Via Newspapers.com

Crimes are often remarkably mundane and unimaginative, so when I come across a story where a lawbreaker thinks outside the box--such as, say, by enlisting a cicada as a robbery accomplice--you can bet I’ll take notice.  The “Cincinnati Post,” June 5, 1987:

A 17-year-old cicada may have been coerced into a life of crime.

Cincinnati Police are investigating whether a cicada was an accomplice in a heist Thursday afternoon at the Grand Slam restaurant, 4909 Whetsel Avenue, in Madisonville.

Two men walked into the restaurant at about 3 p.m. Thursday brandishing a cicada, police said.

The men thrust the cicada at a 22-year-old cashier, and the bug flew into the cashier’s hair, said cook Tom Johnson.  Screaming, the cashier abandoned her post and ran into the kitchen screaming, Johnson said.

In the ensuing melee, the two men fled the restaurant.  Johnson came to the aid of his co-worker.

As for the cicada:  “I stepped on it,” Johnson said.

Later, after the cashier had recovered and returned to her post, she found her cash register was missing $25.  Suspicion immediately fell on the two men and the cicada, although police said no one actually saw the trio take anything.

The identification of the cicada has not been released.

Alas, if a story seems too good to be true, it’s usually neither good nor true.  The “Loveland Herald,” June 23, 2021:

The story has haunted her for nearly 35 years. Robbery while threatened by a cicada. Marquisa Kellogg just can’t shake it. 

Kellogg’s name was in papers and magazines all over the country in 1987. A brief police account of her story spread just as quickly as Brood X did that year.

Dateline Cincinnati: Two men armed with a cicada are suspected of stealing $25 from a restaurant’s cash register after using the winged insect to briefly scare away the cashier, police say. The two men walked into the Grand Slam Restaurant brandishing a cicada. They thrust the bug at the cashier, Marquisa Kellogg, 22, who then fled from her post, police said. Later, after Kellogg had recovered and returned to the register, she found that it was missing $25. 

If it had happened today, we would say the story went viral.  At least 60 newspapers picked up the story. 

“One magazine had a cicada with a little gun saying, ‘Stick ‘em up!’” Kellogg said. 

She now works for a doctor. She was raised in Madisonville where the Grand Slam used to sit. She moved to California, then South Carolina, then back home.  She now lives in her childhood home. 

“Today, I’m the girl who gets the cicadas off people,” she said. 

She finds humor in the story now, at 56, but she didn’t always. 

“You want the truth? Or do you want the lie?” Kellogg told The Enquirer. “I remember the entire thing.” 

The problem, she said, is the story that everyone laughed about isn’t what it seemed.

Not long before the incident, Kellogg said, she was sitting outside the restaurant with a friend when she decided to play a prank on him. She grabbed a fist full of cicadas and put them on his back. He screamed. 

“He went crazy, like any ordinary human would,” Kellogg said. 

Still laughing, she went back inside the restaurant to wait on two customers, men she knew, friends (or so she thought) from the neighborhood.

She served them their cheese coneys and was cashing them out when her friend returned to exact his revenge. 

Boom. He throws a handful of cicadas straight into her face and runs off. 

“I took off running like OJ in the airport,” Kellogg said, referring to the 1978 rental car commercial. “I completely forgot the register was open.  I ran like a bat out of hell.” 

When she returned, she noticed the bills were not straight in her drawer. She asked the two men at the counter if they had taken anything, but they denied it. 

She counted out the money in front of them and came up $25 short. When they still wouldn’t own up to what happened, she called the police and reported a robbery. 

And here the story turned into what it became. At best it was a cicada-assisted robbery, but what came out in the police report and, later, in news coverage was an image of two masked bandits wielding red-eyed, buzzing, six-legged insects instead of six-shooters.

“That officer put two stories into one and the joke was on me,” Kellogg said. “He heard, but he wasn’t listening. It was a joke to him.” 

She said she thinks the officer was paid for the story and said if she could track him down she ought to sue him for half his pension “for putting me through all this embarrassment all these years.” 

She said her friend, who goes by Squeaky, even made shirts. The shirts have a picture of a cicada, but instead of the cicada’s face, it’s Squeaky’s face. 

