Twain's Indians
Twain's notions of race emerge in his texts sometimes as markers of tired racist rhetoric and sometimes as mysterious buoys which surface unexpectedly, leading the reader in new directions. In
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published first in 1884, we witness the evolution of a delicate friendship between Huckleberry Finn, a young boy, and the runaway slave, Jim. Throughout the course of the narrative, Huck struggles with complicated questions about slavery and his duty to turn Jim into the proper authorities. In an especially poignant moment, Huck resolves not to turn Jim in, but believes himself damned to hell for his decision. As sympathetic readers, we recognize the socialization process by which Huck is indoctrinated into the racist assumptions of slavery, and applaud his elementary efforts at subverting the status quo. Twain has navigates difficult scenarios while managing to subtly probe at the intricacies of slavery while still retaining an endearing Southern landscape and culture.
Unfortunately, Twain seldom takes up his pen to probe racist sentiments underlying American policy and feelings towards Native Americans. Instead, he inscribes a scenario of degeneration and innate savageness that he attributes as inherent to all Native Americans (albeit under the cover of deconstructing the harmful idealization of American Indians in literature). It is not until his 1897 travel book, Following the Equator, that Twain begins to evince a sympathetic tone toward American Indians and different aboriginal groups around the world. However, this tone is largely ambivalent, and is always tinged with a fatalistic note that reminds the reader that all aboriginals are destined to pass away as the Darwinian advance of civilization routes them out.
Following the Equator
Following the Equator, published in 1897, was one of Mark Twain's last major works.
Written in his now-familiar format of the travel book (seen by the American public in the 1869
Innocents Abroad and the 1872
Roughing It),
Following the Equator details Twain's travels in Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa.
Unfortunately,
Following the Equator is a largely ignored and forgotten work of Twain's. While it is not his most impressive text in terms of humor, description, or style, a close examination of certain scenes in
Following the Equator reveals important things about Twain's view of indigenous race in general, and how those views may have changed throughout his life.
Twain recounts an anecdote of a tragic encounter between an Australian squatter and black aborigines which becomes a telling metaphor for white contact with indigenous people.
Here is an instance. A squatter, whose station was surrounded by Blacks, whom he suspected to be hostile and from whom he feared an attack, parleyed with them from his house-door. He told them it was Christmas-time-a time at which all men, black or white, feasted; that there were flour, sugar-plums, good things in plenty in the store, and that he would make for them such a pudding as they never dreamed of-a great pudding of which all might eat and be filled. The Blacks listened and were lost. The pudding was made and distributed. Next morning there was howling in the camp, for it had been sweetened with sugar and arsenic!" (211)
Twain's evaluation of the squatter's actions is ambivalent. He says, "The white man's spirit was right, but his method was wrong. His spirit was the spirit which the civilized white has always exhibited toward the savage, but the use of poison was a departure from custom. true, it was merely a technical departure, not a real one; still, it was a departure, and therefore a mistake, in my opinion. It was better, kinder, swifter, and much more humane than a number of the methods which have been sanctified by custom, but that does not justify its employment. That is, it does not wholly justify it" (211).
Twain does not sanction the squatter's cruelty, yet he expresses understanding at the squatter's motive and predicts the inevitable demise of the aborigines. Whether or not the aborigines consume poisoned Christmas pudding, have violent encounters with whites, or suffer from disease they have no resistance to, Twain asserts that their future is the same. In a perverse way, the squatter shows "mercy" because he alleviates the aborigines' suffering in the years to come. Yet, Twain rejects that logic as well with the chapter's final biting sentence, "There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages" (213). This is a different author than the one who created a character full of innate racial "savagery" as Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or who claimed in The Noble Red Man that Indians are "ignoble-base and treacherous, and hateful in every way."
The Noble Red Man
In 1870, Mark Twain published
The Noble Red Man, a biting satire mocking Cooper's Indian characterization. Throughout the first part of the essay, Twain explores the Cooperian idealized characteristics; in the second half he replaces the idealized characteristics with degrading, demonizing ones. For example, Twain manipulates the Indian who is "tall, muscular, straight and of kingly presence" to be an Indian who is "little, and scrawny, and black, and dirty."
