned. Though she lost the celebrated case—during which she produced a codicil to the will supporting her claims, with Aunt Sylvia's allegedly forged signature fixed upon it—she was still left a very wealthy woman. In time she would make herself infinitely richer.

Both her father's and her aunt's estates were held in trust, which galled Hetty to no end, but the income they produced was substantial and allowed her ample opportunities for investment. She started buying up “greenback” notes printed in large quantities by the U.S. government after the Civil War to cover its enormous expenditures. Most people were apprehensive about the economic prospects of the newly reunited nation, and abandoned the government notes in favor of gold. “Here was an excellent chance for any far-seeing person to pick up government securities at half their value,” wrote John T. Flynn in his book
Men of Wealth
. “All it required was a little faith in the nation that had just demonstrated in a most extraordinary way its ability to come through a terrible civil war.” Hetty had faith few others shared. She gobbled up greenbacks as well as railroad bonds to finance that rapidly expanding enterprise, and quickly quadrupled her fortune. Soon she was wealthier than many banks, and when those institutions needed cash they sold Hetty loans they had made to people who often used property as collateral. Anytime a borrower defaulted, Hetty acquired the property, and in the process laid the foundation of her real estate empire.

The New York Times
asserted in a 1909 article that most women made bad investors, except Hetty. She has a “masculine instinct for finance,” the newspaper stated. “She has a broader grasp of finance than many men in the Street, and her views of the values of railroads and real estate are always worth having. She makes her investments in the logical way a man does, and she usually makes wise ones.” Sexism aside,
The Times
was right. Hetty was a formidable figure in a man's world—a world in which she felt she had no allies and had to rely on her own strength and instincts. “She was a free agent in the truest sense of the term,” writes her biographer Charles Slack, “and anyone going into a deal assuming he had Hetty Green in his corner, or that she could be pushed, harassed, or cowed into going along with a crowd, learned difficult and expensive lessons to the contrary.”

Hetty's business prowess was vividly demonstrated in 1886, when a group of New York investors set out to take over the stagnating Georgia Central Railroad. They began buying up stock with the aim of installing their own managers and directors, but met with stiff resistance from the Georgians, who viewed the investors as a band of Yankee plunderers. Hetty learned of the takeover plan in its earliest stages and began to buy stock in the railroad at about $70 a share. Soon she held 6,700 shares, a significant voting block in the upcoming directors' election.

As the battle between the investors and the railroad became increasingly bitter, and the stock rose to $100 a share, Hetty remained aloof. She knew her shares would become more valuable as the election approached. Sure enough, the nervous investors feared a tight race and wanted Hetty's voting block to help ensure a victory. They offered her $115 for each of her shares, a hefty price for the already inflated stock, but she boldly countered at $125, confident that the investors needed her. They initially balked, but eventually agreed to her price—under the condition that the transaction would take place after the election and that Hetty would promise to vote their way. She would then get her money, regardless of the outcome of the election or the price of the stock. The investors believed it was an offer she would find irresistible, but they didn't know Hetty. “If I have to wait for my money,” she declared, “the price is $130.” Stunned by this stubborn woman, they countered at $127.50. She agreed and the deal was done. The investors won the election, while Hetty walked away with a fat profit.

Nothing was more important to Hetty Green than her fortune, not even her family. Her husband, Edward, learned this in 1885 when the bank where they both kept their money, John J. Cisco and Son, faced a financial crisis. Hetty demanded that her cash deposit of $550,000 be transferred immediately to another bank. Officials at Cisco demurred, however, informing their largest creditor that her husband happened to be the bank's largest debtor, owing in excess of $700,000. Outraged, Hetty argued that her husband's financial affairs were no concern of hers. She continued to demand her money and threatened to sue if she didn't get it. Unable to honor such a massive withdrawal, the bank closed its doors. Hetty now faced the implacable assignee of the failed bank, Lewis May. Though the millions in securities she kept at Cisco were not part of the bank's assets, May nevertheless held them hostage. He informed Hetty that he would be happy to release them as soon as she honored her husband's debt. In a scene reminiscent of the Aunt Sylvia episode, Hetty screamed, stomped, and cried, to no avail. Forced to concede at last, she gritted her teeth and wrote the check that freed her fortune but doomed her marriage: Like Cisco and Son, it collapsed. Edward Green's insolvency had effected her financially, and that was unforgivable.

