Unnameable Media

Series

The Latta Connection

Counterfeiters, blacklegs, horse thieves, steam engines and limestone: one surname followed across the criminal and industrial Midwest.

10 parts, about 2 hr 21 min of reading. Start with part 1

  1. 1
    The Latta Connection: Counterfeit Money, Steam Power, Stone, and the Bonaparte Shadow Behind the American Midwest

    There is a man buried in Monroe, Wisconsin, whose name is Napoleon Bonaparte Latta, and that name is the easiest way into the larger story behind The Latta Connection. He belonged to the nineteenth-century counterfeiting world of…

    19 min read

  2. 2
    The Roads Beneath the Outlaws

    In 1851, Wabash County businessman Daniel Comstock confronted something considerably larger than a few men stealing horses from neighboring farms. A later county history described an organization of horse thieves, burglars, and…

    14 min read

  3. 3
    The Black Leg Gang and the Swamp Frontier

    Northern Indiana rarely enters the popular imagination as outlaw country. The familiar nineteenth-century picture is calmer: farms cut out of timber, small county seats, canals, mills, churches, rail depots, and towns slowly…

    11 min read

  4. 4
    Before the Fire Truck: Alexander Bonner Latta and the Birth of Steam Firefighting

    At left, the famous “Old Joe Ross,” the Cincinnati machine remembered as the first practical municipal steam fire engine. At right, a later Latta self-propelled design, showing how quickly the idea developed beyond the original…

    13 min read

  5. 5
    The Stone Beneath the Empire: How Indiana Limestone Became a National Power Business

    Historic views of Indiana limestone quarrying near Bedford. The scale is the first thing to notice: this was not somebody cutting decorative stone from a hillside. By the early twentieth century, southern Indiana was operating an…

    9 min read

  6. 6
    Napoleon Bonaparte Latta: Why a Midwestern Counterfeiter Carried an Emperor’s Name

    The world around Napoleon Bonaparte “Bone” Latta: an 1849 counterfeit detector, a nineteenth-century image of Napoleon, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, and Joseph Bonaparte’s Point Breeze estate in New Jersey. I have not found a…

    11 min read

  7. 7
    The Latta Gang: Horse Power, Blacklegs, and the Criminal Economy of the Wabash

    Before Indiana had railroads, automobiles, federal agents, or a modern police bureaucracy, its economy moved on animal muscle. Along the Wabash and Maumee corridor, horses were transportation, machinery, freight power, military…

    20 min read

  8. 8
    Latta Money: Blacklegs, the St. Joseph Counterfeiters, and the Indiana Road Into Lincoln’s Counterfeiters

    Andrea Nolen’s Lincoln’s Counterfeiters takes Napoleon Bonaparte “Bone” Latta out of the realm of Wisconsin local legend and places him inside a much larger nineteenth-century financial underground. Her book argues that the…

    18 min read

  9. 9
    Latta Roads: Horse Thieves, Toll Gates, Steam Power, and the Making of the Modern Midwest

    In nineteenth-century Indiana, the road decided who reached the canal, who paid the toll, and which horse thief got away. A century later the same problem of movement ran through railroads, asphalt plants, bicycle patents…

    17 min read

  10. 10
    From Bonelatta to Napoleoniana: The Two Ends of the Latta Story

    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…

    9 min read