Regionalism and the Humanities

8. "With Powder Smoke and Profanity": Genre Conventions, Regional Identity, and the Palisade Gunfight Hoax

8. “With Powder Smoke and Profanity” Genre Conventions, Regional Identity, and the Palisade Gunfight Hoax nicolas s. witschi According to legend, when late-nineteenth-century travelers on the Central Pacific Railroad’s overland limited route stopped in the little Nevada town of Palisade on their way to Virginia City or even San Francisco, they found themselves, as often as not, in the middle of a gunfight. Drunken cowboys were calling each other out in the street to redress the tainted honor of a woman; Indians were either wreaking havoc with their scalping knives or being chased down and tied up; and freshly spilled blood could be seen all over the streets and railroad platform. However, what the westward-bound tourists usually did not know was that these gunfights were elaborately staged hoaxes put on by the townspeople (who eventually formed a Thespian Society to handle the logistics of the show). Evidently, these fake gunfights were designed to frighten travelers by exploiting their ingrained assumptions about the wild, wild West. As a newspaper reporter at the time put it, the excessive and grandiose frontier lawlessness evident in Palisade “would shame the author of a dime novel.”1 The sham or mock gunfights were also reportedly intended as entertainment for the people of Palisade, designed to provide the community with moments of tension- and anxiety-releasing laughter, in what was otherwise a typically arduous mining and ore-processing existence. These performances succeeded in granting to Palisade, for a time, the reputation 128 constructing pl ace of being the toughest town in the West; for those in the know, the repeated hoax made Palisade the funniest town in the West.2 The conventional imagery of the Wild West deployed in the Palisade gunfights is highly suggestive of the sort of frontier reenactments that, in more recent times, take place almost daily in every corner of the United States, from present-day Tombstone, Arizona, to Wild West City in Netcong, New Jersey (a mere forty-five miles west of midtown Manhattan), to the supersized theme parks of both Florida and California .3 However, the events in Palisade reportedly first occurred in the fall of 1876. This date indicates that less than a decade after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, which is to say, just as the great era of railroad tourism in the American West was getting underway , so, too, were dime novels and other popular genre forms already having their effect, particularly in how they defined the realness of a region and a historical period for both locals and visitors.4 A governing tautology that is implicit in many assumptions about representation and reality maintains that if a thing is going to represent something, that thing had better have some degree of resemblance to that which it represents. Very often, elements of the American West—such as objects, places, or people—are recognized as typically belonging to that region because they look “western.” Thus, items such as the cactus, the dusty cowboy, the feathered headdress–wearing Indian, and the expansive vistas of the desert Southwest become signifiers of a certain historical authenticity. Alex Nemerov, in writing about the visual arts of the late nineteenth century, observes that “any analysis of the image of the West must begin with the base of its ideological power: its accreted claims to realism. People from Remington ’s time to our own have taken his paintings and those of his contemporaries as the facts about the American West.”5 The same can be said of an appeal to realism that is endemic to a wide range of representations related to the West.6 Indeed, the complex negotiations of fact, genre, fiction, and authenticity that characterize both locals’ and tourists’ assumptions about the frontier have prompted Louis S. Warren to identify the postbellum, nineteenth-century West as “not just a region, or a place, but a subject in which fact and fiction had been “With Powder Smoke and Profanity” 129 so thoroughly mixed that the very idea of the Far West suggested deception , some of it entertaining.”7 In this world, hoaxes and historical facts ride side-by-side. Thus, the Palisade fake gunfights, with their deliberate deployment of the now-familiar icons of the Wild West, present an opportunity in the study of western American (self-)representation to explore the intersections of ostensibly realistic genre...