When readers see the names Mark Twain and Dan De Quille, fake news may
not be the first thing that comes to mind. But these legendary
journalists were some of the original, and most prolific, fake news
writers in the early years of Nevada's history. Frontier Fake News
puts a spotlight on the hoaxes, feuds, pranks, outright lies, witty
writing, and other literary devices utilized by a number of the Silver
State's frontier newsmen from the mid-nineteenth through the early
twentieth centuries. Often known collectively as the Sagebrush School,
these journalists were opinionated, talented, and individualistic.
While Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who got his start at Virginia City's
Territorial Enterprise, and Dan De Quille (William Wright), who some
felt was a better writer than Twain, are the most well-known members of
the Sagebrush School, author Richard Moreno includes others such as Fred
Hart, who concocted a fake social club and reported on its gatherings
for Austin's Reese River Reveille, and William Forbes, who enjoyed
sprinkling clever puns with political undertones in his newspaper
articles.
Moreno traces the beginnings of genuine fake news from founding father
Benjamin Franklin's "Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle,
Number 705, March 1782," a fake newspaper aimed at swaying British
public opinion, to the fake news articles of New York and Baltimore
papers in the early 1800s. But these examples are only a prelude to the
amazing accounts of petrified men, freeze-inducing solar armor,
magically magnetic rocks, blood-curdling massacres, and other nonsense
stories that appeared in Nevada's frontier newspapers and beyond.