Besides criticizing Cooper's alleged unrealistic characterization, Twain attacks Cooper's ideology concerning American Indians that emerge in his texts. In Last of the Mohicans, Cooper frequently equates Indians with nature; Twain inverts this in the following mocking paragraph:
Still, when contact with the white man has given to the Noble Son of the Forest certain cloudy impression of civilization, and aspirations after a nobler life, he presently appears in public with one boot on and one shoe--shirtless, and wearing ripped and patched and buttonless pants which he holds up with his left hand--his execrable rabbit-skin robe flowing from his shoulder....
The Noble Red Man is a biting essay which would be easy to dismiss as either an example of racist rhetoric, or a satire exaggerated to such hyperbolic lengths as Jonathon Swift's A Modest Proposal. However, it cannot be safely filed into either of these categories. Its tone is ambivalent, and while the narrator does assert that Indians are dirty, lying, thieving beggars, we as readers are unsure if we are to take him seriously, or accept his rhetoric as frustrated resistance against unrealistic narratives modeled in the Romantic fashion.
Injun Joe
In 1876, Twain published one of his most popular works of fiction--
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The villain of the novel, Injun Joe, is unequivocally evil--there is little to stimulate the reader to sympathize with Joe's plight or understand his actions. However, Injun Joe acts out of more than just an evil nature--he is evil because of his "Indian blood," a fact which the novel's characters reiterate repeatedly.
Injun Joe's "evil Indian nature" is made more ominous by the culture of violence that Twain attributes to Native Americans. Joe is not satisfied to merely rob or humiliate the Widow Douglas; instead, he plans on torturing her in ways that he imagines are most excruciating for women. He says to , "When you get revenge on a woman you don't kill her--bosh! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils--you notch her ears, like a sow's!" (208)
Injun Joe's torture fantasy is not developed without motivation; Joe explains that he wants revenge (another stereotype of American Indian behavior is the Indian's insatiable desire for revenge for any slight, no matter how small, done to them). He announces:"I tell you again, as I've told you before, I don't care for her swag--you may have it. But her husband was rough on me--many times he was rough on me--and mainly he was the justice of the peace that jugged me for a vagrant. And that ain't all. It ain't the millionth part of it! He had me horsewhipped!--horsewhipped in front of the jail, like a nigger!--with all the town looking on! HORSEWHIPPED!--do you understand? He took advantage of me and died. But I'll take it out on her."
Joe's reason for revenge is resonant of Magua's motivation revenge in Last of the Mohicans. Magua, a Huron Indian, transgressed a rule of the British army which stated that no Indian should drink alcohol and then enter a soldier's tent. Magua protests his punishment by claiming, "Magua was not himself; it was the fire-water that spoke and acted for him! but Munro did not believe it. The Huron chief was tied up before all the pale-faced warriors, and whipped like a dog " (Cooper 116).
Both Injun Joe and Magua defied public law and received the mandated punishment. Neither one was punished unjustly in the context of the narrative, and while both feel justifiable humiliation for the publicity of their punishment, neither experience engenders sympathy from the reader.
In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Injun Joe must be excised from the narrative as part of its eventual triumph. This is visible in the final chapters when first Tom and Becky, and then Injun Joe, are trapped in the cave. After Tom and Becky escape from the cave, Judge Thatcher places an iron door over the mouth of the cave to prevent any stragglers from similarly getting lost. In terms of the narrative structure, Injun Joe must die so that Tom can live.
Even more devastating than his death is the exploitation of Injun Joe's demise. During his fatal captivity in McDougal's cave, Injun Joe had used a cup to catch the precious drips of water from a stalactite; after his death, this cup assumed symbolic significance. "It is many and many a year since the hapless half-breed scooped out the stone to catch the priceless drops, but to this day the tourist stares longest at that pathetic stone and that slow dropping water when he comes to see the wonders of McDougal's cave. Injun Joe's Cup stands first in the list of the cavern's marvels; even "Aladdin's Place" cannot rival it" (240).
