How a millionaire bonanza farmer was swindled out of $25,000, then died on the Titanic

Illustration by Jeremy Fugleberg, Forum News Service / Images contributed by NDSU Archives and Newspapers.com By Jeremy Fugleberg Today at 1:05 PM Listen Comments Share Share this article News Reporting News Reporting Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. The Trust Project What is this? MINNEAPOLIS — The beaker was, to them, filled with truth serum. It was the night of Oct. 13, 1909, at the Pauly House, a Minneapolis hotel. ADVERTISEMENT Herbert F. Chaffee, a wealthy bonanza farmer from Amenia, North Dakota, and his son Eben bent over a tumbler holding a pile of shavings. Contributed / Institute for Regional Studies Archives, NDSU, Fargo This was a chemistry test with life-altering consequences. The shavings were supposedly gold, trimmed from an entire disc of gold. But if the liquid turned the color of the sky, it meant Chaffee had been swindled out of a fortune of $25,000 (over $900,000 today). "A bottle of nitric acid was clinked against the glass by a nervous hand," a reporter later described the moment. A splash, the liquid submerging the shavings. They eyed its color. "Blue! Brass!" The reporter recorded. Chaffee had been conned, swindled by a stranger with two worthless hunks of brass. ADVERTISEMENT Contributed / Minneapolis Tribune via Newspapers.com. It was a scandal. Front page news. An upstanding citizen had been brought low by lies. What happened next would result in a manhunt, accusations, a drowned corpse of dubious identity and a trail of tragedy that would stretch across the decades. Within three years. both Chaffee and his swindler would be dead: one on the Titanic and the other only on paper. But for now, the hunt for justice was on. The con It had seemed like an amazing offer. Too good to pass up, of course. Contributed / Minneapolis Journal via Newspapers.com. The man meeting with Chaffee at his home in Amenia claimed to be a miner. He was in his 50s and heavyset, his sandy hair and beard turning gray, a rough, homespun suit draped over his body. He said his name was John Armstrong. He claimed to own a gold mine in "old Mexico" and was looking for his uncle, also named Chaffee. ADVERTISEMENT But not this Chaffee, he said he had just realized — his mistake. He'd have to continue looking for the relative who had come into a large sum of money. Chaffee couldn't resist. What was this about money? Armstrong told of his "wondrous mine," of which he owed $25,000 in liens, and of "two golden ingots" held in two trunks in Minneapolis, worth about $40,000. Armstrong's proposal: He would give Chaffee the gold discs if the farmer would cover Armstrong's $25,000 in liens. He would even test the bricks in Chaffee's presence to prove their value. Chaffee agreed to the plan. At a Minneapolis motel, Armstrong retrieved the bricks. Contributed / NDSU Archives "In the dim gas light of a purposely selected inner room, the yellow metal shone with royal brilliance," a newspaper later reported. Armstrong drilled out a careful sample, and a quick trip tassayersayer backed up his claim: This was gold. ADVERTISEMENT Chaffee and his son handed over $25,000 in "crisp one-thousand-dollar bills" to Armstrong. It was only later that the Chaffees grew suspicious. But by then, Armstrong was long gone, as was the assayer who vouched for the gold. Reported the newspaper: "They were swindled." The hunt The sensational crime captivated newspapers and the public. More than 50 people who had heard of the swindle visited the police station to see the brass discs, so police let a news photographer photograph one of the infamous objects. Chaffee was overwhelmed with embarrassment, but ruefully impressed. Eben told a reporter that "his father remarked that he could almost wish for the escape of the men." Chaffee was a "gentleman farmer" said descendants, who described him as a generous, decent man. ADVERTISEMENT "He used to have two expressions," Chaffee's youngest son Lester said in a 1974 interview. "Goodness gracious and he had one other expression, 'By George.' When he said that, boy, somebody had better jump because that meant he was really mad." Contributed / Institute for Regional Studies Archives, NDSU, Fargo Chaffee had been hornswoggled by a hoary old swindle known as the "gold brick game" — called in 1927 "perhaps the most celebrated of all swindles." But the Chaffees wouldn'to let this go. They issued a $2,000 reward for the swindler's arrest. A year and a half later, in April 1911, Eben Chaffee was on his way to Los Angeles. There had been news: a report from California of a man who had pulled the exact same con the exact same way — on a friend of his wife. His name was, allegedly, Cornelius W. Caddagan. The Chaffees hired the much-vaunted Pinkterton Detective Agency, who obtained a photo of the man. ADVERTISEMENT It appeared to be "Armstrong." Eben quickly left for Los Angeles and showed up in the courtroom where Caddagan was being arraigned, identifying him in person to the authorities. Contributed / Los Angeles Times via Newspapers.com Caddagan was to be extradited to Minnesota to face charges for the Chaffee con. He managed to first file a suit against Chaffee for malicious prosecution, and demanded $27,000 in damages, show in court filings stored in the NDSU Archives. Caddagan claimed he was "caused to suffer great indignity, was humiliated in the presence of his wife and son and in the presence of his neighbors and friends, and was made to endure great hardships." But then, on May 20, he vanished. On May 27, 1911, a week later, the body of a well-dressed man "heavily weighted with iron castings" was found floating in San Pedro Harbor, a copy of a May 18 newspaper in his pocket. Caddagan's wife, called Clara in news reports although her name was Eudora, stood over the corpse in its open grave. "He's my husband. That's Caddigan," she said, according to a newspaper reporter, misspelling Caddagan's name. Eudora railed against police, insisting they had driven her husband to end his own life. Police were not so sure about the corpse's identity. They admitted it resembled him, but that was as far as they would go. One detective said the corpse was fully two inches shorter than Caddagan, and said, "there would be no such shrinkage even had the body been in the water for two months." Sightings, tragedy, mystery The Chaffees weren't convinced either. They filed suit against Caddagan and his wife for grand larceny, said North Dakota State University history student D. Carter Kress, in a well-sourced 1985 unpublished paper stored in the NDSU Archives. Contributed / NDSU Archives Kress cited Chaffee family correspondence to show that Eudora Caddagan offered a settlement, exchanging shares of a silver mine if the Chaffees would accept the death of her husband. Meanwile, through the Burns detective agency, they posted rewards for Caddagan, from $2500 to $3,000, then boosting it further to $5,000 (About $178,000 today) in various languages across the Western Hemisphere. The Chaffees had cut ties with the Pinkerton agency after they discovered Caddagan was a personal friend of William Pinkerton, who operated the agency. Then in January 1912, a possible break: A man filed an affidavit in a Los Angeles court swearing he had seen Caddagan in Waterloo, Iowa. The lead didn't seem to go anywhere. Burns detective chased additional leads without success from Idaho to New York City, Kress said. In April, Chaffee and his wife, Carriel, headed across the Atlantic to Britain. It remains unclear why they made the trip. Chaffee descendants, with some justifiable skepticism, have said one possible reason was related to the swindle. Regardless of the reason, one thing is for sure. The Chaffee couple, allegedly gifted first-class return tickets, boarded a brand-new ocean liner to return home. Its n