harum-scarum

I am working almost non-stop on coalescing my research.  I came across a very interesting assessment of David Vickers by a special examiner ordered to investigate his past upon his death and thougt I woudl share segments of it here:

"I have not been able to obtain anything more than a fragmentary history of soldier's life.  There are none of his relatives living in Camden….All had heard that he had married a Chilean wife and had left her, or she him.  The letter from his half sister, Mrs. Bates, gives one version of the separations.  There were various rumors that I heard, the one most common being that after losing his diplomatic post he had no means to support her, and he either left her on her sister, or she had to go to here sister for support.  One rumor had it that she left him in Philadelphia after he had purloined and disposed of some of her jewelry."

"Soldier is said to have been a very bright, intelligent, fine-looking , and fascinating man. But he was a high-roller & free-spender, one of the kind who would blow in forty or fifty dollars for a wine supper to friends, if it took his last dollar and he did not know where the next was to come from.  He was also a confirmed roué (A man devoted to a life of sensual pleasure; a debauchee; a rake), and I was told broke up at least two families in Camden while living there.  One man said he heard of his receiving three inheritances two of them running into the tens of thousands but he went through them in a  hurry.  As to whether he would have committed bigamy, there is a difference of opinion among his acquaintances.  It is conceded that the moral features would not have given him concern.  Some say that he would have been reckless enough while others say they think it improbable that a man of his experience and standing and knowing that tropical temperament of his wife, would have laid himself liable to the charge." 

"Of the Idaho claimant, none of his acquaintances had ever heard except his cousin, and he knew nothing as to her identify.  I made a careful search of the Philadelphia marriage records, and also the license records in Philadelphia & Montgomery Counties, but the name of David Vickers does not appear in the indexes. The stated license law, making obtaining of a license compulsory, went into effect in 1885.  The claimant does not hown whether a license was obtained and cannot produce even a marriage certificate. I thought is was worth while to look into her antecedents, and found her mother one of the most ignorant and unintelligent Pennsylvania Dutch women I ever came across.  I asked her if she was a widow, and she replied "No, she had never been married," and told me that Amos Tyson, whom claimant named as her father, was her mother's father."

"Coming from such a house and parentage, and a soldering being the kind of man he was, it is not too violent a strain on the imagainat8ion to suppose, in absence of proof to the contrary, that there was no marriage ceremony between them (By the way, her mother says her name is Ella not Helen). She must have been an intelligent, adaptable, woman to have fitted into the life of a man like Vickers who, whatever his faults, would have required a woman of brains to hold him loyal for twenty years."

I'll leave it to you to determine why entitled this harum-scarum