Drake's Fortune The Fabulous True Story of the World's Greatest Confidence Artist

ONE The Education of a Con Man Oscar Merrill Hartzell was a son of the prairie, of the American heartland, of Monmouth, a small city (even today the population is only nine thousand) in western Illinois that Abraham Lincoln visited often during the early years of his legal career. Wyatt Earp was born there in 1848, and it's where Ronald Reagan attended second grade in 1918. Hartzell, whose life would in its own way be as emblematically American, was born there on January 6, 1876. One of his grandfathers was a steamboat man. His father, John Henry Hartzell, came originally from Tiltensville, Ohio, but moved west when he was eighteen to work as a hired hand for Eliza Jane Shaw, a widow who had a farm outside Monmouth. John Henry Hartzell was quarrelsome and hot-tempered, but a hard worker, a capable farmer, and evidently a man who, even if he allowed one eye to stray in the direction of love, always kept the other fixed firmly on the main chance. On Christmas Day 1874, he married one of Eliza Jane Shaw's daughters, and with his wedding gift he bought his own small holding of twenty acres. Oscar, their first child, was born just over a year later in the one-room log cabin that John Hartzell had raised with his own hands. A daughter, Pearl May, soon followed, and then Emma Hartzell lost her third pregnancy during childbirth. The next child was yet another boy, Clinton, but here arises a confusion. Some records suggest that he was a natural birth, but Oscar would one day claim that Clinton was adopted. (Of this important divergence, more later.) The family was completed by the birth of Canfield, Oscar's youngest brother, in 1880. John Hartzell, the patriarch, was stable, steady, strict, a Protestant of German descent who lived a gospel of hard work and grasping thrift. Emma Hartzell was subsequently described as "the sweet, motherly type usually relied upon to guide her offspring in righteous paths." Unlike her husband, she was patient and indulgent, always ready to help Oscar with his homework (he was poor at grammar) or to press a cold cloth to his forehead if he had a headache. As a child he suffered from the usual ailments--measles, mumps, chickenpox--but was otherwise a healthy and robust boy. He was active and intelligent and considered of unusual promise. John Hartzell added to his land until he had more than four hundred acres and then built a new nine-room house. Oscar's room on the upper story had a view of the prairie. On his entry to the local country school in Cold Creek, his future seemed to be already written--he would follow his father, be a farmer. Oscar milked the cows before breakfast; he learned how to pierce the skin and bring relief to an animal that had eaten clover. When he stole a penknife at school, he was whipped for it. When he gambled, and won from his friends a pint pot full of pennies, he was whipped for it, and made to give back the pennies. When his schoolteacher said he was a born businessman who would be rich some day, his father was very proud and gave him a dollar. Oscar left school at sixteen to work on the farm. His father taught him how to castrate bulls, fatten them, and sell them as steers--Oscar's first experience of transformation and shape-shifting. His mother gave him a gold watch on his eighteenth birthday, for not chewing tobacco, and when John Hartzell took the rest of the family to the great Chicago World's Fair of 1893, Oscar opted instead to stay at home and look after the farm. As reward for this sacrifice he received a new buggy and a new riding harness; the buggy alone cost $80. "I think no one could have been more proud than I was. I went hell-for-leather over sense, riding that buggy like a madman twixt the farm and Monmouth," he wrote in his autobiography. This typical Western childhood even had its archetypal feud: the hard-nosed John Hartzell brought lawsuits against members of his wife's family toRayner, Richard is the author of 'Drake's Fortune The Fabulous True Story of the World's Greatest Confidence Artist' with ISBN 9780385499507 and ISBN 0385499507.