Hetty's son, Ned, learned a painful lesson about the limits of his mother's love, too. He had injured his leg as a young boy, which caused a painful limp that grew steadily worse over the years. Ned's agony became so great that it briefly distracted his mother from the stock market. She was determined to find the best medical care for the young man—so long as it didn't cost her anything. Dressed as a pauper, as she customarily did when she wanted free medical treatment,
¹
Hetty marched her limping son to all the free clinics in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Alas, she was recognized everywhere and was unceremoniously shooed away. Having exhausted all possibilities for medical charity, she was forced to call a specialist who advised immediate amputation of the now gangrenous leg. Hetty wasn't buying it.

“Mamma still felt there was a chance to save my leg,” Ned later recalled, without apparent bitterness. “We both wanted this, of course. We didn't have much faith in doctors and believed, given time, the limb would heal itself.” But Hetty's remedies of “oil of squills” and Carter's Little Liver Pills didn't do the trick, and the leg came off. The doctor determined that the limb might have been saved had the injuries been treated sooner. Fittingly, it was Hetty's banished, bankrupted husband who paid for the operation.

Hetty kept her son financially crippled as well. Though she decreed that her enormous fortune would go to Ned and his sister upon her death, which it did, she maintained absolute dominance over them while she lived. Even after she installed Ned as president of a Texas railroad, she still controlled the purse strings, as this rather pathetic letter attests: “Dear Mamma, I am 25 years old today. I think you might send me money so I could go to the [World's] Fair at Chicago in about two weeks before the fall rush comes. It would only cost about $200. I can get passes to Chicago and return. Let me know as soon as you can so I can get ready. I want to see the fair
so
bad. Please let me go.”

Poor Ned Green, along with his sister, Sylvia, finally inherited his mother's vast wealth when Hetty died in 1916 at age eighty-one. After years of deprivation, he lived lavishly and spent a good chunk of Hetty's carefully hoarded fortune before his own death in 1936. Neither Ned nor his sister left any heirs, and within a few generations most of the money was dispersed. Now all that remains of Hetty Green's legacy is the dubious distinction she received in the
Guinness Book of World Records
as the world's greatest miser.

Some outlaws live forever as icons of wayward Americana. Others flare briefly in the collective imagination and then, for whatever reason, simply fade away. So it was with Oliver Curtis Perry, one of the boldest and most charismatic of these forgotten bandits, who captivated the nation at the end of the nineteenth century when he introduced a little of the Wild West to the otherwise civilized East.

On the night of September 29, 1891, the New York Central freight train known as the American Express Special was steaming toward the city of Utica when a hooded intruder suddenly appeared inside the so-called “money car,” which contained cash, bonds, and other valuables protected by an armed guard. “It's money I'm after,” shouted the bandit, brandishing two guns. “Quick, we're getting near to Utica!” With that he fired a shot past the guard, disarmed him, and ordered him to open one of the safes on board. He then stuffed a canvas bag full of loot and slithered back through the small hole he had cut to enter the car. The speeding train suddenly ground to a stop, its air-brake hose apparently severed by the brazen thief who escaped into the night with a fortune.

WILD WESTERN WAYS IN THE EMPIRE STATE
! screamed a headline in the
New York Herald,
while Joseph Pulitzer's
New York World
expressed shock over the audacious crime: “A train held up right in the heart of the Empire State! And this on one of the most frequented roads in the Union—the New York Central! It seems almost incredible that such wild Western methods could be successfully practiced in the centre of civilization without a trace being left as to the perpetrators of such a daring deed; yet such is a fact.”

