The disappearing Colonel

EDMUND PEARSON

■ Colonel Walton Dwight was the kind of colonel who is always called "doughty". Importance surrounded him like a golden haze; in his presence a turkey-cock would seem to be suffering from an inferiority complex.

The Colonel appeared in Binghamton, N. Y., at the close of the Civil War. He rose six feet, three inches, from the ground, and he weighed 225 pounds. His beard, at that time, was long and blond and wavy. He was robust in health and hearty in manner. The military title was no pretence: his career in the War had been distinguished; it included fourteen minor engagements and four great battles. At last, severely wounded at Gettysburg, he retired from the army, married the rich Miss Deusenberry, and looked about him for the triumphs of business and politics.

I always see Colonel Dwight, at this period, as the central figure and hero of a Currier and Ives print. Let it be Winter Sport, and there he is, driving a fast pair of long-tailed horses along a snow-covered road. His fur coat and cap are regal in their magnificence; they indicate the opulence of the 1870's. If the picture is American Home Life in the Country, there he is again, with his jig-saw house, the artificial pond, the croquet lawn, and the big, bursting barn.

■ In and about Binghamton, the earth shook beneath his tread. His clients and his lietors referred to him as a "splendid fellow"; and his own description of himself was as a man accustomed "to bore with a big auger".

When he was but twenty-eight he wished f.o raise $300,000. to buy timber lands in Canada. He approached those whom an irreverent writer calls "the cautious fossils" of the Broome County Bank, and such was his magic that they let him have the money. He became a dealer in manufactured lumber, a mine operator in Pennsylvania, a landlord in Chicago, and the owner of Canadian forests.

For other activities, the Colonel built a section of the city, called Dwightsville (no longer so called, I think) and put up a grand hotel, the Dwight House, with fifty cottages. He was Mayor of Binghamton about 1871.

Now, there were certain privileges in ruling over the city at that period. One of them was that it might have brought him into contact with the Herr Dr. Rulloff, who had temporarily abandoned the study of philology in New York to engage in a little burglary and murder in Binghamton. Yet the learned historian of the region is coy, almost to the point of studied reticence, in his admission that Colonel Dwight once wore the robes of the Lord Mayor's office. The reason for this must be found in some events of later years, particularly on the last night of all: the bizarre and much discussed death-bed scene of the mighty Colonel.

The time was a midnight of November, when, as the Shropshire Lad has noted, "Dead Man's Fair is nigh." The Lad goes on, in a manner almost reminiscent of the astonishing mystery of Colonel Dwight, to observe: "The living are the living, And dead the dead will stay, And I will sort with comrades That face the beam of day." It was to solve the problem, which were the dead, and which the living, and where on earth, or under it, was Colonel Dwight, anyhow, that agitated dozens of lawyers and doctors for many years. There are at least four theories as to what happened on that night of November 15, 1878. Let us take them in order, the plain and prosaic ones first, rising to the odd and romantic.

It was all very sad and simple, said the friends and retainers and heirs of the Colonel. That officer and gentleman, having with forethought insured his life, passed away from the effects of gastric fever, at the untimely age of forty-one. And, with certain honourable exceptions, the insurance companies chose to enact the roles of an obscene flock of vultures, and to repudiate their just debts to the bereaved family.

Not so; not so, at all, returned a great swarm of insurance companies, about twenty of them. They kept up their contention, by legal methods, until, at last, the whole case was exposed in Court, at Norwich, in 1883. And still, when gray-bearded insurance officials gather round a winter's fire, the tale is told, of how the Germania Company fought the good fight, in the brave days of old.

They raked up some curious facts. It is denied by nobody that the Colonel's vast financial operations went to smash, not long after the term as mayor. He spent all his own fortune, whatever that was; all of his wife's, which was considerable; and accumulated a grand total deficit of $400,000. The elder Deusenberry, with a fine gesture, offered him a check for quarter of a million; and the Colonel, equally magnificent, declined it.

In the summer, less than six months before the event which some persons described, with the sarcastic aid of quotation marks, as the Colonel's "death", he became very active. He had been discharged from bankruptcy, and any payments of money on insurance policies, for instance, would fall to his heirs, and not to his creditors. With the grandeur of him who always wielded the big auger, he applied to every insurance company in the country but one. Why he discriminated against this company, which was in California, I cannot discover. Twenty-one companies accepted the risk and the sum on the Colonel's life was not less than $390,000. and is sometimes given as $420,000.

