A Counterfeiter's Paradise (14 page)

Despite his apparent gentility, Lewis didn’t come from an eastern city or a southern plantation. He was a native of central Pennsylvania, the youngest son of Lewis Lewis, a Welsh immigrant who then lived about a hundred miles north of Bedford, on the banks of a stream that runs
alongside a ridge of the Alleghenies. His father settled in Pennsylvania before the Revolution and became a surveyor, dividing up parcels of land in a region still bloodily contested by Indians and whites. Pennsylvanians had a reputation for being particularly ruthless colonizers. In 1763, a band of white vigilantes who massacred natives on the Pennsylvania frontier became so powerful that they marched on Philadelphia five hundred strong, hoping to kill every Indian in the colony. Benjamin Franklin and others talked them down, but white rage continued to simmer as settlers pushed farther west into Indian territory. Another war broke out in 1774, this time sparked by colonists moving aggressively into the Ohio River country. The conflict began when the governor of Virginia sent land -surveyors to explore the disputed area, inviting attacks by Shawnee raiding parties.

Surveying was a risky business: it involved spending considerable time in rugged, unsettled places and eluding Indians who were often enraged at the sight of a white man measuring land that didn’t belong to him. Surveyors made easy targets because their task required precision. They used a magnetic compass and a chain of one hundred iron links totaling twenty-two yards to mark out a property’s boundaries, and the process could take time. When surveying along the steep flanks of Pennsylvania’s Juniata and Susquehanna rivers, Lewis Lewis must have kept a close eye on his surroundings, just in case a group of Indians charged down the valley to ambush him.

Despite the danger, land surveying was prestigious. It was considered a profession of the propertied class; rich Virginia planters like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both knew how to survey. It also paid well, either in money or in acreage. Lewis Lewis made a good living, earning land grants from the government in exchange for his services and becoming a landowner in at least three counties. When he died, his possessions included enough household items to fill a few homes: rugs, chairs, trunks,
teacups, gold ware, spinning wheels, and hundreds of other articles. He also left his compass and chain, the two indispensable tools of his trade.

Lewis Lewis’s background suited his distinguished occupation. He didn’t come to America as a poor country laborer but as an Oxford University graduate with a proud pedigree; his descendants later claimed George Washington and Meriwether Lewis as relatives. It’s not clear why, but after four years as a student at Christ Church college, he left its vaulted halls and manicured gardens for the American colonies. Being the only Oxford-educated land surveyor in central Pennsylvania presumably helped attract clients. It also came in handy when, at the age of thirty-three, he courted a nineteen-year-old girl named Jane Dill. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Dill was famous for her fearless horsemanship and stern Presbyterianism. She fell for the Welshman, and the two married. Together they traveled throughout Pennsylvania, surveying one plot after another.

By the time Jane gave birth to David, the last of their eight children, in 1788, hostilities between Indians and whites had cooled. Although Pennsylvania saw skirmishes until the last decade of the eighteenth century, the frontier line had shifted farther west and so had the battlegrounds. Locals commemorated the bloodshed with place-names that recalled the region’s violent past. Lewis’s birthplace, Bald Eagle Creek, took its name from one of two Indians, both known as Bald Eagle, who were murdered by whites in the 1770s. Bloody Run, where Lewis almost escaped arrest, had allegedly been the site of an Indian ambush decades earlier. The natives descended on a trading convoy, killing enough men to dye the nearby stream red with the slaughter. The name Bloody Run remained until 1873, when residents decided to rechristen the town with a less sanguinary and more respectable name. They chose Everett, after Edward Everett, the famous orator who delivered the two-hour speech before Lincoln’s two-minute address at Gettysburg.

Lewis never had a chance to hear his father’s stories about the Indian wars, since the Welshman died when his son was still an infant. Jane remarried an old Dutch widower named Frederick Leathers, who no doubt offered fewer opportunities for adventure than her last husband. But their relationship, cut short by Leathers’s death four years later, was happy; in his will, the Dutchman left all his property to his “loving wife, Jane.” With enough money to bring up her children, Lewis’s mother decided to live on her own for a bit. Around 1800, she moved to the town of Clearfield and, then in her fifties, started a distillery.

