Washington, D.C., United States, Fall 1852

On an early fall day in 1852, Abner Doubleday strolled down F Street in Washington toward the home of Secretary of War Charles Magill Conrad. By this time, Doubleday—later known as the fictitious inventor of baseball—was a ten-year veteran of the U.S. Army. He wondered why the Secretary, who “scarcely has any special orders for lieutenants,” had summoned him specifically. Perhaps his gaze turned a block north, to the new Church of the Epiphany, where he had married Mary Hewitt earlier that year. Was the Secretary about to send him away from his new bride?

Doubleday soon learned that he was to travel. Conrad ordered him to investigate what the July 7, 1851 New York Herald suggested was, “if a fraud, one of the most splendid that has been perpetrated since the organization of the government.”¹ He was to go to Mexico, where he had been an occupying soldier a few years before, to find out whether the silver mine for which U.S. citizen dentist George Gardiner had received $480,000 from the U.S. government actually existed.

College Park, Maryland, United States, 2018

While Doubleday first encountered Gardiner through his meeting with Conrad, I first made his acquaintance 167 years later and a few miles away, in the light-filled manuscript reading room of the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland. For several summers, while researching for my dissertation on U.S. citizens who moved to Mexico’s interior between 1821 and 1846 and working a full-time job, I took advantage of half-day summer Fridays to photograph 45 boxes of claim files that U.S. citizens filed against the Mexican government. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the U.S.-Mexican War, the United States agreed to assume $3.2 million of claims that U.S. citizens like Gardiner had filed against Mexico for compensation for a range of issues, from ship confiscations to unpaid loans and arrests.

Like many researchers trying to maximize archive time, I took a quick glance at each file to see if it was worth exploring further. This involved looking at the claimant’s memorial, or statement, to see if the person had lived in Mexico, versus merely traveling or trading there. Gardiner’s statement noted that he owned a mine in San Luís Potosí until Mexican soldiers destroyed his mine and expelled him just after the U.S.-Mexican War broke out. This made Gardiner’s file worth photographing before moving on to the next.

Washington, D.C., United States, Fall 1852

Conrad briefed Doubleday on the case, including how everything Gardiner presented seemed in order to the claims commission (as it initially had for me). The commissioners had compensated other U.S. citizens who faced expulsion when U.S. troops were near.²

Of Gardiner’s claim, they noted: “It appears from the evidence in this case that the claimant was sole proprietor of certain silver mines,” awarding him $480,000 of the $800,000 in losses he claimed.³ Gardiner had also represented another claimant, John H. Mears, who claimed a similar Mexican action against his mercury mine and whom the commission similarly believed.⁴

Arlington, Virginia, United States, 2019

Some of the claim files are literally thin, containing only the claimant’s statement, while others occupy full standard archival boxes. Gardiner’s was one of the more voluminous, including testimony of U.S. and Mexican witnesses, financial records, and copies of official documents, on the letterhead of the state government of San Luís Potosí. For me, files like these provided invaluable details about what U.S. citizens did in Mexico, where they lived and traveled, the people with whom they interacted, and what their finances were like. I used these files to paint a richer portrait of U.S. citizens’ activities and lives in Mexico as I wrote my dissertation.

After I had photographed what I needed of the claim files and embarked on other research in the United States and Mexico, I used Tropy to organize and annotate thousands of document photos, tagging claim files by the themes that emerged as I read through the memorials. Gardiner’s claim fit with the numerous others filed over the claimants’ 1846 expulsions. Thus, while writing a section on those expulsions in an early draft of the dissertation, I mentioned Gardiner as an example in one sentence, drawing on the memorial he filed.⁵

Washington, D.C., United States, Fall 1852

As Doubleday learned from Conrad during his briefing, it was only through a fluke of history that suspicions arose about Gardiner’s claim. After the claims commission finished its work in early 1851, Charles Davis, the commission’s secretary, took care of the last order of business: organizing the paperwork that I would photograph a century and a half later. As he filed Gardiner’s and Mears’s claims, Davis saw that they were, as Doubleday later described them, “full of absurdities.” Davis knew that mercury mines like the one for which Mears claimed compensation did not exist in Mexico. He also knew that Lagunillas, San Luís Potosí, where Gardiner’s supposed mine was located, was not a mining district. Having knowledge of the state seal of San Luís Potosí, Davis even recognized that official documents in Gardiner’s claim file appeared to be forgeries.⁶ Davis blew the whistle, and President Millard Fillmore ordered an investigation.

