There is a remarkably clean nineteenth-century story hiding inside the Latta name. At one end stands Napoleon Bonaparte “Bone” Latta, the Wisconsin counterfeiter around whom the so-called Bonelatta Gang operated during the Civil War era. At the other stands William J. Latta of Philadelphia, who entered the Pennsylvania Railroad as a young telegraph operator, rose through its organization, and eventually assembled a Napoleon collection so large that the Anderson Galleries advertised it in 1913 as an “unequalled collection relating to Napoleon and the French Revolution.”
There is not presently enough evidence to say that these two men belonged to the same immediate Latta branch, and that distinction matters. The story does not need a secret genealogy to be worth telling. What survives in the record is stranger in its own way: one Latta literally carried Napoleon Bonaparte as his name while operating in the shadow economy of nineteenth-century money, and another Latta spent a career inside one of America’s great transportation systems before turning himself into a serious custodian of Napoleon’s material memory.
Between them sits much of the machinery of nineteenth-century America: counterfeit notes, horse-and-wagon distribution, railroads, telegraph wires, corporate offices, collecting, auctions, and the enormous cultural afterlife of Napoleon.
America Was Swimming in Bad Money
Bone Latta’s world makes more sense once the monetary situation of the mid-nineteenth century is understood. Before a stable national currency system was fully imposed, Americans encountered a bewildering mixture of bank notes whose authenticity and value could be difficult to determine far from the issuing bank. The U.S. Marshals Service estimates that by the 1860s roughly one-third of the currency in circulation was counterfeit. The Secret Service, created in 1865, was originally an anti-counterfeiting organization rather than a presidential-protection agency.
Counterfeiting consequently became an industry with its own division of labor. Skilled engravers or printers produced the paper; wholesalers moved it; specialized “passers” converted it into real money or goods. The Marshals Service notes that gangs could dominate particular regions while maintaining connections far outside them. That is exactly the sort of environment in which the Bonelatta operation appears.
Local historian Andrea Nolen has done the most sustained recent reconstruction of Napoleon Bonaparte Latta and the Monroe, Wisconsin network. Her work places the Latta family in the counterfeiting trade along the Michigan-Indiana border before Bone Latta’s operation shifted toward Monroe in the late 1850s. By 1871 newspapers were publicly identifying Napoleon Bonaparte Latta—also rendered “Boney” or “Bone” Latta—as the central figure in a substantial western counterfeit network. Federal archival records also preserve the criminal case involving Napoleon B. Latta, John Watson and William H. Watson, indicted for counterfeiting.
Some larger interpretations surrounding the gang remain disputed. Nolen has argued that the operation enjoyed political protection and had deeper relationships with Civil War-era Treasury and intelligence circles; she has also revised parts of her earlier account as additional evidence surfaced. Those arguments should be treated as her developing historical thesis rather than as established fact. The criminal network itself, Latta’s role in it, the federal prosecution and the surrounding counterfeiting economy are much firmer ground.
That distinction actually makes the story more useful. Bone Latta does not have to be turned into the center of a grand conspiracy. He already provides a documented example of how illicit money moved through the same ordinary infrastructure that moved legitimate commerce.
The Bonelatta Gang Was a Transportation Business
Counterfeiting is usually imagined as a printing problem. At scale, it was really a distribution problem.
Fake notes manufactured in one state were valuable only if somebody could move them into markets where merchants would accept them. That required roads, inns, horses, freight connections, railway stations, couriers and people capable of crossing jurisdictions faster than information about them could travel.
Nolen’s reconstruction of Bone Latta’s Monroe operation describes lookouts around the railway and carriage stations and meetings conducted through the ordinary commercial geography of the town. She also points out that Monroe’s developing railroad connections gave the area better access to Mississippi River routes and the broader western market. Whatever one makes of the more speculative political layer of her argument, the logistical point is strong: railroads changed the scale on which a counterfeiting network could operate.
This is where the Latta story becomes more interesting than another account of colorful nineteenth-century criminals. The technologies that made national commerce possible also made national crime possible. Telegraphy accelerated information; railroads accelerated people and paper; standardized national currency eventually made federal enforcement more powerful. The same infrastructure could carry the counterfeit note, the detective pursuing it, and the telegram identifying the suspect.
Bone Latta was arrested amid the federal crackdown of 1871. Nolen’s research traces his prosecution and subsequent imprisonment, followed by a presidential pardon under Rutherford B. Hayes several years later. The precise political significance of that pardon is open to interpretation, but the larger transition is unmistakable: the age in which locally organized counterfeit networks could exploit fragmented currency and slow communications was closing.
Then another William Latta appears in a completely different part of the country, working directly inside the infrastructure replacing that world.
William J. Latta Starts at the Telegraph Key
William James Latta was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1852. His family was already unusually close to the Pennsylvania Railroad. His father, William Sutton Latta, is identified in archival material as the railroad’s first surgeon. William’s brother Samuel Whitehill Latta later served as chief medical examiner of the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1886 to 1918.
William J. took the operational route.
The surviving Latta family papers say that he entered the Pennsylvania Railroad as a telegraph operator while still a young man, then moved upward through the company’s hierarchy until becoming a general agent. The more detailed family material dates his railroad service from the early 1870s through his retirement in 1899.
That is an extraordinary career path when placed beside the earlier Latta story. The telegraph operator occupied one of the nerve points of the new industrial system. Trains could not simply be made faster; they had to be coordinated. Orders, arrivals, departures, freight movements and emergencies increasingly depended upon electrical communication running alongside the rails.
