Ross Raymond’s Story – Part 1
Ross E. Raymond’s grave at Lone Mountain bears only with a small, metal mortuary marker – the kind that’s intended to be temporary. And when I started researching this story, I thought it was going to be simple — a straightforward account about an old-time journalist.
Little did I know that Raymond’s temporary marker would be oddly fitting, in a way – because the man changed names nearly as often as he changed clothes. And Raymond wasn’t even his real name. With a crime spree spanning decades and at least different three continents, he was one of the most prolific con men of the entire Victorian era. So hold onto your seat – here’s Ross Raymond’s incredible tale!
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At birth, he was “Frank H. Powers,” making his debut in Beaver, Pennsylvania in 1850 (or possibly 1851). Frank’s father passed away when he was only five, and his mother soon remarried a widower named Barnabas F. Lee, and moved (with Frank and his older brother) to Poland, Ohio.
Step-father Barnabas ran a private seminary (school). And though Frank was bright and learned quickly, he was also smart enough to get into heaps of trouble. As a later newspaper would put it, “his gay, rollicking disposition [and] his audacious, daring qualities made him a leader of the wilder boys of the vallage, and he became a sore problem to the exacting stepfather.”
The 1870 Census found Frank (then about 20) attending a Soldiers Orphan School in Dayton, Pennsylvania, along with his older brother, James. This was probably a military-style boarding school, where he might have been sent to acquire a little discipline as well as to further his education.
Frank-slash-Ross would later claim he became a naval apprentice, eventually entering the U.S. Naval Academy. But if that actually happened, he didn’t stick with it long. Next, he joined the British Navy (he said), where it’s possible he served aboard the frigate Monarch.
By 1872, Frank had apparently abandoned his ship at San Francisco, becoming instead a correspondent for several local newspapers. And while “journalist” was the title he’d claim for the rest of his life, it seems, he’d discovered his real aptitude: as a con artist. He “turned his face eastward,” one account would say, leaving a “trail of swindles” from Virginia City through Denver, Utah, and Omaha.
After making his way cross-country to New York, Frank found employment with the New York daily papers – and this is when he likely changed his name, reinventing himself as “Ross Raymond.”
The name was a brilliant pick. “Raymond” was one of the most prestigious newspaper names in all of America, at the time; luminary Henry J. Raymond was the founder of the New York Times in 1851, and had recently passed away in 1869. Henry’s brother, Rossiter W. Raymond, was also well-known in mining and scientific circles. So the newly-minted “Ross Raymond” won superficial credibility from his new name alone — he sounded like someone who was affiliated with this prominent family.
The state of Ross’s romantic affairs would be murky throughout his life, but at least one source suggests he induced a California acquaintance, “Lizzie Linderman,” to come east and marry him about this time. Figuring prominently in his affections may have been her sizeable recent inheritance. Try as I might, I haven’t actually been able to track down such a woman. What does seem well-established, however, is Ross Raymond’s first serious brush with the law.
In 1873, Raymond stole an overcoat from the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City – a more serious offense than it might sound to modern readers.
The Fifth Avenue was a famous New York hotel, advertising luxury accommodations, fireplaces in every room, and even private bathrooms. Raymond was known to dress in the height of fashion. And an overcoat was an expensive item that might cost as much as $40, back when wages were a dollar or two a day.
The overcoat’s value turned this simple crime into “grand larceny” – and Ross Raymond was convicted.
Now just 22 or 23 years old, he was sent off to Sing Sing, New York’s state prison, an imposing edifice beside the Hudson River whose stone walls had been quarried by the prisoners themselves.
If the judge hoped that experience would cause Ross Raymond to turn over a new leaf, he would have been sorely disappointed. By 1875, Raymond was out – and finding new and ever-more-creative ways to make a buck. Once again he turned to newspaper work. But once again, honesty was not his hallmark.
To the Baltimore American, he submitted a detailed and dramatic account of the “Point of Rocks” railroad bridge disaster that won him accolades – until the editor discovered the entire piece was fiction; Raymond hadn’t actually observed the accident.
Next, he wangled a job as a reporter for two newspapers in Chicago, leaving town about 1877 with his payroll account overdrawn. Moving on to Philadelphia, he secured employment at the Philadelphia Times by pretending connections with prominent London papers, and presenting forged letters of recommendation from Benjamin Disraeli and other prominent British luminaries.
Raymond did apparently manage to secure one incredible scoop while working at the Philadelphia Times, writing in great detail about the wedding of William Waldorf Astor and Mary Dahlgren Paul on June 6, 1878. It was a choice piece of gossip; this was one of the great society marriages of the Gilded Age. But with the ceremony taking place at the bride’s family residence, media and reporters were definitely not invited.
Raymond, however, didn’t take “no” for an answer. After learning that a Hungarian orchestra had been engaged for the occasion, he procured a trombone and pretended to become part of the band, moving the slide back and forth like a pro and “blowing himself red in the face.” From details about the bride’s and groom’s clothing to a long list of attendees, every nuance he observed went into his covertly-obtained newspaper story.
Raymond got himself fired from the Philadelphia Times when his sensational interview with prominent British actor Charles Fechter triggered a libel suit against the paper. But before long, he was back in New York, this time working as a reporter for the New York Herald. And New York City is where the Census of 1880 found him, living at 335 East 18th Street, with a wife named Elizabeth (though it’s unclear whether this was the same woman as heiress “Lizzie Linderman”).
When President Garfield was shot in July, 1881, it was one of the biggest news of the day, and Raymond leaped at the opportunity to cover it. He persuaded his New York paper to send him to Washington, D.C., then to Long Branch, the Gilded Age seacoast resort where Garfield was transferred. Sadly, the sea air didn’t help; Garfield passed away on September 19. But, using his company expense account, Raymond “lived like a prince” for a couple of months, racking up enormous bills – and submitting them for reimbursement twice.
Despite his ostensible marriage to Elizabeth, and in the midst of that lengthy “reporting” on Garfield, Raymond somehow found time to get married again – this time wedding freshly-widowed Emma S. Newpher in New York City on August 3, 1881 (though she would soon leave him, after discovering his “swindling ways.”) In the midst of all that drama, Raymond also managed to publish a novel, “No Laggards We” – though later accounts suggested the manuscript may have been written by someone else.
An amazingly lengthy succession of fresh criminal antics followed, as Raymond defrauded businessmen and hotel-keepers from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati, and Boston to Tennessee. To some, he claimed to be the son of a British naval officer. To others, he touted himself as a journalist. There was always a story; and it always involved him walking away with a small “loan.” By March 1882, newspapers began warning citizens about his scams, noting that he was wanted in “nearly every large city of the Union.” And New Orleans would be where pretty new wife Emma finally left him.
Newspaper accounts suggest Raymond skipped bond in New York and turned up in Australia, dodging trouble there by fleeing again to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and finally the East Indies and Calcutta.
And that, dear reader, is hardly the end of Ross Raymond’s incredible tale. In India and Egypt, his antics became even more creative, and his life of crime took on what observers called “a sort of Arabian nights flavor.”
So stay tuned for Part 2 of Ross Raymond’s amazing story!
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