Frontier Journalist Fred Hart was a Man of Many Names

 

Austin in the late 1860s

   If former Reese River Reveille editor Fred Hart is known for anything today, it is for concocting the fictional Sazerac Lying Club for that Austin, Nevada newspaper in the early 1870s.

   For about four years, Hart regularly recounted the minutes of the local social club’s meetings in the pages of the Reveille—in spite of the fact that club did not actually exist. His tall tales of the club’s doings were so popular, in fact, that in 1878 he compiled them into a book that was successful enough to go into five printings.

   But the Sazerac Lying Club wasn’t Hart’s first literary invention. Several years earlier, in 1868, Hart began writing under a pen name—Van Jacquelin—when he contributed letters to the Reveille about promising mining activities in the White Pine Mining District.

   The use of a nom de plume was fairly common in Nevada newspapers during this period. A few years earlier, a young Virginia City newspaper reporter named Samuel Clemens had begun writing under the name, Mark Twain, while one of his co-workers, William Wright, wrote under the name Dan De Quille.

   By 1873, Hart had moved to Austin and become editor of the Reveille. In addition to his reporting for that paper, he also traveled to Carson City during the sessions of the Nevada State Legislature and reported on its activities for other publications. Here, he out-did Twain and De Quille by utilizing yet another pseudonym, Toby Green.

   In fact, during the 1873, 1875, and 1877 legislative sessions, Toby Green’s dispatches on state government activities appeared in the Gold Hill News, owned at the time by renowned newspaper editor Alfred Doten, as well as in several other Nevada newspapers.

   Perhaps feeling the freedom of writing under a pen name, Hart’s Green stories sometimes had a slightly sarcastic tone with an edge. He often poked fun at self-important legislators and mocked the tedious hearings.

   For example, in “Letter from the Capital,” which appeared in the News on January 14, 1873, Green wrote: “In the Senate today, Mr. Phelan [State Senator James Phelan of Storey County] gave notice of a bill providing for the appointment of an inspector of alcoholic liquors. If ever there was need of the creation of an office there is need in this instance.

   “Let a man take two drinks of ordinary Carson whisky and in five minutes afterward he’ll fancy that he owns the Capitol, the Warm Springs and the Mint. I think there ought to be a man—with a cast-iron, copper-bottomed stomach—whose duty shall be to examine this rotgut, and throw it ‘righd avay oud.’”

   Strangely, it appears that having two nom de plumes may not have been enough for Hart. In the February 26, 1875 edition of the Eureka Sentinel, a letter to the editor purportedly from a reader in Virginia City named “Quien Sabe,” which is Spanish for “who knows,” wrote of encountering Toby Green and Van Jacquelin.

   “I also saw Toby Green, the lively correspondent of the Gold Hill News. He was very agreeable and gentlemanly, and informed me that his full name was Tobias, but he signed Toby for shortness, and with the view of saving ink for the State. Good, economical soul, I shall never forget him.

   “On the second day I met Van Jacquelin, the racy correspondent of the Reese River Reveille, and was astonished at the resemblance he bears to Toby Green. He told me the likeness had been remarked by others, and modestly said that he thought that Toby was better looking than he was.

   “He informed me that he was a brother of Bret Harte, who is widely known as the author of a religious work called the ‘Heathen Chinee.’ He said his true name was Fred Hart, and that the final e was assumed by Bret as an aristrocratical appellation. Fred was not at all stuck up, but on the contrary was very affable and attentive to me.”

   From the tone and style of the letter, it’s pretty obvious that Quien Sabe most likely was another pen name for Fred Hart.

   But, as Quien Sabe might say—who knows?