William Latta therefore did not merely “work for a railroad.” He entered the combined railroad-telegraph apparatus at precisely the level where information was converted into movement.
By the 1890s his position was substantial enough that Pennsylvania’s official railroad reporting listed William J. Latta as a director of the Engelside Railroad Company, a Pennsylvania Railroad-operated corporation whose general office was at Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station.
The family archive preserved at Winterthur gives an unusually tactile picture of this life. There are railroad passes, baggage privileges, telegraph privileges, tickets, timetables, business correspondence and material associated with Broad Street Station. Even after retirement, Latta continued doing railway consulting work.
So the second major Latta in this story was not simply a wealthy gentleman who happened to like trains. His adult life had been constructed inside the communications and transportation system that helped destroy the older geographical advantages exploited by men such as Bone Latta.
Then comes the part that makes the whole story memorable.
Napoleon Comes Back
After William J. Latta left the Pennsylvania Railroad, he became known for an altogether different obsession: Napoleon Bonaparte.
Not a portrait over the fireplace. Not a shelf of biographies.
A collection.
By 1913 it was substantial enough for New York’s Anderson Galleries to issue a multi-part sale catalogue under the title The Unequalled Collection Relating to Napoleon and the French Revolution of William J. Latta. HathiTrust’s surviving catalog record describes four parts and lists prints, original drawings, autographs, books, medals, bronzes, snuff boxes and other works of art. Part I alone was scheduled for six afternoon and evening sessions on April 22, 23 and 24, 1913, with the material sold without reserve.
Winterthur’s Latta papers independently preserve the auction catalogues and describe the collection as containing letters, bronzes, portraits, caricatures, mezzotints, memoirs and other documents. Sales took place during 1913.
The collection was real enough, and dispersed widely enough, that pieces can still be traced.
McGill University’s Napoleon Collection, for example, holds a nineteenth-century print concerning Napoleon’s son, the King of Rome, whose provenance explicitly includes William J. Latta. That small catalog entry is an unusually satisfying piece of evidence because it lets an object from the great Latta sale be followed into a modern institutional Napoleon collection.
This was not casual enthusiasm. William Latta had become a collector of Napoleonic memory on an institutional scale.
And that leaves an unavoidable historical curiosity.
Napoleon Bonaparte Latta and the Latta Who Collected Bonaparte
One side of the story begins with a man whose actual name was Napoleon Bonaparte Latta.
The other culminates in a man named William J. Latta whose collection of Napoleoniana became important enough to merit a multi-volume auction catalogue and whose former objects can still be located in museum and university collections.
That does not establish that William J. Latta inherited Bone Latta’s papers, that they belonged to one close family line, or that the Latta surname conceals some undocumented Bonaparte descent. No reliable evidence presently justifies those conclusions.
But historians are allowed to notice patterns without pretending they have already explained them.
In this case, the pattern is unusually sharp. Napoleon appears at both ends of the Latta material, while the world connecting those ends moves from loosely controlled roads and counterfeit paper into centralized railroad schedules, telegraph communications and institutional archives.
The contrast is almost too good.
Bone Latta belonged to the world in which distance protected the criminal. William J. Latta belonged to the world that was eliminating distance.
One moved questionable paper through the transportation network.
The other helped operate the transportation network and later collected paper, portraits, medals and objects documenting the most famous imperial organizer of movement in modern European history.
From Bad Paper to Imperial Paper
There is another way of looking at the transition.
Bone Latta’s business depended upon the instability of paper value. A bank note was valuable because somebody believed the institution named on it would honor it. Counterfeiters lived inside the delay between appearance and verification.
William J. Latta’s railroad career belonged to a system designed to remove delay. Telegraph wires allowed distant stations to verify information almost instantaneously. Railroad companies imposed schedules, standardized procedures, paperwork, accounting and hierarchies over enormous areas.
Then, when William Latta became a collector, paper changed functions again. It was no longer counterfeit money trying to impersonate value. It became the letter, autograph, print, catalogue and historical document whose value came from provenance.
The Latta story therefore begins with paper whose origin had to be concealed and ends with paper whose origin had to be meticulously preserved.
That is a better connection than trying to force a genealogy that the evidence has not yet established.
The Latta Question Is Still Open
There remains plenty to investigate. The obvious task is genealogical: determine conclusively whether Napoleon Bonaparte Latta’s Midwestern family and William J. Latta’s Pennsylvania line ever converge further back. That needs probate files, land transactions, church records, census reconstruction and actual family documentation rather than surname matching.
But even if the answer ultimately turns out to be no, the historical juxtaposition survives.
Napoleon Bonaparte Latta is a documented figure in the Midwestern counterfeit economy. William J. Latta is a documented Pennsylvania Railroad man. William’s surviving papers document his telegraph and railroad career. Government records place him inside Pennsylvania Railroad-associated corporate management. His Napoleon collection is documented independently by Winterthur, HathiTrust’s 1913 auction catalog and objects now held by McGill.
That is already enough for a remarkable American story.
The Latta trail begins among counterfeiters moving bad money through the roads and rail junctions of the Old Northwest. Several decades later the same surname appears high inside the Pennsylvania Railroad, attached to a man who started at a telegraph key and ended his career surrounded by the relics of Napoleon Bonaparte.
From Bonelatta to Napoleoniana, the history is really about movement: who could move money, who could move information, who controlled the rails, and who finally got to preserve the papers after everyone else was gone.