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
In 1895, Mark Twain published his acerbic criticism of James Fenimore Cooper. In his essay
The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper, Twain asserted Cooper's popular
Deerslayer, a Leatherstocking tale, committed 114 "offenses against literary art out of a possible 115." Generally, Twain's biting mockery of Cooper's characterization, plot, and setting is considered by contemporary critics as unnecessary and unfounded.
In Mark Twain as Critic, Sydney Krause asserts:
The sulfurous grumblings over Cooper is hardly the work of a judicious person, of a respectable citizen like Sam Clemens, who after the debacle of 1892, had made it an appoint of honor to pay his creditors one hundred cents on the dollar; rather, it belongs to a hoodwinking persona who puts up a good front but is not always entitled to the horror he exhibits and is not the unsuspecting reader he pretends to be. (128)
John McWilliams in The Last of the Mohicans: Civil Savagery and Savage Civility also agrees that Twain's attack is unjustified. He states:
Hilarious though Twain's essay is, it is valid only within its own narrow and sometimes misapplied criteria. Whether Twain is attacking Cooper's diction or Hawkeye's tracking feats, his strategy is to charge Cooper with one small inaccuracy, reconstruct the surrounding narrative or sentence around it, and then produce the whole as evidence that Cooper's kind of English would prevent anyone from seeing reality. (36)
Twain's intention, through his "sulfurous grumblings," is not simply to convince the reader of Cooper's inaccuracy; more so, he is defending his notions of literary and historical appropriateness. Twain, revolting against the entire Romantic tradition, used Cooper as a metonym for the literary characteristics Twain had fought so hard to eradicate. Krause comments that Twain's essay was;
more than a caveat against the pitfalls of romantic fiction; it was a plea for readers to accept the verdict of history that old-style romanticism--at best an exotic movement with a code of feeling engendered by a cult of sensibility, to which America opposed the cult of experience--that this brand of die-hard romanticism was a literary dead letter in post-Civil War America. (134)
Roughing It
Roughing It, published in February 1872, was Mark Twain's second major work after the booming success of his 1869 travel book, Innocents Abroad. A rollicking description of his travels in the wild west, Twain assumes the role of another "innocent," except this time on American soil.
In Chapter 19, Twain describes a group of Indians which he fictitiously names the "Goshoot Indians." Here Twain's treatment of American Indians is similar to that of The Noble Redman; he is involved in deconstructing Cooperian myths and reinscribing a Native American culture of degeneration.
It is interesting that Twain names Cooper in this text. Indeed, we can see the beginnings of the literary criticism grumblings which erupt in the 1895
"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses when he states:
"The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of Cooper and a worshipper of the Red Man--even the scholarly savages in "Last of the Mohicans" who are fittingly associated with the backwoodsman who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part critically grammatical, refined, and choice of language, and the other part just such an attempt to talk like a hunter or mountaineer, as a Broadway clerk might make after eating an edition of Emerson Bennett's works and studying frontier life at the Bowery Theatre a couple of weeks--I say that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been overestimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance." (129)
Twain indeed sets to "examining authorities" for the rest of his literary career, but what he exactly discerns, we will never know.
Huck and Tom Among the Indians
Mark Twain most likely wrote
Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians during the summer of 1884. It featured the same targets as Twain's works such as the
The Noble Red Man and
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses highlighted: James Fenimore Cooper's alleged idealization of American Indians.
Huck and Tom Among the Indians takes place on the Oregon Trail from western Missouri, along the Platte river, ending in Sioux territory near Fort Laramie. This is the same route that Twain himself took in 1861 on the way to Nevada, and from which he developed the travel book
Roughing It (Blair 84). Walter Blair, the editor of
Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck & Tom observed that several of the events in the short story correspond with those that occurred in Clemens' personal life. He states: "Hugh's shocked reaction to the demonstrative love of the Mills family recalls the author's comparison of his family's refusal to show affection with his wife's Olivia's greater warmth. Huck's infatuation with the much older Peggy Mills recalls the boy Sam Clemens's unrequited love for two girls several years older than he was. Indians massacres like the one in which several members of the Mills family died were part of Jane Clemens's family tradition" (84).