“I’m the butt of the joke,” she said, but as time has passed her mood about the situation has lightened.  She says she even tells the story to her patients now to get them laughing. They’ll often look it up on their phones right then and they can’t believe it, she said. 

She’s been enjoying this summer seeing the grandchildren of the insects that once brought her national attention. 

But she wants everyone to know, she is not afraid of cicadas, especially just one of them. A face full of any bug is enough to freak someone out.

“The only thing I’m scared of is something with eight legs,” Kellogg said. “You can have the whole restaurant if you have eight legs.”

As a side note, one has to salute Ms. Kellogg.  I’m willing to bet she is the only person in human history to gain fame for allegedly being robbed by an insect.

“Cattle Kate” Watson was one of early Wyoming’s most scandalous outlaws. She was a prostitute, a cattle thief, and a mean, aggressive Amazon who would beat you up as soon as look at you. She was, in short, a public menace. In 1889, her harassed neighbors finally had had enough, and resorted to classic rough frontier justice. Watson, along with her equally disreputable husband/pimp, were captured and strung up. No one mourned them.

It is a colorful story, one which made Watson one of the Old West’s most famous villains. There is just one problem: not one of the “historical facts” listed above is even close to being true.

Aside, unfortunately, for the lynching part.

Ellen Watson was born in Ontario in July 1860. When she was 17, her large family--she was the eldest of ten surviving children--moved to Lebanon, Kansas. Soon afterward, Watson began to work as housekeeper for one H.R. Stone. In 1879, she married a farm laborer named William A. Pickell. During this period, she was described as a tall, solidly-built woman with a pronounced accent inherited from her Scottish parents.

Unfortunately, Ellen’s marriage was a disaster practically from the start. Pickell was an alcoholic who treated his wife with great emotional and physical brutality. In early 1883, Ellen finally had enough, and fled to her parents. Pickell followed her and tried to force her to return to him, but Ellen’s father put such a scare into him, he decided it was wisest to leave Ellen’s life for good.

Finally a free woman again, Ellen moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where she made her liberation official with a divorce. She then went to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she worked as a cook and seamstress. As Cheyenne proved to not be to her liking, Ellen--who seems to have had a decidedly restless and independent personality--moved on to Rawlins, Wyoming, where she found work in the town’s main boarding place, the Rawlins House.

In early 1886, one James Averell claimed land along the Sweetwater River, where he opened a restaurant and general store. He hired Watson as a cook. Several months later, James and Ellen applied for a marriage license. Although there is no proof the pair actually wed, historians have surmised that they did make their relationship legal, but kept it a secret so that Ellen could apply for land through the Homestead Act. (This 1862 legislation allowed women to buy 160 acres of land, but only if they were unmarried.) In May 1888, Ellen filed a homestead claim to land adjacent to her sub rosa spouse. She lived in a small cabin on the property, where she supplemented her income by doing sewing for the many cowboys who passed through the area.

When she had saved enough money, Watson began accumulating a small herd of cattle. Although she never could have dreamed it at the time, this investment was to prove her undoing. It was a tricky time to be a small-scale rancher. At the time, it was common for cattle owners to graze their animals on public land. However, in 1872, owners of the larger ranches came together to create the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, and claimed rights to the open range. In the terrible winter of 1880-81, cattle were unable to get enough grass. As a result, ranchers began growing hay to feed their animals in winter. This meant that in this generally arid land, water suddenly became a particularly precious resource. And the land claimed by Ellen and her husband contained one mile of Horse Creek. Thus, the formerly humble Watson/Averell property suddenly became of great value. A wealthy rancher named Albert Bothwell made numerous offers to buy this land from them, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. Averell and Ellen began to prosper. James became postmaster, a notary public, a justice of the peace and an election judge. This hardly fits the popular image of Averell as a pimp, outlaw, and cattle thief.

Inevitably, the WSGA used their newfound self-created power to crowd outsiders out of the ranching business. They used their influence to pass a law decreeing that all unbranded calves automatically became WSGA property. They limited independent ranchers from bidding at auctions, and announced that all cattle owners, no matter how small, must have a registered brand. Naturally, they also engineered it so that the cost of these brands was so high that few could afford it. Additionally, the WSGA had the power to have brand applications either accepted or rejected. This all went just about the way you would think.

