Kimberly Harper, author of Men of No Reputation: Robert Boatright, the Buckfoot Gang, and the Fleecing of Middle America, talked with Kate Carpenter on the Drafting the Past podcast about “how some key mentors helped her find her way as a historian and writer, how she is learning to balance her day job, writing, and family life, and how you deal with sources for a book in which everyone is lying.”
Listen to the Podcast here, or find it wherever you find podcasts.
Swindler. Murderer. Scoundrel. Robert Boatright was one of Middle America’s greatest confidence men. Although little remembered today, his story provides a rare glimpse into America’s criminal past. Working in concert with a local bank and an influential Democratic boss, “this dean of modern confidence men” and his colorful confederacy of con men known as the Buckfoot Gang seemed untouchable. A series of missteps, however, led to a string of court cases across the country that brought Boatright’s own criminal enterprise to an end. And yet, the con continued: Boatright’s successor, John C. Mabray, and his cronies, many of whom had been in the Buckfoot Gang, preyed upon victims across North America in one of the largest midwestern criminal syndicates in history before they were brought to heel.
Like the works of Sinclair Lewis, Boatright’s story exposes a rift in the wholesome midwestern stereotype and furthers our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American society.
Kimberly Harper earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Arkansas. She received the Missouri Humanities Council’s Distinguished Achievement in Literature (Non-Fiction) Award for her book White Man’s Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894–1909.