While definitely not his best work, and in some respects an utter failure, Huck and Tom Among the Indians reveals intriguing things about Twain's view of American Indians. The devious nature of the Indians who double-cross and then massacre the loving Mills family, and Peggy's implied brutal rape, eliminate any possibility of a positive racial relationship between whites and American Indians. The story's plot dwindles until it reaches stagnancy; perhaps this is the reason that Twain could not finish the text.
Among us, the newspaper is a tremendous power. It can make or mar any man's reputation. It has perfect freedom to call the best man in the land a fraud and a thief, and he is destroyed beyond help. Whether Mr. Colfax is a liar or not can never be ascertained now — but he will rank as one till the day of his death — for the newspapers have so doomed him. 4
Our newspapers — all of them, without exception — glorify the "Black Crook" and make it an opulent success — they could have killed it dead with one broadside of contemptuous silence if they had wanted to. 5
Days Doings and Police Gazettes6 flourish in the land unmolested by the law, because the virtuous newspapers long ago nurtured up a public laxity that loves indecency and never cares whether laws are administered or not.
In the newspapers of the West you can use the editorial voice in the editorial columns to defend any wretched and injurious dogma you please by paying a dollar a line for it.
Nearly all newspapers foster Rozensweigs and kindred criminals and send victims to them by opening their columns to their advertisements. You all know that. 7
In the Foster murder case the New York papers made a weak pretense of upholding the hands of the Governor and urging the people to sustain him in standing firmly by the law; but they printed a whole page of sickly, maudlin appeals to his clemency as a paid advertisement. 8
And I suppose they would have published enough pages of abuse of the Governor to destroy his efficiency as a public official to the end of his term if anybody had come forward and paid them for it — as an advertisement.
The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money's sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
I am personally acquainted with hundreds of journalists, and the opinion of the majority of them would not be worth tuppence in private, but when they speak in print it is the newspaper that is talking (the pygmy scribe is not visible) and then their utterances shake the community like the thunders of prophecy.
I know from personal experience the proneness of journalists to lie. I once started a peculiar and picturesque fashion of lying myself on the Pacific coast, and it is not dead there to this day.
Whenever I hear of a shower of blood and frogs combined, in California, or a sea serpent found in some desert, there, or a cave frescoed with diamonds and emeralds (always found by an Injun who died before he could finish telling where it was), I say to myself I am the father of this child — I have got to answer for this lie.
And habit is everything — to this day I am liable to lie if I don't watch all the time. The license of the press has scorched every individual of us in our time, I make no doubt.
Poor Stanley was a very god, in England, his praises in every man's mouth. But nobody said anything about his lectures — they were charitably quiet on that head, and were content to praise his higher virtues. But our papers tore the poor creature limb from limb and scattered the fragments from Maine to California — merely because he couldn't lecture well. His prodigious achievement in Africa goes for naught — the man is pulled down and utterly destroyed — but still the persecution follows him as relentlessly from city to city and from village to village as if he had committed some bloody and detestable crime. 9
Bret Harte was suddenly snatched out of obscurity by our papers and throned in the clouds — all the editors in the land stood out in the inclement weather and adored him through their telescopes and swung their hats till they wore them out and then borrowed more; and the first time his family fell sick, and in his trouble and harassment he ground out a rather flat article in place of another heathen Chinee, that hurrahing host said, "Why, this man's a fraud," and then they began to reach up there for him. And they got him, too, and fetched him down, and walked over him, and rolled him in the mud, and tarred and feathered him, and then set him up for a target and have been heaving dirt at him ever since. 10
The result is that the man has had only just nineteen engagements to lecture this year, and the audience have been so scattering, too, that he has never discharged a sentence yet that hit two people at the same time. The man is ruined — never can get up again. And yet he is a person who has great capabilities, and might have accomplished great things for our literature and for himself if he had had a happier chance.