Watson and Averell filed five different brand applications, only to have them all thrown out. Finally, in 1889, Ellen bought a previously registered brand from a neighbor, John Crowder, and began branding her cattle. Although records show that she had bought only 28 cattle, she branded 41, leading historians to surmise that many of them were calves born in the wild (“mavericks”) which the WSGA considered to be rightfully theirs. Averell had also taken to writing a number of letters to local newspapers, exposing the corrupt practices of the WSGA and its campaign to stifle rival homesteaders.

In short, conditions were ripe for Ellen and her husband to have some sort of showdown with the more powerful ranchers. That showdown began taking place in July 1889, when Ellen filed for permission to build a water ditch to irrigate her land. This would mean less water from Horse Creek would be available to her neighbors, most particularly Albert Bothwell. Bothwell decided it was time to teach this upstart a lesson. He began--entirely unlawfully--fencing in parts of Ellen’s land, and began sending his workers over to harass her and Averell. The beleaguered couple--apparently tragically ignorant of just how far Bothwell was prepared to go--tried ignoring the persecution, and carried on with their lives as best they could.

On July 20, Bothwell had a meeting with other powerful ranchers, where he announced that he had evidence that Watson was a cattle rustler. In 19th century Wyoming, those were, quite literally, hanging words. Although some of Bothwell’s neighbors protested against his assertion that Watson and her partner must be lynched for this crime, five of them agreed.

Bothwell and his cohorts rode to Ellen’s ranch, where at gunpoint they forced her and Averell in their buckboard. Gene Crowder, a young boy who lived with the couple, saw what was happening and ran for help. Tragically, by the time he returned with a neighbor, Frank Buchanan, it was too late. Bothwell’s men began a gunfight that forced the would-be rescuers back long enough for Ellen and James to be hanged.

"San Francisco Examiner," July 23, 1889, via Newspapers.com.  Newspapers of the day--possibly deliberately--confused Watson with a notorious female desperado named Kate Maxwell.

Bothwell and his five co-murderers were arrested, but before their trial date, Gene Crowder--apparently warned that he would share Watson’s and Averell’s fate if he stuck around--fled town. Although Frank Buchanan had been taken into protective custody, he too disappeared. Whether he, like Crowder, ran for the hills or was murdered was never established. With both witnesses to the lynching now unavailable, the charges against Bothwell and his allies were dropped. Watson’s executor, George Durant, sued Bothwell and another of the lynch mob, John Durbin, accusing them of stealing Watson’s cattle and rebranding them as their own. The case was eventually dismissed. Bothwell wasted no time acquiring the properties of the couple he had murdered. He continued to prosper right up to the time he died in Los Angeles in the 1920s. And I’m willing to bet his conscience never pained him once.

After the couple was hanged, it was naturally advisable for Bothwell and his allies to come up with a good cover story. Even in the Old West, the ruthless murder of innocent people was frowned upon. Happily for them, the WSGA controlled all of the West’s major newspapers. Editors were given their instructions, and the lurid legend of thieving, whoring “Cattle Kate”--a name never given to her in life--was born. The lynching was explained in editorials as merely a “lawless but justifiable deed,” the sort of thing cattlemen were “forced” to do in order to protect their rightful property from desperadoes. In brief, the victims were asking for it. Averell’s brother, R.W. Cahill, tried to set the record straight, telling reporters that the lynching was “cruel and cold-blooded murder,” but he was ignored.

Given the choice between a good story and tedious truth, most will opt for the former. Increasingly colorful and fictitious accounts of Watson’s life spilled over from the newspapers into numerous Western TV shows, movies, and even so-called history books. The myth of “Cattle Kate” would possibly be reigning unchallenged to this day, if, in the late 20th century, a composer named George Hufsmith had not begun researching Watson for an opera he planned to write about her. He learned that the accepted history about Watson was, in his words, “pure fabrication.” Family and friends described Ellen Watson as brave, honest, hard-working, and generous. In the words of one acquaintance, Harry Ward, “Other women looked down on her in those days, but no matter what she was or did she had a big heart. Nobody went hungry around her.” Hufsmith eventually published the fruits of his groundbreaking research in his 1993 book, “The Wyoming Lynching of Cattle Kate.”

