Olmsted and the ‘veritable and eminent pirate’ Captain William Kidd: an unhistorical history

Abstract

While Frederick Law Olmsted’s reputation rests almost as much on his authorship of studies including the Cotton Kingdom as it does for his work on landscapes including New York’s Central Park, a neglected file in the archival papers of Olmsted Associates, his sons’ design firm, suggests that it was Olmsted’s alleged role in a fabulous pirate story that truly captured the attention and imagination of the general public, along with that of business historians and other specialists. This paper examines the reception history of A Notable Lawsuit (1898), which purports to tell the tale of how the Astor family stole a fortune from the Olmsted family in the form of the ‘veritable’ pirate Captain William Kidd’s buried treasure. The designation of his pirate stories as ‘veritable’ is but the first clue that must be deciphered in weighing the documentary evidence incorporated into and dissimulated by Head’s text. The perils and the pleasures of treating A Notable Lawsuit as a test case in establishing the credibility of historical fact and fiction—as defined by authors such as Herman Melville and Thomas Carlyle—is the survival of the file preserving the range and kind of perplexities faced by readers of the tale.