Hawthorne's Forgotten Frontier Fake News Purveyor: Alfred McCarthy

   Several years ago, I wrote a book about Nevada’s 19th and early 20th century journalists who indulged in the art of writing hoaxes (“Frontier Fake News: Nevada’s Sagebrush Humorists and Hoaxsters”). While the best-known of these writers were Mark Twain and Dan DeQuille of Virginia City’s legendary Territorial Enterprise, the central Nevada community of Hawthorne once boasted its own hoaxster: Alfred J. McCarthy.

   McCarthy, in fact, had close connections to Virginia City—his brother was Denis E. McCarthy, co-owned the Territorial Enterprise for a time and, later, owned the Virginia Evening Chronicle.

   Alfred McCarthy began his newspaper career at the Territorial Enterprise and the Gold Hill News and later worked at the Sacramento Bee, Sacramento Union, San Francisco Chronicle, Sierra City Tribune, Virginia Evening Chronicle, and the Reno Evening Gazette. While working at the latter, he fell into ill health and, in 1888, moved to Hawthorne because he thought it would help him better recover.

   That year, he became editor of the local newspaper, the Walker Lake Bulletin, and in 1890, bought the paper. He would continue to edit and own the paper (except for a few years when his son, John, ran it) until it closed in 1926 due to a fire destroying its building.

   McCarthy’s primary hoax, published during his time with the Bulletin, involved promoting Walker Lake as the home to a massive sea serpent (which has been celebrated by the community over the years).

   While the idea that the lake was home to a large snake-like monster first appeared prior to McCarthy’s arrival in Hawthorne, he did his part to foster the legend during his tenure.

   The original story about the creature appeared in the August 1, 1883 edition of the Bulletin, under the headline, “The Sea Serpent In Walker Lake.”

   According to the article, “One day, about a year ago, two Indians, while fishing at the north end of the lake, were startled at seeing an immense sea serpent, with the regulation saucer-shaped eyes and barrel-shaped head, rise out of the water and, after lashing its tail in sport until the water for miles around turned into a sea of seething foam, suddenly, with a loud hissing sound, disappear.”

   The story went on to talk about the creature reappearing the next day and the local Native people seeing there were actually two of these monsters, who were fighting with each other. One was seriously wounded in the battle and ended up beached on the lake’s shore. The Indians decided to kill it to put it out of its misery.

   It concluded by noting the Indians presented the skeletal remains to a local man, Charley Kimball, who apparently measured the bones as being “exactly seventy-nine feet, seven inches and a quarter in length.”

   McCarthy’s contribution to keeping the legend alive was perhaps best acknowledged in the Bulletin with a short item on May 9, 1911: “The Bulletin is in receipt of a package of seeds from Congressman (Edwin E.) Roberts. The following note accompanied the seeds: ‘Through the courtesy of the Government, and for the feeding of that Walker Lake Sea Serpent, I am sending you a consignment of various kinds of bird seed. By the way, if you can catch a few of those young Sea Serpents, send them back to put among the Sea Reptiles in the National Museum. I am yours, E.E. Roberts.’”

   Additionally, an article in the March 8, 1914 Nevada State Journal, quoted one of McCarthy’s reporters, Frank Kinghorn, as noting that while his boss was a great newspaperman, he was also “the greatest bunch of contradictions ever assembled in one human frame.”

   To illustrate that point, Kinghorn claimed, “As a publisher of facts and reputed facts, he is absolutely truthful and fearless. As the originator of the Walker Lake sea serpent story, he is the most colossal faker that ever crossed the pike.”

   McCarthy, like many frontier editors, also carried on a long-standing “fake” feud with a rival newspaper editor, W.W. Booth of the Chloride Belt (McCarthy often mocked the paper with funny titles).

   For example, in a short item in the September 18, 1890 issue of the Bulletin, McCarthy wrote: “The Chloride Belly Band made an unusually silly spectacle of itself last week. It is bad enough ordinarily, but its last issue was a marvelous mixture of bad English and untruths. We always believed that ‘editor’ of that sheet to be an ass, but we did not know before that he was a malicious liar.”

   After the Bulletin shut down, McCarthy moved on to Yerington, where he joined his son in publishing the Yerington Times. In 1931, he sold that interest and relocated to Reno, where he lived until his death on November 5, 1938 at the age of 84.

   In his obituary in the Nevada State Journal, he was said to have been “well acquainted with Mark Twain and Dan DeQuille, both famous newspapermen of the Comstock Lode.” It was high praise indeed.

 

The Story of the Felling of Prometheus

  In the summer of 1964 a geography graduate student named Donald L. Currey, with permission from the U.S. Forest Service, cut down a bristlecone pine tree nicknamed Prometheus that was growing on the slopes of Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada. The tree turned out to be more than 4,900 years old, making it the oldest known tree (at the time) in the world.

  There are various stories explaining why Currey cut down the ancient tree. According to the National Park Service’s webpage, Currey was conducting research on ice age glaciology in the region and had originally been granted permission to take tree core samples from several bristlecones to determine the age of glacial features of the area where the trees were growing.

  “Currey was studying the different widths of the rings inside these bristlecone pines, which were believed to be over 4,000 years old, to determine patterns of good and bad growing seasons in the past. Because of their old age, these trees act as climatic vaults, storing thousands of years of weather data within their rings. This method of research is valuable to the study of climate change,” the site noted.

  Apparently, he took a sample from Prometheus and, according to one version of the story, his borer broke off in the tree. Another version claimed he didn’t know how to core such a large tree or that his borer was too short. And yet another version is that he decided he needed a full cross section of the tree to better examine the tree rings.

  Whatever the truth, which we may never know since Currey died in 2004 at the age of 70, Currey gained permission to cut down the tree.

  The result was that for many years, many believed, ironically, that Currey had chopped down the oldest living tree in the world to see how old it was.

  While Currey gave few interviews about the event during his lifetime, in 1998 he told reporter Carl T. Hall of the San Francisco Chronicle that he “knew it was a pretty old tree.” He said he didn’t know how old–or that it might be the oldest in the world—and assumed there were older trees living in the same grove.

  Currey, who later expressed deep regret for the felling of Prometheus, went on to have a successful academic career at the University of Utah, spending several decades researching and exploring ancient Lake Bonneville among other things. He also testified in the mid-1980s on behalf of the effort to create Great Basin National Park, which provided permanent protection for the bristlecone pines in the Snake Range.

  A few years after the felling of Prometheus, scientists discovered older bristlecone pine trees living in the White Mountains on the California-Nevada border. One, nicknamed Methuselah, is estimated to be some 5,065 years old and its believed there may be older ones that have not yet been dated.

  Visitors to Great Basin National Park hiking up the trail leading to the glacial cirque at the base of Wheeler Peak can pass through several small groves of bristlecone pines, many of which have been dated to being more than 3,500 years old. And tucked away, amidst the other majestic, twisted, unique bristlecone trees is a flat, decaying stump—all that remains of Prometheus.

  For more information about Prometheus, go to: https://www.nps.gov/grba/learn/historyculture/the-prometheus-story.htm. Additionally, author Jim Sloan’s 1993 excellent book, “Nevada: True Tales from the Neon Wilderness,” contains a chapter on the cutting down of Prometheus.