September 29, 2025 • 34 mins
People traveling through the west by train in the 1800s expected shootouts and danger and cowboys. The citizens of Palisade gave it to them.
Sources:
"Westward Hoax: The Secret History of Palisade, Nevada," Very Special Episodes.
Fakes, Frauds & Other Malarkey by Kathryn Lindskoog.
"Mark Twain's Nevada Newspaper Hoaxes" Andrew R. Giarrelli.
Mark Twain's writing for the Territorial Enterprise (1851-1865)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Hoax, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Folks, it's a hug.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
No one I have seen what us to see this latter.
Welcome to Hoax, a podcast about the lies we wish
we're true and truths that sound like lies.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Every episode we look at one story of a prank,
a grift from history so big and bold it makes
us question why we believe.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I'm the ghost of Danis Schwartz and I'm.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
The evil twin of Lizzie Logan. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Lizzie. What's your relationship to the idea of the wild West?
Just like the concept.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I think it's one of the best like songs written
for a movie ever. Will Smith did a great job,
and uh, you know, Kevin Klein freaked it. And that's
pretty much what I know about the wild West. I'm
thinking Saloon and Back to the Future three. That's what
I know about the West.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
I mean, it's kind of interesting that now the West
is just sort of an esthetic. There's like space and
there's cowboys. Yeah, it's just like, I don't think people
know a lot about the history of the West really.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I mean, so I'm I'm from California and A big
part of growing up in California is like every year
you're in middle school, your history curriculum module is like
learning about California. So like you learn about the gold Rush,
and you learn about the missions, and but you never
really learn about like Cowboy times, I think because it's
(01:37):
like pretty problematic. So I don't know, I learn. I
know a lot about like puayblows and like how to
pan for gold and the difference between like fools cold
and real gold, but I don't know anything about like
Wider or Billy the Kid.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
But you know, that's like a perfect segue because kind
of even at the time, the idea of the West
was just sort of this invented idea. Yeah, so I'm
going to before we get into the hoax, just a
little bit of like background. I think sort of people
point out with like the origin of the idea of
like the wild West. I'm doing like air quotes is
(02:14):
but kind of in the eighteen forties, the West as
an idea began to get really popular, with like minstrel
shows and P. T. Barnum presenting like reenactments of Native
American chiefs and tribal dances. In his exhibits, and exhibitions,
so it was like already a fetishized object sort of
(02:35):
where it's like, ooh, mysterious and exotic.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, and people were like, let's go die on the
organ trail because we totally want to be part of this.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Yeah. It was like, yeah, that sounds romantic and fun. Well,
in eighteen fifty nine, dime novels came out, so these
super cheap paperback novels with very simplistic themes of like
heroic cowboys, you know, savage Native American savage and air
quotes outlaws said. The tropes that people even now think
(03:03):
of as the cowboys were like invented for fiction in nineteen,
you know, eighteen fifty nine. They're written super super quickly.
People are writing like multiple dime novels about cowboys a month,
and people are eating them up. There's this guy named
Ned Buntline who is a writer who read this article
about wild Bill Hiccock, who is a soldier and a
(03:23):
scout and gun slinger, and Ned, this writer ran up
to wild Bill Hiccock in a saloon and said, there's
my man. I want you because he wanted to write
a dime novel about him. But Allegedly, Hiccock hated being surprised,
and the fact that a guy ran up to him
was like, you he pulled his gun out and told
him to get out of town.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I thought you were going to say that he just
shot him, Like it seems like a really bad idea
to surprise a gunslinger in a saloon.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah, but no, he just said get out, and you know,
get out of town in twenty four hours. And so
Buntline is like, fine, I'll talk to one of your
friends and write a dime novel about him. And he
finds this twenty three year old guy named William F. Cody,
aka Buffalo Bill. He intersting a guy he had fought
some battles against the Sioux and Cheyenne, and was, you know,
(04:09):
a buffalo wrangler hunter. And he and Ned Buntline become friends,
he writes. Buttline writes this very popular serialized novel called
Buffalo Bill The King of the Border, which is adapted
into a hit play, and then in like the eighteen seventies,
Buffalo Bill starts playing himself on stage in like wild
(04:29):
West shows, there's the show called The Scouts of the Prairie,
produced by Ned Buttline, New plays every year. This troop
tours for ten years. They do like big reenactments of
fights with Native Americans, and it's like goes all over
the world and that so even in the eighteen seventies,
the idea of the West as like a piece of
popular entertainment was being formed in real time.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Interesting, I have a fun fact that I wonder if
you're about to get to and I got no, please
yank in the rugout.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Because I'm about to change the sub and talk about
a hoax.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Oh okay, Well, do you know the thing about the
Lone Ranger?