Lewis’s childhood couldn’t have been dull. Raised by a widow turned entrepreneur with a reputation for spirited horseback riding, he grew up in the valleys of the Alleghenies, roaming the landscape that his father had spent years surveying. As a boy he lived comfortably, and as a young man he could have easily chosen to become a respectable citizen. Instead, he counterfeited money and robbed members of the communities that Lewis Lewis had helped map out decades earlier. He learned the terrain as well as his father, but with a different end in mind: not as open land to be carved up and claimed, but as a tangle of camps, hideouts, and trails to transport forged currency or stolen goods.

IN THE FALL OF 1812,
a few years before Lewis’s arrest on New Year’s Eve, General Isaac Brock paced the ramparts of Fort George, a British garrison on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Niagara River. Over six feet tall and heavily built, he was well liked by his men and admired for his military prowess throughout Canada. Brock loved war: he joined the army at fifteen and remained a soldier—and a bachelor—his entire life. Until recently, however, he had been desperate to leave his post. Eager for action, Brock seethed at being stuck in the colonies while the British fought Napoléon’s troops thousands of miles away. But in 1812, as the
conflict between Britain and the United States heated up, he chose to stay, hoping to make a name for himself when the fighting began. As the governor of Upper Canada—a colony that comprised present-day Ontario—and the commander of its armed forces, he would soon have his chance. Only a couple of months after war was declared in the summer of 1812, Brock dealt a humiliating defeat to the Americans at Detroit, a victory that earned him the nickname the “Hero of Upper Canada.” By October he had moved farther up the Great Lakes to the Niagara River, the strait that divided British Canada from New York.

On the other side of the water, not far from where Brock was standing, six thousand American soldiers were preparing to invade. Brock knew they were there, and wanted to attack. But his superior General George Prevost, the governor of British North America, insisted on a strictly defensive strategy and, as a way to enforce his will, sent Brock a relatively small number of men. His hands tied, Brock waited. The imminent American assault and the timidity of his superior weren’t Brock’s only problems; he also faced widespread defeatism at home. Despite Brock’s celebrated reputation, people in Upper Canada felt an American triumph was inevitable. “[T]he population, believe me, is essentially bad,” Brock wrote to Prevost. The Canadian militia shared the public’s pessimism; their gloom, combined with poor training and inadequate equipment, made them practically useless. On top of everything else, Upper Canada had become a refuge in recent years for criminals fleeing from the United States: “the most abandoned characters,” Brock complained, “seek impunity in this province from crimes committed in the states.” The lawlessness they brought over the border further sapped Canada’s ability to defend itself.

One of these émigré crooks was David Lewis, whom Brock had caught with counterfeit money and imprisoned at Fort George. Lewis’s arrest couldn’t have come at a worse moment. While typically an affable man, the British commander was also a firm disciplinarian—and the thought of
Lewis swindling his men, added to his many other frustrations, pushed him over the edge. Brock threatened to hang Lewis on gallows so high that he could see his own country. Given the short distance across the river to New York, the general wasn’t exaggerating. An execution might help him maintain discipline in his camp, or at least give his troops a little entertainment to ease the anxiety of waiting for the Americans to make their move.

Fortunately for Lewis, Brock didn’t live to fulfill his promise. Shortly before daybreak on October 13, American batteries opened fire on British positions, provoking an artillery exchange across the Niagara. The flash of exploding shells in the gray dawn illuminated the water below, where boats of American soldiers paddled furiously to the opposite shore. They were headed for Queenston, a village about seven miles south of Fort George. Brock hadn’t expected them to land there, and now he raced to confront the invaders. While he was leading the charge, a ball from an American musket pierced his chest. He died almost instantly, and his men, shaken by the death of their beloved commander, gathered around the powerful frame lying lifeless on the battlefield. They carried his corpse to Queens-ton while their colleagues successfully repelled the attack. Upper Canada was saved, but the loss of Brock inflicted a major blow to the British effort.

The battle that killed Canada’s greatest general also saved Lewis’s life. He sat behind bars at Fort George for weeks after Brock’s death, until another stroke of luck set him free. In mid-November, the British started shelling the enemy across the river, and the Americans responded with their own bombardment. The barrage set fire to much of the British garrison, including the mess hall, and did enough damage to the walls of the jail to allow Lewis to escape. As the cannonballs fell and engine crews ran to extinguish the flames, he took advantage of the commotion to slip out of the fort.