The American Express Company, which owned the plundered money car, immediately retained the services of the famed Pinkerton National Detective Agency to catch the thief. The agency had plenty of experience dealing with train robbers in the West, but this case presented the Pinkertons with a unique challenge. “The man who committed the train robbery here is one of the nerviest I ever heard of,” wrote George Bangs, the agency's New York manager, to Robert Pinkerton. “There are few if any men who possess the daredevil courage to accomplish what this train robber did yesterday.”

After weeks of investigation the elusive outlaw was finally identified as Oliver Curtis Perry, a twenty-six-year-old railroad worker living in Troy, New York, and now a sudden celebrity on the run. People were fascinated not only by Perry's bold exploits, but by what kind of man he might be. Photographs circulated during the manhunt showed him to be quite handsome, with an expression that suggested an enigmatic mixture of troubled sensitivity and a certain roguish charm. Conflicting accounts of his character made him seem more mysterious. The Pinkertons described him as a ruthless criminal, yet some prominent citizens of Troy defended the man they had come to know as religiously devoted, hardworking, and determined to leave his difficult past behind.

Adding to his allure were unsubstantiated rumors of his munificence toward the poor, some of whom supposedly found stolen cash and jewelry left on their doorsteps. And he was gallant, too. When the guard on board the looted train was suspected of assisting in the crime, Perry wrote a letter to the authorities and declared himself solely responsible. The elusive thief was quickly becoming a legend.

“Perry became the object of the day-dreams and fantasies of men, women and children: a man you might want to be, or be with, or become,” writes his biographer Tamsin Spargo. “Handsome, boyish, clever and honorable, he now became for some people a latter-day Robin Hood, a worthy successor to Jesse James, an eastern outlaw to rival any the west could boast.” And he was about to strike again.

Just five months after pulling off the spectacular heist aboard the American Express Special, Perry did something even more astonishing: He hit the very same train! This time, however, the robbery didn't go quite so smoothly. He found there was no cash in the money car, only jewelry and silver that would be difficult, given his fugitive status, to sell. Furthermore, he wounded American Express guard Daniel McInerney in an exchange of fire, but not before McInerney was able to alert the conductor by pulling on an air-whistle cord. Now Perry had to make a quick escape, empty-handed. He climbed atop the roof of the train as it approached the town of Port Byron, then dropped off the side just before it reached the station. While the train was being searched, Perry kept hidden behind some stationary cars, replacing his hood with the gentleman's attire he had been wearing when he originally slipped aboard the Special in Syracuse. With the thief nowhere in sight and presumably long gone, the train departed Port Byron. Just before it did, Perry emerged from his hiding place and crept back on board. It was a brilliant ploy. And it almost worked.

When the Express arrived at its next stop at the village of Lyons, Perry jumped off on the opposite side of the station platform and snuck along the tracks away from the depot. Then, when he reached the road that led to the station, he turned around and casually walked back as if he was there to buy a ticket or meet a passenger. Only problem was, the Express conductor remembered the well-dressed young man after seeing him at the station in Syracuse and realized there was no way he could have made it to Lyons so quickly unless he were aboard the American Express Special, which didn't carry passengers. He had to be the thief, the conductor concluded, and alerted some railroad workers on the scene. They immediately rushed toward Perry, but abruptly stopped when he leveled his guns at them. An extraordinary chase ensued.

Perry backed away from the platform and onto the tracks, where a westbound coal trail awaited the signal to depart. Unhitching the train's engine, he ordered the engineer and fireman off the cab and then thrust it into motion. The railmen watching the scene were momentarily stunned, but quickly gathered themselves. One grabbed a rifle while the others uncoupled the Express engine to give chase. Several miles into the pursuit, the railmen were close to overtaking the engine Perry had commandeered. It was then that the desperate bandit slammed on the brakes, threw the cab into reverse, and started hurtling backward toward the Express. Guns blazed as Perry and his pursuers faced one another in a railroad duel. The trainmen ran out of ammunition, however, and rather than risk confronting the robber unarmed, they retreated back to Lyons. Their quarry then proceeded west, only to find he was quickly losing steam—he hadn't kept the engine stoked during the chase. Abandoning the cab at a place called Blue Cut, he raced up an embankment and set off into the countryside deeply covered in snow. Meanwhile, the police were alerted and began to descend on the area.