Although Watson’s and Averell's murderers were never brought to justice, perhaps history can give them some small measure of reparation.

Here lies what's left of liar Joe,
A truly gifted liar,
Who could outlie the liar below
In realms of flame fire.
He lied in life, in death he lies,
And if, his lies forgiven,
He made a landing in the skies,
He plays the lyre in heaven.
~mock obituary for Joseph Mulhattan that appeared in "The Cambrian" in 1901

Anyone who has spent even a brief amount of time looking through 19th century American newspapers quickly learns that they are full of highly entertaining, but utterly fictitious tales. The annoying truth is, the "better" the story is, the more likely that it was the work of a hoaxer.

If you yourself have read any of these tales, it may interest you to know that it was very likely the product of one man: Joseph Mulhattan, perhaps the most underrated practical joker in American history.

Mulhattan was born sometime around 1853 near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the late 1870s, he moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he got a job as a traveling salesman for a hardware manufacturer. He spent much of his time on the road, which, as it happened, gave him the ideal opportunity to pursue his unusual hobby. Mulhattan had a gift for writing, a warped sense of humor, and a fondness for alcohol. Combine those three qualities, and you have the perfect formula for mischief. He would enliven his travels by composing phony news items, ones that were both so outrageous and so seemingly sincere that they readily fooled people into thinking they were genuine. Mulhattan would send them off to various newspapers (most often the "Pittsburgh Leader" and the "Philadelphia Public Ledger,") secure in the knowledge that most newspapers cared little if a story was accurate, as long as it boosted circulation. Have you ever encountered old news accounts of Texas planters using monkeys to pick cotton? The petrified corpse of George Washington? The amazing crystal cave containing ancient mummies in stone coffins? The little girl who was carried away in the wind because she was holding a bundle of toy balloons? The largest meteor known to man falling in Texas? The discovery of the Star of Bethlehem? You can thank Joe Mulhattan for all of them.

Although he used various pseudonyms in his work, (most often "Orange Blossom,") word of his singular talent eventually spread, causing this once-obscure salesman to be lionized as "the greatest liar in America." In 1891, the "New York Times" described Mulhattan as "known in every city in the United States and has probably caused more trouble in newspaper offices than any other man in the country. His wild stories, written in the most plausible style, have more than once caused the special correspondents of the progressive journals of the United States to hurry from coast to coast to investigate some wonderful occurrence which only existed in the imagination of the great liar."

He even merited a place in Thomas W. Herringshaw's 1888 biographical dictionary, "Prominent Men and Women of the Day," where our hero shared space with the likes of Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Czar Alexander III:

In 1884, as a joke, Joseph Mulhattan was nominated for president of the United States, by the drummers' national convention, held in Louisville. Kentucky, on the ticket of the "business men's reform patty." 

Mr. Mulhattan professed not to regard his nomination as a joke, but spoke of it quite seriously. In an interview at the time he said: "There are two hundred and fifty thousand drummers in the United States, and though we do not expect a large vote this time, we shall make a good showing, and organize for the next campaign. This year we had to do everything inside of a week,and we did not have time to get properly organized. The drummers are good canvassers, and they will s t n m p the country from Maine to California; so, you will see, we shall have lots of stump speakers on the road. We may carry a state or two, and thus throw the election into the house, and in that case the present political parties will have to compromise with us. I have always been a democrat, but now I suppose I shall have to call myself the leader of the business men's reform party. In 1888 the drummers propose to down the bummers." 

...Mr. Mulhattan is a remarkably bright and clever business man, is genial and tender-hearted, sunny of disposition, truthful, excepting in joke, and a practical philanthropist. A year ago he organized the Kentucky humane society, and has worked hard since to promote the success of this benevolent enterprise. 

He is still a bachelor, having, as he says, refused all offers of marriage and never made one. In personal appearance tins ex-presidential candidate is very pleasing. He is a small, and shapely man, about five feet five inches in height, and weighing one hundred and thirty-five pounds. His hair and beard are dark, and heavy dark eye-brows reach across his nose. He speaks with astonishing rapidity, and is quick in all movements. His blue eyes give the impression of comprehensive observation. Slanderous attacks on Mulhattan would fail of their purpose; he is a good man, and is highly esteemed wherever he is known. 

