Parker H. French

Parker Hardin French (1826 – 1878)[1] was an adventurer, entrepreneur, and swindler, labeled and chronicled by author Joe Goodbody as the “Kentucky Barracuda.” As a runaway child he fought as a member of the Royal Navy in the First Opium War as a cabin boy and a "powder monkey".

Before he was 30, he was the leader of an infamous and fraudulent gold rush expedition; implicated in an irregular invasion of Cuba; jailed bandit and then military hero in Mexico; lawyer, district attorney, legislator, journalist, and political enforcer in California; he was a real estate developer; lawyer; journalist; part of a conspiracy to invade Mexico; suspected seditionist agitator and Confederate agent; jailed as a political prisoner; and lawyer and purveyor for Union troops.

His final days were spent in obscurity but the period was still peppered with the occasional swindle that garnered both regional and national attention.

Though a notorious scoundrel in his time, notably from 1850 to 1862, French has been relegated to a minor footnote in antebellum America and Civil War history.

[2] Ned McGowan, who knew French in 1854 and 1855 in California, summarized his life in two newspapers articles in 1879;[3] Kenneth Johnson republished them with a commentary in 1958.

McGowan's version probably conflated a few different stories that Parker French told about his youth, and the account likely got distorted with time.

Hampered by lack of access to genealogical records and unassisted by the digital age, historians have accepted the McGowan version of French's early life.

Margaret, the daughter of Martin L. Hardin, was the progeny of a highly cultured, prominent, and powerful Kentucky family full of military heroes, lawyers, judges, and politicians.

Hardin treated the boy like a son, fostered his development and lifelong connections and provided the best education available to affluent antebellum Kentuckians.

Boosted by access to an extensive and valuable private library French inevitably acquired what the local paper described as a "disposition to roam.

[14][15] Before long, French – having granted himself the rank of "Captain" – had taken an office in the Tammany Building,[16] had placed ads in the newspapers, and had flyers printed describing his plan to lead an expedition to the gold fields of California for a fee of $250.

[17] One flyer began, "From NEW YORK to Port LAVACA, in Texas, by Steamship, thence by comfortable and easy wagon coaches ... over the gently swelling uplands of Western Texas," along the Gila River, down to the Colorado, and, finally, across "the magnificent plains of California" (the Colorado Desert) to San Francisco.

The government had delayed the departure for a week to search the ship seeking evidence of connections to a suspected forthcoming attack on Cuba led by López,[1] which, in fact, occurred the same day French and his group arrived at Havana harbor.

There, as he had in Victoria, French produced such papers as military orders, bank drafts, and an unlimited line of credit drawn on Howland and Aspinwell, a major New York shipping firm.

French bought a number of the wagons and mules from the owner, Ben Franklin Coons, for a promised payment of nearly $18,000.

[25] French arrived in El Paso a couple of days ahead of his wagon train, which finally got there on September 18.

But a frontiersman named Henry Skillman, riding hard out of San Antonio, reached El Paso near midnight the next day; time had run out for all of them.

[16][27] About three weeks after escaping the law, French led a dozen mounted men into a camp near Corralitos, Chihuahua, Mexico, where eight former expedition members had made their way from El Paso.

[24] The gunman may have been John Holmes, who later said, "My blood boiled, and snatching my rifle from my son's hands, without taking aim I shot French.

[29] A third man, Daniel Wright, had already attacked French with a Bowie knife, and the two were fighting in the dirt when Cooper or Holmes shot him.

Once back on his feet, he went to Durango and approached the governor of the state with a proposal to establish an American colony on the Gila, with the benefit of providing protection for the locals from Indian attacks.

The governor was interested and planned to raise $600,000 for the project, only to cancel it when Ben Coons came to town from El Paso and told of French's swindles.

The Hallowell was unable to resupply in Mazatlan and, on the morning of August 18, after 47 days of unfavorable wind out of Panama, somewhere off the coast of Baja, with its food stores nearly exhausted, a lookout sighted a clipper ship, the North America.

Captain Artell Austin [36][37] provided Noyes with twelve days provisions but refused French's offer of $40 to join the passengers aboard his ship.

French, a notorious criminal, found himself broke, friendless, and carrying all he owned in a remote, scarcely populated "cow county.

"[38][39][40][41] But by January, the land-grant dons who ran the county had appointed the smooth talking French as their District Attorney at $500 a year.

[45] He launched a Sacramento newspaper,[46] was shot in a bar (in the leg),[47] and decked a former governor in a fistfight,[48] in spite of being a very short, slight, one-armed man.

[6][58] French was living in Washington, D.C., by 1863, where he registered for the Civil War draft in July, describing himself as a 40-year-old lawyer with only one arm.

He was remarried to Rebecca Claggett in 1875 with whom he had a namesake son, Parker Hardin French Jr.[6] According to McGowan, who saw him in D.C. in the 1870s, he "appeared to be a perfect wreck of his former self,"[49] drinking himself to death with cocktails of whiskey and chloroform.

French died early in the morning of June 19, 1878, after becoming extremely ill with very painful "congestion and sepsis of the lungs and stomach.