It was a queer kind of man hunt. The posse was made up of eminent historians, led by the Archivist of the U.S., Solon J. Buck. The man they were after was an obscure carpenter from Topeka, but he was regarded by some of them as the greatest historical forger in the U.S. To track him down, they employed lapidaries, metallurgists, and ink and paper experts.
Their prey was a wispy-haired old fellow named William F. Horn, who turned up in southwest Pennsylvania fifteen years ago with a set of documents he called the Horn Papers. They were full of surprising new findings about Pennsylvania in the 17005. Soon a series of articles, based on what he said were family diaries, began to appear in the Waynesburg (Pa.) Democrat Messenger. The diaries no longer existed; but Horn explained that he had made careful copies of them.
Lost Towns. The articles became the talk of the region. They described the massacre of 12,000 Indians in the Battle of Flint Top—a battle no one had ever heard of. They showed that Greene and Washington Counties included earlier and more important cities than Pittsburgh. He had maps and descriptions of Razortown and Augusta Town, two famous "lost" towns whose sites had baffled historians.
People followed him over hills and trails on his "historical walks," listened to his authoritative reports of early battles and settlements. He became top adviser to the local historical societies. He led a WPA expedition to look for lead marker plates, buried by the French in 1751 as claim to the land, and found two, just where he said they would be. The Greene County Historical Society thereupon appropriated $20,000 and worked nine years to put the Horn diaries and papers into a three-volume set.
Among those who received copies was Princeton's Librarian Julian P. Boyd. He read them with a skeptical eye, attacked them as "fabrications" and demanded an investigation by a committee of historians. Last week, the William & Mary Quarterly reported the committee's verdict.
The Evidence. Step by step, the committee had weighed the evidence. First of all, Horn's transcript was suspiciously complete to have been copied from diaries he had described as "moth-eaten" and partly illegible. The papers used phrases unknown in the 18th Century ("frontire spirit," "race hatred"). Horn's ancestors showed themselves ignorant of the Julian calendar, which was universally used in their day. Horn's maps and court dockets bore a 19th Century watermark and were written with a metal pen and in blue-black ink, unknown until 1836. The documents had been "aged," said the committee, probably with ammonia. As for the lead marker plates, the expedition's director admitted that Horn had found them himself, when the director was away. They, too, were fakes: metallurgists said the 18th Century French could not have used that type of lead.
The committee's verdict: the papers were spurious and Horn was a fraud. "Beyond a doubt," said the Quarterly, "they will become collectors' items . . . treasured with comparable fabrications on the grand scale." Why had the papers been forged? In Topeka last week, 77-year-old William Horn said nothing. His wife told newsmen that he had suffered a stroke. As to the Horn Papers, he was "no longer interested."