Greater Vegas—The Illusion State 2

In my last blog, I described Greater Vegas as an illusion, built on a foundation of falsehood and fantasy.

This isn’t my own idea; it’s an outgrowth (indirect as it might be) from a long tradition of journalism in the American west, which incorporated elements of exaggeration, satire, ribaldry, and just plain fiction to fill up the column inches of the many competing newspapers in boomtowns from Tombstone and Tonopah to Eureka and Nome.

J. Ross Browne was one of its earliest practitioners, but Mark Twain (who adopted his pen name as a young reporter working at a newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada) is its best known; he summed it up succinctly with, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good tale.”

Oscar Lewis was one of the last of the great western-style journalists. Born in San Francisco in 1893, he was a historian by career, but a storyteller by nature. For example, of his hometown’s famous Palace Hotel, he wrote, “It had 9,000 spittoons and six elevators, each containing a piano and a bowling alley.”

Most of his books concerned California history, but one of them, The Town that Died Laughing (1955), was about Austin, Nevada—a mining boomtown in the 1860s and ’70s of 5,000 that, if it ever actually died, was resurrected and is now a village of 200 along US 50 roughly 170 miles east of Reno.

In the book, Lewis tells the story of Fred Hart, first editor of Austin’s Reese River Reveille, who frequently found himself “without anything of a startling nature in the way of news” to print. This wasn’t an uncommon predicament for the editors of small frontier-town dailies and it partially accounts for the creative license that crept into the newspapers of the era.

A fine example is Hart’s description of a wife arrested for disturbing the peace while searching Austin’s bars for her wayward husband: “A female slightually on the rampage was fined by the judge who perorated his remarks with an invitation to pungle $40.”

One night, making his reporter’s rounds, Hart stopped into Austin’s Sazerac Saloon, where old-timers gathered to drink, smoke, and tell tall tales.  He overheard one of the regulars describing silver bars he’d seen in Mexico, “which made a pile thirteen feet wide, forty feet high, and seven miles long.”

The next day, strapped as usual for news, Hart printed a notice of the formation, the previous night, of the “Sazerac Lying Club, which has unanimously elected Mr. George Washington Fibley as president.”

To be continued …