Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired by Bill Neal

Abstract

Reviewed by: Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired by Bill Neal Bob Cavendish Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired. By Bill Neal. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2015. Pp. 256. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In the summer of 1962 during a visit with some of my grandmother’s friends in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the dinner conversation turned to the city’s surrender to Union general Ulysses Grant in July 1863. From the tone and tenor of their remarks, it seemed Vicksburg had fallen about ten minutes ago and they were still peeved. Some people know how to hold a grudge. And some things just will not go away, as Bill Neal discovered during a lecture in Canadian, Texas, where he encountered a woman who warned him to avoid a “that Isaacs mess,” a notorious local crime still fraught with suspicions and innuendo 115 years later. Fortunately for us, Neal took a closer look instead. Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders begins in 1894 with the clumsy plot to swindle Wells Fargo out of $25,000 (in today’s money, $675,000) with a bogus loss claim, disguising the ruse with a straightforward train robbery. Instead, the train robbery never happened. Two murders, of the local sheriff and of a Wells Fargo undercover agent, are linked, somehow, to the attempted fraud. At the center of the action is George Isaacs, the dull-witted youngest member of a family of brothers moderately successful and presumably unaware of George’s scheme. George and two minor villains were arrested for the murders, and one additional “associate” turned state’s evidence, but trials only provoked more questions. Who was the mysterious, tall, light-skinned man who remained in the background of key events? Who assisted in the jailbreak that nearly put one of the suspects beyond reach? What was compelling enough about three pennyante desperados to create the territory’s best legal defense team, one that included Sam Houston’s son, by now a formidable attorney? The murders in Canadian, Texas, were part of a white-collar fraud conspiracy not usually associated with wild west lawlessness. Whereas tracking horse thieves and bank robbers could mean lengthy pursuit over hostile terrain, this chase involved following a money trail. George Isaacs’s kin had engaged certain impressive (and expensive) courtroom advocates for George and two other defendants. But, Neal asks, why not George only? Was there something else at stake? And how had the brothers Isaacs amassed that kind of fortune in frontier Canadian, Texas? Without making direct accusations, Neal alludes to circumstances—the “old west’s” lack of law enforcement—that made the Isaac’s fortune possible, much as Joe Kennedy later benefited from Canadian booze running during Prohibition. The George Isaacs-Wells Fargo plot intrigued Neal, whose curiosity about a local taboo uncovered a complex affair with a modern ring: a bungled scheme, a mysterious stranger, a fugitive, and covert legal funding. Neal’s wry wit and fascination with this cold case (note the extent and [End Page 399] variety of sources in the bibliography) propel the narrative even as it takes occasional zigs and zags. Skullduggery is not a toss-off western frontier law-and-order tale but an American crime saga more interesting than stagecoach holdups or horse thieves. Television does not look to the old west so much these days (outside of Lonesome Dove and Tombstone) but within this yarn lies a good miniseries that would do HBO proud. Bob Cavendish Buda, Texas Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association