Twain in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

From Archibald Henderson, Mark Twain (1910)

[38] === From Archibald Henderson, Mark Twain (1910) Dan De Quille De Quille reminisced elsewhere about another of Twain’s famous hoaxes, “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson,” published in the Territorial Enterprise on 28 October 1863. As Twain admitted at the time, “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” (Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 7 March 1868). mark twain was fond of manufacturing items of the horrible style, but on one occasion he overdid this business, and the disease worked its own cure. He wrote an account of a terrible murder, supposed to have occurred at “Dutch Nick’s,” a station on the Carson River, where Empire City now stands. He made a man cut his wife’s throat and those of his nine children, after which diabolical deed the murderer mounted his horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, rode to Carson City (a distance of three and a half miles) and fell dead in front of Peter Hopkins’s saloon. All the California papers copied the item, and several made editorial comment upon it as being the most shocking occurrence of the kind ever known on the Pacific Coast. Of course rival Virginia City papers at once denounced the item as a “cruel and idiotic hoax.” They showed how the publication of such “shocking and reckless falsehoods” disgraced and injured the State, and they made it as “sultry” as possible for the Enterprise and its “fool reporter.” When the California papers saw all this and found they had been sold, there was a howl from Siskiyou to San Diego. Some papers demanded the immediate discharge of the author of the item by the Enterprise proprietors . They said they would never quote another line from that paper while the reporter who wrote the shocking item remained on its force. All this [39] worried Mark as I had never before seen him worried. Said he: “I am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains.” We roomed together, and one night, when the persecution was hottest, he was so distressed that he could not sleep. He tossed, tumbled, and groaned aloud. So I set to work to comfort him. “Mark,” said I, “never mind this bit of a gale, it will soon blow itself out. This item of yours will be remembered and talked about when all your other work is forgotten. The murder at Dutch Nick’s will be quoted years from now as the big sell of these times.” Said Mark: “I believe you are right; I remember I once did a thing at home in Missouri, was caught at it, and worried almost to death. I was a mere lad, and was going to school in a little town where I had an uncle living .1 I at once left the town and did not return to it for three years. When I finally came back I found I was only remembered as ‘the boy that played the trick on the schoolmaster.’” Mark then told me the story, began to laugh over it, and from that moment “ceased to groan.” He was not discharged, and in less than a month people everywhere were laughing and joking about the “murder at Dutch Nick’s.” Note 1. Twain’s uncle John A. Quarles (1801–76) owned a seventy-acre farm in Rawls County, Missouri, where Twain spent summers as a child. It became the model for the Phelps farm in Huck Finn. Dan De Quille, from Archibald Henderson, Mark Twain (New York: Stokes, 1910), 80–81. Dan De Quille ...