Lewis was twenty-four years old when he fled Fort George. The boy from rural Pennsylvania had become a troublemaker early, spurning the
example set by his brothers, who, like their father, lived decent, law-abiding lives. The youngest son took a different path. He enlisted in the army before the war with the British broke out, deserted, and later traveled north to Canada. Across the border he discovered the thriving expatriate underworld on the other side—the rabble of deserters, lowlifes, and jailbirds that Brock despised. It was also a haven for counterfeiters. Canadian-based engravers forged notes printed by American banks right above the border, drawing on a sophisticated network of smugglers to ship the product southward along roads, rivers, and canals into markets throughout the United States.

Like their colonial predecessors in the Oblong and elsewhere, counterfeiters understood the value of geography. From a moneymaker’s point of view, a poorly guarded border between bickering neighbors offered the ideal location to base an operation. The bad blood between Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century—not to mention three years of conflict during the War of 1812—made Canadian officials ill-inclined if not outright unwilling to crack down on the counterfeiting of American currency. Despite occasional moments of cooperation between the two countries, their strained relationship, combined with the rough terrain and the perpetual shortage of law enforcement, meant that moneymakers ran a booming business in the Canadian townships.

One of these entrepreneurs was Philander Noble. Lewis met him while drifting up north, and they became close collaborators. An accomplished engraver, Noble had spent years between Vermont and Canada cutting plates and making fake cash. He took Lewis under his wing, mentoring the young deserter in the art of moneymaking. The apprenticeship proved important for Lewis: he began as a juvenile delinquent and graduated a master criminal.

The two men made an odd couple. Sixteen years older, Noble looked nothing like the tall, graceful Pennsylvanian. He was fat, bald, and a couple of inches shorter than his protégé. Like Lewis, however, he came from
a small town with a frontier past: Westfield, Massachusetts, which for decades after its founding in the seventeenth century had the distinction of being the colony’s westernmost settlement. Westfield was a farming community, but Noble, rather than working in the fields, became an artisan. His nimble fingers earned him a living as a silversmith, a clockmaker, and an inventor. In 1800, at the age of twenty-seven, he wrote a letter to his congressman, William Shepard, complaining that he had been hired to create a machine for grinding gun barrels but was cheated by his employer. “I performed the task which cost me many a sleepless night as well as very close & intense thought,” Noble explained, and in return got only “a bare days wages.” Even more infuriating, his boss took credit for inventing the device. Noble pressed Shepard to pass his story along to the secretary of war—if not to get more money, then “at least to place me in a favourable point of light to the publick.”

For a young workman from western Massachusetts to think a high-level member of John Adams’s cabinet would care about protecting his rights to a gun barrel grinder gives a sense of Noble’s regard for himself. It’s unlikely that Shepard followed up on the request, and within a few years, Noble took his metalworking skills into a trade that afforded better opportunities for wealth and recognition. He moved to Vermont and started carving copperplates to counterfeit currency.

The summer of 1807 found Noble huddled in a cave with three accomplices, each man engaged in a different task: Noble engraved plates while the others prepared the ink, fed paper into the rolling press, and forged the official signatures that appeared on the notes. While the criminals worked, a posse of twenty-six local men beat a path through the wilderness looking for them. The hideout lay in the mountains near Plymouth, a town in central Vermont at the bottom of a steep valley. Getting there required traversing tough ground under the hot sun and crawling part of the way on their hands and knees. It took the men hours to find the retreat, and they approached loudly enough for the counterfeiters to hear them coming.
Desperate to destroy the evidence, one of Noble’s associates hurled some tools out of the cave’s entrance—a precipitous fifteen-foot drop—and then leaped down after the debris to escape. He didn’t get far: the men grabbed him, along with Noble and the other two criminals. Inside the cavern was more than enough incriminating evidence: plates, a rolling press, paper, and lots of counterfeit bills, some still wet with ink. Noble’s handiwork, honed during his years as a craftsman, impressed even those who were happy to see him behind bars. After reporting the arrest “with sincere pleasure,” a Vermont newspaper couldn’t resist commenting on Noble’s superb technique: “The engraving is very handsomely executed, and the bills so well done as to deceive tolerable good judges.” The jail didn’t hold Noble for long. Two years later, he resurfaced in Canada, arrested for counterfeiting once again.