His other actions were alarming. He repeatedly swam the Susquehanna River in cold weather, at peril of pneumonia; and he engaged, during October, in a long and fatiguing hunt in the woods and hills around Windsor, N. Y. He also took large doses of morphia and gelsemium. These things laid the foundation for a strange suspicion that he had been trying, heroically but illegally, to destroy himself and thereby enrich his heirs.

His celebrated death-bed was spread for him in a room in one of the Binghamton hotels—not the Dwight House. Here on the last day of his life he was able to be up and dressed, to receive friends, execute legal papers, and, most oddly, to sacrifice that source of pride and glory, his hair and beard. A barber came and shore them quite away.

A gentleman named Hull was the only person present when the soul of the great Colonel passed from earth. This was an unfortunate fact, and the name was doubly unfortunate, since another Hull of Binghamton had recently been exploiting some colossal but spurious human remains, known as the Cardiff Giant.

The chief contention of the insurance men, led in the test case by the Germania Company, and speaking through physicians who performed the autopsy, was that the body produced for their inspection had come to death from strangulation —that is, through hanging. This suggests that the Colonel, with or without the connivance of Mr. Hull, arose at some time during the evening, and hanged himself to his bed-post. Descriptions of the bed-post have been furnished, to show that it was adequate for the purpose.

The Colonel's will needs much more explaining than his heirs seemed to offer. Its public bequests were many and lavish. A thousand dollars for an annual dinner for newspapermen, and $7500. for the public library shall never be condemned in my presence. Nor have I fault to find with $10,000. for an annual Christmas dinner for the poor, or $3000. for the firemen. But $5000. for the Coroner who was to view the body, and $10,000. for the Surrogate who was to pass upon the will—these would plant suspicion in the mind of a saint.

(Continued on page 102)

(Continued from page 67)

It should be said that either one, or two, companies, including the Equitable of New York, after investigation, paid the full amount of their policies—$50,000. This money must have been useful in the long-drawnout litigation which had followed. In the end, the Germania won its test case, on appeal, but the decision did not concern the main point of interest. The Colonel's estate lost, because of false statements which he had made in his applications. The other suits were finally compromised on payment of about $2000. each. Meagre moral victories these were for the estate, with many of the Binghamtonites dissenting from the word "moral".

Now for the more picturesque theories. The first and less romantic of the two was that Colonel Dwight slipped out of the back door, on that doleful night, and that Mr. Hull, or somebody, fetched in an ersatz Colonel, who happened to be in the neighborhood, conveniently deceased. To discover a dead man capable of duplicating the Colonel's glorious proportions would assuredly need some doing. But the adherents of this theory point to the mysterious clean shave procured by the chief conspirator that morning, and suggest that he had been told that it was necessary, since his understudy was not suitably bewhiskered. The loss of the beard would also be convenient, as a disguise during flight. This flight, they said, led to Mexico or South America, and there were men who offered, if suitably rewarded, to go down into these countries, and fetch the Colonel back, alive.

The ultra-romantic seized upon the gelsemium as the clew to the mystery. This drug, so they asserted, could produce suspended animation and a semblance of death. It had the properties of the liquid swallowed by Juliet when she wished to seem to die, and the Colonel had used, or attempted to use it, for the same purpose. The chief trouble with the theory is the difficulty of imagining Colonel Dwight as Juliet in the tomb of the Capulets.

The disappearance theory and the substitute body have the greatest attraction for me. Ordinarily I am opposed to painting the lily and bringing extra elements of romance into such cases. People sometimes comment with chill disapproval on my failure to inject fiction into the painfully veracious histories which I strive to record. It is contrary to my usual inclination, therefore, when I say that it seems to me likely that the Colonel chose to sort with comrades that faced the beam of day. First, there is the will, which plainly indicates a plan for some kind of hocus-pocus. Second, there appeared at the trial a physician of high repute and long experience, Dr. John Swinburne, at one time mayor of Albany. He said, under oath, and could not be confuted, that the body at the autopsy was not, in his opinion, the body of Colonel Dwight.

For these reasons and also because it offends my sensibilities to hear of so splendid a creature going down into the grave at the age of forty-one, I prefer to fancy the Colonel, at Tia Juana (or its equivalent), living the much-praised life of Riley.