The expression "the greatest liar in America," as applied to Mr. Mulhattan, must be understood with modification. It has been given him on account of the harmless weakness with which he beguiles the monotony of selling hardware all over the country east of the Rocky mountains. "Joe Mulhattan" is known everywhere in connection with the authorship of newspaper yarns as surprisingly clever and impossible as the creations of Baron Munchausen. They are as entirely harmless as brilliant in conception and treatment, such as only a pure-minded and educated gentleman of exceptional endowments can write As a rule they have been used without remuneration to the author, who has sometimes done graver work for the magazines and newspapers for pay, and with the conscientious regard for trustworthiness which characterizes ail Mr. Mulhattan's merely business operation. Apart from these his genius takes wing and indulges in flights which amaze by the sublime range of their unveracity. Hence the epithet applied to this American Munchausen, which he never resents, because his unassailable character as a business man and good citizens gives the proper limits to its application. 

"The champion liar of America,'' a variation in phraseology which some affect in speaking of this ex-presidential candidate, is credited with the enormous feat of "laying out" Tom Ochiltree, who, with characteristic chivalry, acknowledged his defeat. Threats were made of sending him to congress in Tom's place on this account, and he had to leave the district in order to avoid what was, at that time, an undesirable consummation. The story which produced such momentous results is briefly outlined as follows: A huge meteor fell from the heavens, crushing houses, people, cattle and trees by its stupendous weight. So enormous was its ponderosity that its fall imbedded it two hundred feet in the earth, and left seventy feet in height still exposed to the light of day. This meteor was red hot, blasting everything about it, and from huge fissures in its substance proceeded sulphurous gases of baneful strength. The Fort Worth Gazette published this incredible fabrication in collusion with its author. An associated press agent read the account, in his hunger for news swallowed it, and telegraphed it to the main office in New York, from whence it was distributed the length of the United States. The morning after its universal publication, the Gazette received one hundred and fourteen telegrams of inquiry respecting the alleged phenomenon, of which several were from Europe; and letters asking for further information poured into the office for months. Even more horrifying was the alleged discovery of five skeletons found in a carriage in a lonely place on the wild prairie of Texas. This little story had the distinction of being illustrated in several weekly publications, and is most devoutly believed by a great multitude which no man can number. 

When the readers meet with a circumstantial account of hidden rivers being found here or there, of vast bodies of water deep under ground, the haunts of eyeless sharks and whales and other monsters who swim in its waters of untold depth, upon which icebergs float, he is exhorted to think of Mulhattan; and the ethnologist and geologist are warned against believing all they see in newspapers about newly discovered works by prehistoric man. 

How many persuasively written and circumstantial fabrics of lies Mr. Mulhattan has written probably only their author knows. Recent oft-repeated accounts of John Wilkes Booth having been seen in many places, which have caused great excitement,had their origin "on the road;" and that biggest of all "sells," his "great national joke," as Mulhattan calls it, was characterized with his usual felicity of expression. Everybody remembers it, and the time of its origin, 1876. A proposal was published all over the country to remove the bodies of Washington and Lincoln to the centennial exhibition, and charge fifty cents a head to view them.

Modern-day aficionados of Mulhattan's work have made a parlor game of guessing which colorful old newspaper stories are really creations of The Master. The most intriguing theory is that Mulhattan invented the disappearance of "David Lang." Lang was purportedly a resident of Gallatin, Tennessee who vanished into thin air while crossing a field. The story became a staple of various popular Fortean books (most notably Frank Edwards' "Stranger Than Science.") It is only in recent years that the tale has conclusively been established as fiction, probably inspired by Ambrose Bierce's short story, "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field." No one knows for sure who first morphed Bierce's fiction into the supposedly factual "David Lang," but for many years a rumor has persisted in Tennessee that Mulhattan was behind the hoax. If so, it's probably his most influential achievement.

It is pleasant to note that on at least one occasion, this menace to the public prints was actually a force for good. In March 1888, Mulhattan read a small news item in the "Richmond Climax." It stated that a local plasterer named Patrick Cunningham was bitten by a snake. Fortunately, he was given an antidote to rub on his wound, with the result that Cunningham "limps a little yet, but will not die, although he was scared badly enough."