And he made the mistake, too, of doing a pecuniary kindness for a starving beggar of our guild — one of the journalistic shoemaker class — and that beggar made it his business as soon as he got back to San Francisco to publish four columns of exposures of crimes committed by his benefactor, the least of which ought to make any decent man blush. The press that admitted that stuff to its columns had too much license. 11
In a town in Michigan I declined to dine with an editor who was drunk, and he said, in his paper, that my lecture was profane, indecent, and calculated to encourage intemperance. And yet that man never heard it. It might have reformed him if he had. 12
A Detroit paper once said that I was in the constant habit of beating my wife and that I still kept this recreation up, although I had crippled her for life and she was no longer able to keep out of my way when I came home in my usual frantic frame of mind. Now scarcely the half of that was true. Perhaps I ought to have sued that man for libel — but I knew better. 13
All the papers in America — with a few creditable exceptions — would have found out then, to their satisfaction, that I was a wife beater, Si and they would have given it a pretty general airing, too. Why I have published vicious libels upon people myself — and ought to have been hanged before my time for it, too — if I do say it myself, that shouldn't.
But I will not continue these remarks. I have a sort of vague general idea that there is too much liberty of the press in this country, and that through the absence of all wholesome restraint the newspaper has become in a large degree a national curse, and will probably damn the Republic yet. There are some excellent virtues in newspapers, some powers that wield vast influences for good; and I could have told all about these things, and glorified them exhaustively — but that would have left you gentlemen nothing to say.
FOOTNOTES
1) The New York Times describes the salary grab in some detail. Briefly, according to Wikipedia: "On March 3, 1873, President Grant signed a law that authorized the President's salary to be increased from $25,000 a year to $50,000 a year and Congressmen's salaries to be increased by $2,500. Representatives also received a retroactive pay bonus for previous two years of service. This was done in secret and attached to a general appropriations bill. Reforming newspapers quickly exposed the law and was repealed on January 1874. Grant missed an opportunity to veto the bill and to make a strong statement for good government"
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2) Charles Reade was a British playwright, who, in spite of having studied law, or perhaps because of it, was involved in many lawsuits.
According to Bookseller: the organ of the book trade, By the Booksellers Association of Great Britain and Ireland, Publishers' Association, March 1, 1873
Reade won 200 pounds from the Morning Advertiser in a libel suit. In 1872, the paper’s critic, Mr. Lee, wrote that Shilly Shally, a play Reade had based on Anthony Trollope’s Ralph the Heir, was “an indelicate play, or, at all events, a play containing very indelicate passages.” He also called it “thin in story” and “weak.” For good measure, Mr. Lee added that “decent people… have not the moral courage to hiss down the wretched double entendres which disgust them.”
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3) I cannot find this editorial, although one web site had an editorial in favor of the pay raise from a provincial Republican newspaper. Further information on this reference is welcome: email me. (pes- at- sign -schindler -dot -org)
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4) Grant's first-term vice president, Schuyler Colfax apparently lied about his involvement in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. He left politics in disgrace.
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5) According to Wikipedia: "The Black Crook is considered to be the first piece of musical theatre that conforms to the modern notion of a "book musical". The book is by Charles M. Barras (1826-1873), an American playwright. The music is mostly adaptations, but some new songs were composed for the play, notably "March of the Amazons" by Giuseppe Operti, and "You Naughty, Naughty Men", with music by George Bickwell and lyrics by Theodore Kennick. It opened on September 12, 1866. The British production of The Black Crook, opened at the Alhambra Theatre on December 23, 1872."
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6) According to Wikipedia: "The National Police Gazette, commonly referred to as simply the Police Gazette, was an American magazine founded in 1845 by two journalists, Enoch E. Camp, also an attorney, and George Wilkes, a transcontinental railroad booster.[1] The editor and proprietor from 1877 until his death in 1922 was Richard Kyle Fox, an immigrant from Ireland.
Ostensibly devoted to matters of interest to the police, it is a tabloid-like publication, with lurid coverage of murders, Wild West outlaws, and sport. It is well known for its engravings and photographs of scantily clad strippers, burlesque dancers, and prostitutes, often skirting on the edge of what is legally considered obscenity."