The first investigators came back with witness statements attesting to the fraud, though they had not visited Gardiner’s supposed mine out of fear for their safety, “as [he] had confederates there to whom he had provided a portion of the spoil.”⁷ Although the grand jury ultimately indicted Gardiner, Fillmore and a group of U.S. senators feared that there was not enough evidence for a conviction. This became Doubleday’s mission: he was to join a small party of investigators, appointed by both the president and Senate, on a venture to Mexico, specifically to visit the supposed location of Gardiner’s mine.

Arlington, Virginia, United States, 2020

As I continued to work on my dissertation, I had to build for myself the context that Davis had gained from his experience. I turned to other sources, like newspapers, U.S. consular records, and Mexican government records. Using Heurist, I built a database of U.S. citizenship certificates from the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City. U.S. citizens used these certificates to obtain yearly cartas de seguridad—essentially visas.

From there, I cross-checked the names of U.S. citizens with more than one certificate (indicating likely residency, rather than travel), as well as the names of claimants who discussed living in Mexico, with genealogical databases and Mexican newspaper databases. The first things that came up when I searched for Gardiner’s name were creative ads for his dental practice in Mexico City.

An ad for Gardiner’s dental practice, touting his New York origins. From Siglo Diez y Nueve, October 20, 1841.

Like other U.S. citizens living in the country, he argued his U.S. origin meant that he was trained in the most advanced techniques of his craft. But then I saw Mexican articles about the investigation of his fraud and his trials in the United States. Like Davis, I found myself taking the sum of my developing knowledge and wondering if Gardiner’s claim file was all it purported to be.

Lagunillas, San Luís Potosí, Mexico, December 1852

Doubleday was not impressed when he arrived at the investigating party’s main destination. He described Lagunillas, the municipality where Gardiner’s supposed mine was located, as a “miserable little village of no account.” The investigators put up posters “offering a reward of $500 to anyone who would show [them] the Gardiner mine.” Doubleday expressed no surprise when no one emerged to claim the reward.⁸ Soon after arriving, however, Doubleday and the other investigators learned they were not the only interested parties currently in Mexico. While the investigators took up lodging on the main plaza of Lagunillas, Gardiner and two comrades were staying across the plaza—with the mayor himself. Even though under indictment, Gardiner was allowed to go to Mexico himself, purportedly to gather evidence for his defense. What he was actually there to do, however, was attempt further deception.

Read Part II

John Tallis and John Rapkin, Map of Mexico, Texas, and Upper California, 1851 , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

1. “Incidents of the Fourth—The Administration and General Scott—The Republic Disposed To Be Accomodating—The Unfolding Mysteries of the Gardiner Claim—Where Is the Secretary of the Treasury?,” The New York Herald, July 7, 1851.
2. David Patrick McKenzie, “Racing Ahead of Manifest Destiny: U.S. Migration, Citizenship, and Commercial Expansion in Mexico’s Interior, 1821–53” (Ph.D., United States — Virginia, George Mason University, 2021).
3. “62 – Opinion of Commissioners” (Washington, D.C., United States, March 12, 1850), Box 13 – November Term, Claim 73 – G.A. Gardner [Gardiner], 1849 Claims Commission, RG 76.7 – Records of the United States and Mexican Claims Commissions, U.S. National Archives.
4. Doubleday and Society, My Life in the Old Army, 158; Dan Plazak, A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top: Fraud and Deceit in the Golden Age of American Mining (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006).
5. George A. Gardiner, “Memorial” (Washington, D.C., United States, November 30, 1849), Box 13 – November Term, Claim 73 – G.A. Gardner [Gardiner], 1849 Claims Commission, RG 76.7 – Records of the United States and Mexican Claims Commissions, U.S. National Archives.
6. Plazak, A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top; Doubleday and Society, My Life in the Old Army, 159–60.
7. Doubleday and Society, My Life in the Old Army, 160.
8. “Las Reclamaciones de Gardiner,” Siglo Diez y Nueve, December 10, 1852, Latin American Newspapers.

David McKenzie

David McKenzie is a public historian who received his Ph.D. in U.S. and Latin American history from George Mason University in 2021. He currently works as Head of Exhibitions at the Folger Shakespeare Library. He previously worked at Ford's Theatre, the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, The Design Minds Inc., and the Alamo.