Court voids James Reavis's claim to 18,600 square miles of Arizona and New Mexico

By 1895, James Addison Reavis had spent years convincing railroad magnates, lawyers, and politicians that he owned a swath of Arizona and New Mexico the size of a small nation — roughly 18,600 square miles — based on a Spanish land grant he had largely invented. The U.S. Court of Private Land Claims, convened specifically to settle the tangled property questions left by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, heard his case and ruled the claim "wholly fictitious and fraudulent." Surveyor General Royal A. Johnson had already torn the forgeries apart, and in 1896 Reavis was convicted, fined $5,000, and sentenced to two years in prison — a modest punishment for a man who had collected an estimated $5.3 million from settlers and investors who believed he could evict them…