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7) There is an 1873 case mentioned in the New York Times involving a Rosensweig, but no Rozensweig. The case does not seem to match Twain's reference. Further information on this reference is welcome: email me.(pes- at- sign -schindler -dot -org)
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"[March 21, 1873] William Foster — who spent two years warding off execution — finally succumbed to New York’s hangman.
Foster’s case was a long-term headline-grabber: he drunkenly accosted a couple of perfect strangers on the Broadway Line (think horses, not trains), then smashed the man of the party, Avery Putnam, with a conductor’s device going by the sinister name of “car-hook”. His case turned, both juridically and in the public eye, on the question of whether Foster had formed an “intent” sufficient to justify a first-degree murder conviction; the killer’s own jury later joined appeals for his reprieve, having felt buffaloed by public opinion in the immediate aftermath of the crime."
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Excerpted from the BBC website: Henry Morton Stanley was a Welsh-born American journalist and explorer, famous for his search for David Livingstone and his part in the European colonization of Africa. He was born John Rowlands on 28 January 1841 in Denbigh, Wales. In 1867, Stanley became special correspondent for the New York Herald. In [Zanzibar in] November 1871 he found the sick explorer, greeting him with the famous words: 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' Stanley's reports on his expedition made his name. He earned $60,000 for an 1890-91 U.S. lecture tour. There is no record on the Internet of bad reviews of any English lecture tour preceding Twain’s speech.
Further information on this reference is welcome: email me. (pes- at- sign -schindler -dot -org)
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10) Brett Harte in Google Books
On 15 December 1872 Kendall published an attack on Harte in the San Francisco Chronicle, belittling his talent and accusing him of embezzling funds…
Harte, Bret (1836-1902) (encyclopedia.com)
Bret Harte, the first American writer from the West Coast to gain an international reputation, was instrumental in introducing frontier literature to eastern audiences.
His short story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” was published in the August 1868 issue [of the Overland Monthly] and brought him immediate national fame.
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11) Further information on this reference is welcome: email me. (pes- at- sign -schindler -dot -org)
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12) Further information on this reference is welcome: email me. (pes- at- sign -schindler -dot -org)
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13) Further information on this reference is welcome: email me. (pes- at- sign -schindler -dot -org)
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following particulars concerning a bloody massacre which was committed in Ormsby county night before last. It seems that during the past six months a man named P. Hopkins, or Philip Hopkins, has been residing with his family in the old log house just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick's. The family consisted of nine children - five girls and four boys - the oldest of the group Mary, being nineteen years old, and the youngest. Tommy, about a year and a half. Twice in the past two months Mrs. Hopkins, while visiting in Carson, expressed fears concerning the sanity of her husband, remarking that of late he had been subject to fits of violence, and that during the prevalence of one of these he had threatened to take her life.It was Mrs. Hopkins' misfortune to be given to exaggeration, however, and but little attention was paid to what she said. About ten o'clock on Monday evening Hopkins dashed into Carson on horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of the Magnolia saloon. Hopkins expired in the course of five minutes, without speaking. The long red hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that of Mrs. Hopkins. A number of citizens, headed by Sheriff Gasherie, mounted at once and rode down to Hopkins' house, where a ghastly scene met their gaze. The scalpless corpse of Mrs. Hopkins lay across the threshold, with her head split open and her right hand almost severed from the wrist. Near her lay the ax with which the murderous deed had been committed. In one of the bedrooms six of the children were found, one in bed and the others scattered about the floor. They were all dead. Their brains had evidently been dashed out with a club, and every mark about them seemed to have been made with a blunt instrument. The children must have struggled hard for their lives, as articles of clothing and broken furniture were strewn about the room in the utmost confusion. Julia and Emma, aged respectively fourteen and seventeen, were found in the kitchen, bruised and insensible, but it is