A nice little human-interest story. It appealed to Mulhattan. He thought that the tale just needed that little something extra. And he was more than willing to provide it.

A few days later, the "Lexington Transcript" printed the new and improved account of Cunningham and the snakes:

Lexington, KY., March 23.--The Transcript has received the following special dispatch from Richmond, Ky.: 

"Patrick Cunningham, of this place, is death to snakes and venomous reptiles of all kinds. The snake that bites him dies in great agony, frothing at the mouth and swelling to almost double its former proportions. Cunningham has discovered a poison more deadly than that of the reptile, but harmles as a lotion for the human body, and the moment the fangs of the snake come in contact with it a powerful electrical current is generated that drives the snake's own poison through every blood vessel in its body. Blood-poisoning is the result which, with the terrible electrical shock causes almost instant death. 

Cunningham killed during last summer over 17,000 snakes in Madison county, and realized quite a handsome sum by his wonderful skill in driving these offensive reptiles from the premises of our citizens."

The article described how Cunningham had discovered the "deadly lotion." He was born near Calcutta, India, while his parents were doing department work there for the English government. "It was in the jungles of India that Cunningham discovered from the natives the formula for making the deadly lotion, so fatal to poisonous reptiles...Cunningham says he will keep on killing and driving the snakes until there is not one in the state of Kentucky, if the people will pay him for it."

The report concluded, "I have stated in this article nothing but actual facts, without the slightest attempt at exaggeration. If any of your readers doubt in the least they can address Col. Shackleford, or Shackleford & Gentry; E.W. Wiggins, of Wiggins & Best; P.M. Pope, Mr. Willis, the postmaster, or any other reputable citizen of Richmond, or Mr. Cunningham himself, and they will find the statements herein made are nothing but wonderful facts, and they will find that in the matter of exterminating snakes from the soil of old Kentucky Mr. Patrick Cunningham is indeed the modern St. Patrick."

Mulhattan at work, "The Tennessean," March 23, 1888

The story was picked up by the wire services, and soon appeared in newspapers across the country. In Iowa, it was read by the administrator of the estate of a John Cunningham, a recently-deceased relation of Patrick. As it happened, this administrator was very anxious to find the now-famed snake-slayer, but until reading this article, had no idea how to get in touch. As John's nearest living relative, Patrick stood to inherit 3,000 acres of Iowa farmland. And this felicitous twist was all thanks to Joe Mulhattan.

Unless, of course, this sequel was yet another of the old fraud's taradiddles.

It is sad to say that Mulhattan could not invent any happy ending for his own personal story. His drinking gradually got out of control, to the point where, in 1901, he spent time in an Inebriate Asylum. Two months after his release, he was arrested for stealing money from a man in a saloon. The following year, he was found drunk and unconscious outside a Louisville hotel. In 1904, he was again arrested for stealing a coat. A reporter who saw him at this time wrote with what one can only hope was gross exaggeration, "This outcast, ragged, stuttering, downcast man is the same Joseph Mulhattan who ten years ago was the richest, most popular, and best commercial traveler in the United States... The purple and fine linen of his heyday are changed to noisome rags. He sits on a rickety bench, his smeared face in his dirty hands, his bleary eyes staring at the mud daubed shoes in which he has been tramping the streets and alleys of San Francisco. His nose is red and shriveled, his face and body bloated, his limbs dwindled and shaky, his hands like talons."

We know little about Mulhattan's final years, which is possibly just as well. The man who was once America's most famous prankster moved to Arizona, where he took up prospecting, with mixed success. On December 14, 1913, the "Bisbee Review" announced Mulhattan's appropriately outlandish death:

“The waters of the Gila river brought to a close Friday afternoon the career of Joe Mulhatton [sic], commonly regarded as the biggest liar in the world. Mulhatton, who has been mining a number of years in the vicinity of Kelvin, started to cross the Gila at that place late in the afternoon. The stream was swollen and Mulhatton was swept off his feet. Several persons on the ground saw him drown, powerless to give aid. His body was recovered a short distance below and buried a few hours later.”

Was this news report true? Or was Mulhattan hoaxing everyone right to the end?

I prefer to think the latter was the case.