Speaker 1 (05:05):
No?
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Okay, So the Lone Ranger is a fictional character. Yeah,
but he was sort of based on a real US
Marshal named Bass Reeves who was like known as like
the most badass US Marshall in the West, and he
was black.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Whoa, yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
He like started his life as an enslaved person and
then became a US Marshal and then was like the
coolest US Marshal ever and is one of the like
he and some other people inspired the character of the
Lone Ranger. But like, what a cool figure from history
that got whitewashed. But like, fortunately now is getting un whitewashed.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
That's so cool. I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah, anyway, so cool, A cool figure from the old
fact Bass reeves.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
So the wild West is like at this point, even
in the eighteen seventies, when the Wild West is like
still ostensibly happening, even as it's happening, it's being like
romanticized in real time. And people who don't live in
the West, people live on the East Coast, people who
live in big cities, can see these Wild West shows,
can read these dime novels, and they have an idea
(06:08):
of what it's like to live in the wild West.
And the truth is not nearly as exciting as a
dime novel because it's like those are novels, and not
nearly as exciting as these shows because those are performing shows.
But case in point, a lot of people come out
West just for jobs and like boring jobs. There's a
town called Palisade in Nevada that's a very very sleepy
(06:31):
mining town. In eighteen sixty eight, it becomes a station
on the Central Pacific Railroad and it just basically only
exists as a transportation hub for eastern Nevada mining camps
and to live there is mostly because you're a miner
working in minds ten hours a day, six days a week.
It's really physical, boring work that the truth of living
(06:53):
there isn't very romantic. There's like a lot of xenophobia
happening because people think Chinese people are stealing their jobs,
and those jobs don't sound very fun in the first place. Nope,
it's a very small town with basically one saloon. I
guess probably what you're picturing for an old West town.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, I'm just picturing like and the only exciting thing
that happened in this time is that like jeans were invented. Yeah,
down the street invented jeans.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Well, what does become sort of exciting is in eighteen
sixty eight, because this sleepy mining town is a stop
on the Central Pacific Railroad, passenger trains will come through, Okay,
passenger trains from Chicago to San Francisco, which is basically
from Dana to.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Lizzy, the Dana Lizzy Express, the Dana Lizzy.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Express, and it would stop in Palisade usually as a
chance for these people to like stretch their legs. They
would fill up more water in the engine and like,
you know, wait ten minutes and something kind of unusual
started happening when the train stopped there these big city
you know, I don't know, what's like a cowboy way
(08:04):
to insult a big city person.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
You half a lutint, half fancy fancy city. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, So these city slickers would be walking stretching their
legs when they would see in the middle of the
street a cowboy lift his pistol and go up to
another man and say, I saw what you did with
my sister, and the man would deny it, and then
the cowboys shot, and the guy collapses and there's blood
on the street, and people drag his body away, and
(08:31):
a sheriff comes and chases, and then the train would
be like okay, all aboard, and you'd have to get
back on the train and be like, oh my god,
what did we just see. Basically, the passengers on this
train would stop. In the ten minutes that they would
be stretching their legs, a scene out of a Wild
West dime novel would happen.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Is this like that bus tour in New York where
it would like to and they would do a little
song and dance.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
I mean, basically, but this wasn't a thing that the
train hired people were just like, what is happening. There's wood,
you know, they dragged this body off. People would be like,
oh my god, the wild West is really wild. The
scene that I just described of a man shooting another guy.
In the news article to quote it, they say, sympathetic
friends carried off the dead and wounded to some neighboring saloon,
(09:25):
and then frightened and bewildered immigrants, which are the train passengers,
crawled from under seats and behind cars, their blanched faces
and trembling limbs attesting to their belief and the genuineness
of the fight. So train passengers passing through Palisade would
just always happen to witness some astonishingly entertaining and terrifying
moment of the wild West. One time, half a dozen
(09:48):
Native Americans ran into town and were like rounded up
by a cowboy. Sometimes there were bloody shootout. Sometimes sheriffs
would arrest people. And the reason that this was always happening,
that it was so entertaining was because it wasn't real.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah they're doing improv It was the.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Entire city of Palisade, the sleepy board mining tone decided
to give purpose to their sad, lonely mining, you know,
exhausted lives, that they would trick the city slickers on
big trains who expected the wild West to be some like,
you know, crazy gun slinging place. They're like, fine, you
(10:27):
want it, we'll give it to you.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Dan, I absolutely love this. I love this so because
my favorite, one of my favorite plots in a movie
or episode of television is Let's put on a show.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Let's put on a show.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Let's put on a show will get me pretty much anytime,
Like it really really delights me.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
So I'm going to quote from an article from a
newspaper called the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, who wrote about
this prank in October eighteenth.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Are they making money from this?