thought their recovery is possible. The eldest girl, Mary, must have taken refuge, in her terror, in the garret, as her body was found there, frightfully mutilated, and the knife with which her wounds had been inflicted still sticking in her side. The two girls, Julia and Emma, who had recovered sufficiently to be able to talk yesterday morning, state that their father knocked them down with a billet of wood and stamped on them. They think they were the first attacked. They further state that Hopkins had shown evidence of derangement all day, but had exhibited no violence. He flew into a passion and attempted to murder them because they advised him to go to bed and compose his mind. Curry says Hopkins was about forty-two years of age, and a native of Western Pennsylvania; he was always affable and polite, and until very recently we had never heard of his ill treating his family. He had been a heavy owner in the best mines of Virginia and Gold Hill, but when the San Francisco papers exposed the game of cooking dividends in order to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested to an immense amount in the Spring Valley Water Company of San Francisco. He was advised to do this by a relative of his, one of the editors of the San Francisco Bulletin, who had suffered pecuniarily by the dividend-cooking system as applied to the Daney Mining Company recently. Hopkins had not long ceased to own in the various claims on the Comstock lead, however, when several dividends were cooked on his newly acquired property, their water totally dried up, and Spring Valley stock went down to nothing. It is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad and resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family. The newspapers of San Francisco permitted this water company to go on borrowing money and cooking dividends, under cover of which cunning financiers crept out of the tottering concern, leaving the crash to come upon poor and unsuspecting stockholders, without offering to expose the villainy at work. We hope the fearful massacre detailed above may prove the saddest result of their silence.
[reprinted in The Works of Mark Twain; Early Tales & Sketches, Vol. 1 1851-1864, (Univ. of California Press, 1979), p. 324-26.]
Available from amazon.com
“Fake news” isn’t really anything new. Robert Darnton points out in a recent essay in the
New York Review of Books that “the concoction of
alternative facts is hardly rare, and the equivalent of today’s poisonous, bite-size texts and tweets can be found in most periods of history, going back to the ancients.”
Twain was well acquainted with the sensationalized “click bait” form of “fake news” as well, the kind that distorts real events or even fabricates them entirely. “I know from personal experience the proneness of journalists to lie,” he told the Monday Evening Club. “I once started a peculiar and picturesque fashion of lying myself on the Pacific coast, and it is not dead there to this day.”
The details are a bit convoluted, but basically Twain meant for his gory story to be a satire of a real-life stock-cooking scheme happening at the time involving San Francisco newspapers and utilities companies. In Twain’s over-the-top spoof, peppered with intentionally glaring errors, the securities scheme was what triggered Hopkins (who was actually unmarried and still very much alive) to go on his murderous rampage. But the satirical attack on unethical stock manipulators was lost on most of Twain’s readers, who were fixated on the horrific details of the non-existent slaughter of Hopkins’ made-up family.
Twain wrote a retraction and offered his resignation to the Enterprise’s editor, who refused to accept it, but the massacre hoax seriously damaged his reputation as a reporter for a time. His writing career would rebound, of course, but the incident left its philosophical mark on him, and he would ruminate on it for years to come. In “My Famous ‘Bloody Massacre’”, published ten years after the original hoax, Twain concluded,
The idea that anybody could ever take my massacre for a genuine occurrence never once suggested itself to me, hedged about as it was by all those telltale absurdities and impossibilities…But I found out then, and never have forgotten since, that we never read the dull explanatory surroundings of marvelously exciting things when we have no occasion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is trying to defraud us; we skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling particulars and be happy.
I believe this insight would go on to haunt Twain for the rest of his life. A recurring theme throughout his body of work involves the eager propensity we humans have for believing the “marvelously exciting” narratives imposters use to dupe us, despite the “telltale absurdities and impossibilities.” It’s a theme that remains critically relevant in today’s so-called “post-truth” world as our ability to navigate tumultuous times seems to be marred by increasingly blurred distinctions between what is false and what is true.
