Frontier Nevada was Once a Hot Bed of Fake News

 

   One of the things that has always fascinated me about Nevada’s frontier journalism scene was the fact that many indulged in the art of the hoax.

   While the best-known practitioners of this were Mark Twain and Dan De Quille, who both worked at the legendary Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, there were a number of others who wrote equally witty, clever, or humorous works.

   My fascination, in fact, inspired me to write a new book, “Frontier Fake News: Nevada’s Sagebrush Humorists and Hoaxsters,” which was recently published by the University of Nevada Press.

   In the book, I traced the history of such fake news back to Benjamin Franklin, who once concocted an entire fake newspaper to trick the British, and then to New York newspaper writers in the early 19th century, who wrote about flying bat-people on the moon and other incredible topics.

   In Nevada, Twain and De Quille were among the most prolific hoaxsters, writing about fake massacres, petrified men, solar-powered armor, amazing traveling stones in eastern Nevada and other fantastic subjects.

   But there were, of course, others during that time who amused their readers with such things as the tale of a luminescent bush near Tuscarora that attracted the attention of the scientific community (longtime Tuscarora editor John Dennis) and the proceedings of a special social club devoted to prevarication (Austin editor Fred Hart’s famous Sazerac Lying Club).

   In the course of my research, I found a deep appreciation for the creative and very fake stories written by Carson City editor Sam Davis, the terrible but funny puns of peripatetic editor William J. Forbes, and the unbelievable accounts of an eastern California mining camp, written by the aptly-nicknamed “Lying” Jim Townsend.

   Newspaper hoaxes did not disappear after the 19th century but continued into the early 20th century in the pages of the San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times and, perhaps appropriately, in the revived Territorial Enterprise in the 1950s.

   It was in the latter paper that editor Bob Richards, with the blessing of owners Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, cooked up the idea of camel racing in Virginia City, which eventually became a real thing—sort of the tail wagging the dog, so to speak.

   I think the thing that impressed me most in writing this book was the enormous talent of Nevada’s 19th century ink-stained wretches (who, collectively, have been called the “Sagebrush School” of writers by many scholars).

   Mostly self-taught, they came to Nevada seeking riches and, after failing in the mines or other businesses, were gifted enough to use humor, hoaxes and side-eye writing to make a point about politics, life, or other higher-level matters.

   They fought with each other (in print), made-up, sometimes got drunk together, and crafted a style of writing that was quirky, memorable and substantial—and, I believe, we are all richer for them having done so.

   For more information about (or to order a copy of) “Frontier Fake News: Nevada’s Sagebrush Humorists and Hoaxsters,” go to the University of Nevada Press website, https://unpress.nevada.edu/9781647790868/.