The Fluid Identity of "Petrified Man"

Mark Twain's infamous 1862 hoax "Petrified Man" is in many respects a paradox—on the one hand, the slightest of squibs, a mere paragraph in length, yet simultaneously an Ur-text, the seed from which his literary career subsequently blossomed. Published anonymously some four months before the author first used his celebrated nom du plume in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise on 3 February 1863, Clemens could easily have disavowed or suppressed its existence, but in fact did just the opposite—repeatedly claiming ownership of the piece both in private and public. On 21 October 1862, for example, just two weeks after the hoax appeared, he wrote in a letter to his brother Orion, "between us now—did you see that squib of mine headed 'Petrified Man?'"¹ Far more significant, however, are three later declarations of authorship made between 1868 and 1875, which were published respectively in the Territorial Enterprise (as part of his "Letters from Washington" series), Galaxy, and Sketches, New and Old. In each of these texts, Twain uses "Petrified Man" as a vehicle for self-promotion, strategically spinning the story of the hoax's creation and subsequent reception as a means of mythicizing his western literary origins and touting his skills with language. To this end, his 1868 "Letter from Washington" nostalgically extols the imaginative license afforded by the casual, free-wheeling atmosphere of early territorial journalism—wherein "news" was routinely invented, unencumbered by considerations of accuracy or fact:

To find a petrified man, or break a stranger's leg, or cave an imaginary mine, or discover some dead Indians in a Gold Hill tunnel, or massacre a family at Dutch Nick's, were feats and calamities that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil Enterprise office was a ghastly factory of slaughter, mutilation, and general destruction in those days.²

Discussing the hoax two years later in the Galaxy, Twain's emphasis shifts away from the circumstances of its composition to the power of the written word to deceive a gullible public. Indeed, his claim about the "innocent good faith" with which "Petrified Man" was received and widely reprinted is so exaggerated that it qualifies as a meta-hoax:³ "Nobody ever perceived the satire . . . at all," he announces in mock despair; rather, the story was "copied and guilelessly glorified . . . and steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory, State after State, and land after land, till [it] swept the globe and culminated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august London Lancet."⁴ This tongue-in-cheek account of the text's ostensible "failure" of course attests to its resounding success as well as the ingenuity of its creator.

But "Petrified Man" may reveal more about Twain's literary identity than he consciously intended. Following the author's lead, scholars have long interpreted it as an ahistorical document, testimony to the play of Clemens' rich, unfettered imagination; however, I would like to propose an alternate reading, grounded in the volatile geopolitical reality of Nevada Territory in the early 1860s. The Comstock Lode had been discovered just three years before the hoax's publication, causing a rapid influx of Anglo-American fortune seekers into the Great Basin, settlers who displaced and eventually dispossessed indigenous tribes such as the Paiute, Washoe, and Shoshone. In 1862, this inexorable process was well underway but by no means complete; the Territory was a contested landscape, rife with interracial tension over competing claims of land usage and patrimony that periodically erupted into bloodshed, most notably during the Pyramid Lake War of 1860.⁵ When repositioned within this contemporary pattern of "persistent localized violence,"⁶ Twain's story of a mysterious stone man "glued to the bedrock upon which he sat, as with a cement of adamant" (ETS 159), discovered by a group of silver miners who seek to blast him from his rightful place using the latest western technology, assumes an uncannily iconographic quality. His joke—no longer idle—in fact serves to dramatize and advance the cultural script of manifest destiny.

The petrified man's identity is...