Greater Vegas—The Illusion State 3 

In the Illusion State Part 2, I introduced the Sazerac Lying Club, a fictitious group of barroom storytellers in the tradition of taproom raconteurs everywhere for all time — in this case in 1870s’ Austin, Nevada. The whole thing was a flight of fancy from the dying boomtown’s newspaper editor who needed some text to wrap around whatever advertising he managed to sell.

One story recounted the reason that the scheduled stagecoach had been delayed. The driver was en route when he seemed to be approaching “a thick bank of dark clouds,” which turned out to be a large flock of sage hens.

“But thar was more sage hen obstructin’ that road than I reckoned on,” the driver explained, “and when them leader horses struck into them sage hen, they was throwed back on thar haunches just like they’d butted clean up ag’in a stone wall. As far you could see, thar warn’t nothin’ but sage hen — and you couldn’t glimpse the top o’ the pile of ’em.

“Now my hostler grabbed a ax, ready to chop a road through ’em, but a prospector happened by and said, ‘See here, boys, don’tcha think we could blast ’em out quicker?’

“Well, we all went up the hill to collect that sourdough’s drills and sledges and powder cartridges and fuses, but when we got back to the stage — and I wish I may be runned over by a two-horse jerkwater if this ain’t the whole truth — not a sage hen was in sight as far as a man could see with a spyglass.

“And I hope you fellas is contented now you know what made the stage late t’other night.”

It didn’t take long for Nevada and California newspapers to start reprinting tall tales from Austin’s Reese River Reveille attributed to the Sazerac Lying Club. But this particular story somehow made it as far as Germany; translated back into English, it came out like this:

“In Austin, Nevada, America, is a society whose object is competitive lying. The lie which took the prize this year was of a flock of geese so numberless that they blocked the road and shut out the light of day. It was deemed necessary to telegraph for a corps of sappers, who mined a tunnel through the mass of birds, allowing the royal mails to proceed on their way.”