Speaker 1 (10:59):
No? No, They're just doing it to quote to quote,
a half dozen Native Americans, for a reasonable compensation, would
submit to being bound hand and foot and laid on
the platform during the stay of the train, and around
their prostate bodies, a guard of citizens armed with immense revolvers,
(11:19):
long rifles, and bloodthirsty looking bowie knives would march with
Marshall Maine, meanwhile entertaining the gaping, open mouthed greenhorns with
blood curdling tails of border warfare. So they also got
Native Americans that they're paying a reasonable wage.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
To participate in this. Who is paying them?
Speaker 1 (11:39):
I think the city?
Speaker 2 (11:40):
No one, Okay, So they have like a fund, they
have like a entertain the tourists.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
But yeah, and according to this article, they used animal
blood from the local slaughterhouse. They would load guns with
pot powder but no ball, so that the guns would
actually fire, but there would be no bullet of it,
because they just thought it was fun to trick city
folks who were looking down on the dangerous like savage West.
And also, according to lore, train passengers were complaining that
(12:11):
the wild West they expected was really boring. So like
train passengers had been like complaining to the train and
complaining to people in the town that they're like, well,
we expected something out of these wild West shows or
like you know what we had been reading in dime novels,
and really it's it's so boring. So they decided they
would put on a show.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
This is incredible.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
According to one source, they did like a thousand of
these shows, which means like one a day for three years.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
This is incredible and is making me feel a lot
of things because so I'm from San Francisco, Yeah, which
has a really bad reputation right now, like and you know,
don't take conservative's word for anything, but like people will
say the most like whack shit about San Francisco. That
would be offensive if you said it about other cities. Yeah,
(12:59):
like people, well, like I've told people that I'm from
San Francisco just in the course of conversation, and people
will be like.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Oh, god, you know a lot of drugs or like,
oh a lot of homelessness, or like, oh a lot
of You're like into a city and I'm like, would
you say to someone from Detroit like a lot of
gang violence, like oh a lot of gun violece.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
I'm like this is not like or like if someone
said they were from New York, would you just be
like a lot of terrorism, Like yes, like it has problems,
like every city has problem. But now I'm just like
we should start doing this, Like anytime you see someone
from out of town, like we should just like just
like drop your pants, take a shit, offer them the fentanyl,
like shoot up like saline, like you know what I mean,
(13:41):
Like we should just if you know what you want
bad San Francisco like, let's do it. Let's give it
to that is.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
It's like you get little tour buses of people from
Texas to bring up to San Francisco and put on
the little show.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I want to do this now. I'm like, yeah, let's
lean into it.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
You like be like, where are your children? I would
like to teach them pro noun.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yes, I would like to take their gender away and
give them two items of crack cocaine.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
So that's I mean, that's the sources that that's what's happening.
That these people are just so bored and exhausted from
their lives working ten hour days. This town is so
small they don't even have a theater to distract them,
so like what are they going to do? And in actuality,
crime was so low that Palis did not even have
a sheriff. So in this place where they were doing
elaborate shootouts every day, it's like, actually, no, everyone was
(14:33):
getting along and there was no sheriff.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
I would like to think that they did a raffle
every week to decide who got to play the sheriff.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
It'd be so.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Sweet, would be like, oh, well, it's Frank's birthday coming up,
so he gets to play the sheriff and to go.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Yeah, and they have an endless supply of new audience
members of unwilling audience members every single day.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
That's incredible.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
But I'm going to break your heart just a little bit.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, I thought it. Maybe a twist might be kind.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I'm so sorry, because it's possible that this hoax is
itself a hoax. Because that newspaper I quoted above, the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, It is a real newspaper, but
it's it's our main and only contemporary source on this hoax.
And it also was a newspaper that frequently had joke
(15:30):
and satire articles one.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Of the main guys writing the onion of its day.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
But not not quite Okay, So here's the thing. One
guy writing for it is a man you might have
heard of by a little name name Mark Twain.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Okay, not to spoil this entire podcast, but Mark Twain
wrote satire in newspapers that I just cannot get my
head around.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Well, hopefully, I think I'm gonna still clear.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
That was funny that I just don't get so.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
In a letter he wrote about his experience writing for
the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and he said these stories
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. So you know he's
(16:25):
admitting that they just had fun writing bloody hoax articles. Okay,
he made up this story about a newly discovered petrified man,
like a man who had turned to stone in the
desert that from thousands of years ago. And then he
also wrote this famous hoax article for this newspaper about
a man going crazy and murdering his wife and kids,
(16:45):
which sounds like a laugh riot.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
See this is what I'm saying. I don't like Mark Mark. Yeah,
mister Twain, I don't understand your humor.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Well, okay, I'm going to try to explain it for you, please.