Twain knew about the dire toll such moral obscurity can take. As he has Hank Morgan realize near the end of Connecticut Yankee, when the narrator is succumbing to an ever darkening and incoherent world of his own making, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
THE PETRIFIED MAN
Now, to show how really hard it is to foist a moral or a truth upon an unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly missing one’s mark, I will here set down two experiences of my own in this thing. In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people got to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels. One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or two glorified discoveries of this kind. The mania was becoming a little ridiculous. I was a brand-new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt called upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have our benignant, fatherly moods at one time or another, I suppose. I chose to kill the petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all. I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably petrified man.
I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.——, the new coroner and justice of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch him up a little at the same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combine pleasure with business. So I told, in patient, belief-compelling detail, all about the finding of a petrified-man at Gravelly Ford (exactly a hundred and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail from where —— lived); how all the savants of the immediate neighborhood had been to examine it (it was notorious that there was not a living creature within fifty miles of there, except a few starving Indians, some crippled grasshoppers, and four or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to get away); how those savants all pronounced the petrified man to have been in a state of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, with a seriousness that I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated that as soon as Mr.——heard the news he summoned a jury, mounted his mule, and posted off, with noble reverence for official duty, on that awful five days’ journey, through alkali, sage brush, peril of body, and imminent starvation, to hold an inquest on this man that had been dead and turned to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years!
And then, my hand being “in,” so to speak, I went on, with the same unflinching gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict that deceased came to his death from protracted exposure. This only moved me to higher flights of imagination, and I said that the jury, with that charity so characteristic of pioneers, then dug a grave, and were about to give the petrified man Christian burial, when they found that for ages a limestone sediment had been trickling down the face of the stone against which he was sitting, and this stuff had run under him and cemented him fast to the “bed-rock”; that the jury (they were all silver-miners) canvassed the difficulty a moment, and then got out their powder and fuse, and proceeded to drill a hole under him, in order to blast him from his position, when Mr.——, “with that delicacy so characteristic of him, forbade them, observing that it would be little less than sacrilege to do such a thing.”
From beginning to end the “Petrified Man” squib was a string of roaring absurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretense of truth that even imposed upon me to some extent, and I was in some danger of believing in my own fraud. But I really had no desire to deceive anybody, and no expectation of doing it. I depended on the way the petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle. Yet I purposely mixed that up with other things, hoping to make it obscure—and I did. I would describe the position of one foot, and then say his right thumb was against the side of his nose; then talk about his other foot, and presently come back and say the fingers of his right hand were spread apart; then talk about the back of his head a little, and return and say the left thumb was hooked into the right little finger; then ramble off about something else, and by and by drift back again and remark that the fingers of the left hand were spread like those of the right. But I was too ingenious. I mixed it up rather too much; and so all that description of the attitude, as a key to the humbuggery of the article, was entirely lost, for nobody but me ever discovered and comprehended the peculiar and suggestive position of the petrified man’s hands.
As a satire on the petrifaction mania, or anything else, my Petrified Man was a disheartening failure; for everybody received him in innocent good faith, and I was stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down the wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted to the grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced. I was so disappointed at the curious miscarriage of my scheme, that at first I was angry, and did not like to think about it; but by and by, when the exchanges began to come in with the Petrified Man copied and guilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satisfaction; and as my gentleman’s field of travels broadened, and by the exchanges I saw that he steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory, state after state, and land after land, till he swept the great globe and culminated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august London Lancet, my cup was full, and I said I was glad I had done it. I think that for about eleven months, as nearly as I can remember, Mr.——’s daily mail-bag continued to be swollen by the addition of half a bushel of newspapers hailing from many climes with the Petrified Man in them, marked around with a prominent belt of ink. I sent them to him. I did it for spite, not for fun.
He used to shovel them into his back yard and curse. And every day during all those months the miners, his constituents (for miners never quit joking a person when they get started), would call on him and ask if he could tell them where they could get hold of a paper with the Petrified Man in it. He could have accommodated a continent with them. I hated——-in those days, and these things pacified me and pleased me. I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him without killing him.
Twain knew about the dire toll such moral obscurity can take. As he has Hank Morgan realize near the end of Connecticut Yankee, when the narrator is succumbing to an ever darkening and incoherent world of his own making, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
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