Perry tried to make his getaway by hijacking horses from local farmers, but the icy terrain proved extremely difficult to navigate. Exhausted and freezing five hours after his flight began, he barricaded himself behind a crumbling stone wall and was soon surrounded.

“Is there an officer in the crowd?” Perry shouted from his makeshift fortress.

“I am,” a young deputy named Jeremiah Collins called back.

“If you drop your gun and come unarmed I'll talk with you,” Perry announced, “but if you try to play me any tricks it will go hard with you.”

Collins agreed and crossed the field toward Perry, who immediately asked about the guard he had shot in the American Express money car. He may have been genuinely concerned about the man, or perhaps he simply wanted to know if he was facing a murder charge. Collins assured him that Daniel McInerney was alive, then persuaded him to put down his gun.

“You might as well give in,” the deputy said, “the whole country is after you and you are bound to be caught. Suppose you do kill a few people. It'll only be worse for you in the end.”

“If I give up,” Perry answered, “it means spending all my life in prison. Liberty is sweet to me and I'll sell it dear.”

The trapped fugitive heard a noise behind him. When he turned around to see what it was, Collins seized the opportunity and leaped on top of him. As the two men struggled, Perry tried to bite the deputy's face, but he was soon overpowered and handcuffed. The great train robber of the East was in custody at last.

Perry seemed blithely unconcerned about the situation, cracking jokes and poking fun at the Pinkerton agents who had stumbled over themselves trying to find him. “I never saw anyone so cool,” remarked an American Express agent who spoke to him in jail. The public's fascination with the charismatic outlaw remained undiminished, and Perry played to it like a veteran performer. He delighted reporters with exaggerated tales of his exploits, his misspent youth in the West, and of his redemption back in New York, where he struggled on the path of righteousness. Appealing to public sentiment, he suggested his crimes were motivated by callous railroad companies that exploited their workers, and by the love of a woman for whom he hoped to provide a better life. It was a one-man public relations campaign that happened to make terrific copy.

“Men and boys could imagine his wild cowboy days, as industrialization made the frontier seem more like a myth every day,” writes Tamsin Spargo. “Radicals and reformers could identify with the working man who had finally snapped under the weight of social and economic injustice. Romantics could feel for the sensitive but proud man, torn between right and wrong as he fought to build a life with the woman he loved.”

Perry was more appealing than ever, and he seemed to know it. Yet for all the wit and charm he used to seduce the people, his fate was leading inexorably toward something he truly dreaded—prison. Perhaps hoping for a lighter sentence, he surprised observers anticipating a lively trial by pleading guilty to all counts against him. He was given forty-nine years. “Perry received his sentence as meekly as an erring child receives a mother's kind reproof,” one reporter noted. “The bravado had left him. The wild western spirit had died away and the most noted desperado of the East, perhaps of the country, quailed before the verdict of grim justice.”

Prison ultimately broke Oliver Perry. Though he rebelled against the often brutal and dehumanizing system that confined him, he was really no match for it. Just twenty months after entering New York's Auburn facility he suffered a mental breakdown and was declared insane. Any lingering doubts about the diagnosis were settled in one horrifying instance when, in 1895, he repeatedly jammed two nails into his eyes. When that failed to completely blind him, he finished the job with a shard of glass. “I was born into the light of day, against my will of course,” he wrote. “I now claim the right to put out that light.”

Over the next thirty-five years, the thief who once dazzled the nation lived in total darkness as he slowly faded from the public memory. No one read the poetry he wrote or paid any heed to the hunger strikes he staged to protest his treatment in confinement. And when he died in 1930 at age sixty-four, he was buried in an unmarked felon's grave. It was as though he had never even existed.