SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 29 (of 78)
Stretching and Reporting the Truth (1862-1864)
Chapter 29
Stretching and Reporting the Truth (1862-1864)
So, I walked the one hundred thirty miles from the mining town of Aurora, on the California border, in pretty quick time and took the berth on the Territorial Enterprise.
I soon learned the style of writing the Enterprise wanted: definite, not vague; stirring rather than commonplace; and that suited me, as it turned out that the importance of veracity in my reporting was valued a distant second to interest, as entertainment was what the readers wanted.
I got into some hot water for some of the items I wrote, such as one where I reported the discovery of a petrified man out in the desert, in which I described in detail the position of his limbs which showed that he was thumbing his nose at the reader (which many did not understand, and fell for the hoax), and another about a man who massacred his own family in a shocking but completely implausible way.
Not all of my work there was of the creative sort. I covered actual news, too, and often it was of the violent, and even deadly, kind. Sometimes these affrays involved participants who were companions of mine. For example, in the spring of 1863, as I was writing a letter to my mother and sister, I heard five pistol shots down the street. As it was my duty to report the news, I interrupted the letter and went to see about it.
It turned out that those five shots had killed two of my friends, policemen who had died within three minutes after being shot through the heart by a murderous miscreant from Jackson County, Missouri.
EDITOR’S NOTES: It is likely that Twain did not actually walk the entire distance from Aurora to Virginia City, as he claims; the route was used by many ore wagons, and the odds that one of the drivers offered him a lift, and that he accepted it, seem pretty high.
“The Petrified Man” (1862) and the story of the massacred family, “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson” (1863) were the two most [in]famous of Twain’s Nevada “hoaxes.” In both cases, a careful reading would make it plain that the stories were incredible, yet they were still taken “at face value” by many readers, and considered in shockingly bad taste by those who lacked the intellect to discern that their legs were being given a good yank.
For example, here is how the pose of the “petrified man” was described:
...the attitude was pensive, the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the fore-finger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partly open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart.
As to “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson,” Twain finally felt compelled (or was compelled) to overtly admit that the story was a hoax, when he wrote the following “retraction” regarding it:
The story published in the Enterprise reciting the slaughter of a family near Empire was all a fiction. It was understood to be such by all acquainted with the locality in which the alleged affair occurred. In the first place, Empire City and Dutch Nick’s are one, and in the next there is no “great pine forest” nearer than the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Twain did not directly preach often, but typically couched his social criticisms in burlesques and satires. Nevertheless, enough people “saw through him” that he was given the sobriquets “Moralist of the Main” and “Sage of the Sagebrush.” Twain once called himself “The Moral Phenomenon.”
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.