Runthrough

Dane initiated the plot. George Haviland Barron, a former curator of American history at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, designed the plate and bought the brass at a nearby shipyard, where a worker cut the plate from modern brass with a modern guillotine shear. George Clark, an inventor, art critic, and appraiser, hammered the letters into the plate with a simple cold chisel. Clark told his wife that the "C.G."—later taken to stand for "Captain General"—before Drake's name was...