The petrified man article, he describes it, and it reads
like a straight article, except he also describes the position
they found the man in is with his thumb against
his nose, like thumbing his nose at the audience. So
that was the big joke there, okay, and the other one,
this story, which truly was just an article about a
(17:15):
man going crazy and murdering his wife and kids. He
begins by saying that the man was residing with his
family in the loghouse just at the edge of the
Great Pine Forest between Empire City and Dutch Nicks. There's
no actual pine forest there, which means that he wrote
this article with like a hint for the people reading
it that it wasn't real. Where He's like, people who
(17:37):
live here will know that this is made up. And
when this bloody story that people love, like when it
travels all over the world, because people love these bloody stories,
they won't know it's made up. But we will know
it's made up because I planted these little hints here.
And more importantly, he was actually kind of trying to
make a point with that article, because at the end
of that article about a husband going crazy, they say
(17:59):
that the husband went crazy because he invested in this company,
Spring Valley Water Company of San Francisco, which was a
real company and was crooked and went under and they
were like, and he lost all his money and went crazy.
And so the end of the article says the newspapers
of San Francisco permitted this water company to go on
borrowing money and cooking dividends under cover of which cunning
(18:21):
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 this fearful massacre
detailed above may prove the saddest result of their silence.
So later, when he admits it to hoax, he says
it was necessary to publish the story in order to
(18:44):
get the fact into the San Francisco papers that the
Spring Valley Water Company was cooking dividends by borrowing money.
The only way you could get that fact into a
San Francisco journal is to smuggle it in or some
great tragedy. You're making a concerned face.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
I'm just thinking, I'm thinking, and I'm considering.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
It's not all good, But I understand why. Some'm like,
I don't know, little writer would have fun with this,
being like people are gobbling up stories about about men
murdering people, but no one cares about a story about
a stock company.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
I mean, okay, so that I understand, like has a
point to me, that is not like that is a
different thing from like it's a like, that's not funny.
But I'm like, okay, so he was.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
But I think he did think it was funny.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Okay, I think he was wrong.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
I think he thought it was funny to write these
stories that he knew the public would eat up for
his own little like ends, whatever those ends may be,
whether it was just like thumbing their nose or being like, hey,
this stock company, this company, I want to like expose
the fact that they were cooking dividends. And I think
he thought it was funny to leave hints that certain
people reading it would know it was made up, but
(19:56):
not everyone.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Hmmm, Well, I'll have an answer for you on our
new podcast Dissecting Mark Twain, hundreds of years after his death.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Mark Twain, funny or not?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah, I want to go back to living in the
world of five minutes ago, when I thought that a
whole town did a fun prey.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Well, but here's here's what I want to say. The
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise did publish real articles.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
There are real articles, okay.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
And also when it did publish joke articles, there were
usually those specific hints of like the petrified man was
thumbing his nose, or it says that there's like a.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Did Mark Twain write for the Virginia Okay, so he
wrote for this paper?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
And you know when there were joke articles, they usually
had those hints of like there's a big pine forest here,
but there's not. And the Palisade hoax story does not
have any of those markers.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
But there's no other contemporary accounts, like there's nobody who wrote.
We don't don't have any like letters from someone being
like I was on the train today and I saw
the craziest thing. No, although you did your cousin see
that when they took the same drain.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
There's an amateur historian named Gerald B. Higgs who wrote
like a pretty well regarded account of the palis Ataks
in nineteen seventy six, and he said that his sources
was visiting the County Recorder's offices in Nevada and was like,
I was boots on the ground. But he doesn't actually
cite his sources, so we don't know. And our only
(21:31):
contemporary contemporary source is the Virginia Newspaper, where there were
hoax articles.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Is this town real?
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Do they I mean, are there like descendants of the
people who live there? Could we ask?
Speaker 1 (21:45):
I don't know, Well I could tell you, so what
happened next?
Speaker 2 (21:48):
If we have listeners in Nevada, can you like go
there and check for us?
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Well, that might be a little tricky.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Does nobody live there?
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Because so in eighteen eighty five there were Eureka minds
just declined and so most people just started to move away.
In nineteen ten, there was a flood that destroyed most
of the town. The post office was discontinued in nineteen
sixty one, and then, in a Shit's Creek twist, the
entire town was sold at auction April twenty six, two
(22:16):
thousand and five, for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
to an unidentified bitter. Okay, because it's just a ghost town.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Now, if you own this town, if you're the unidentified bitter,
can you please you know what? Can you make this reel?
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Like?
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Can you say I will? I know a lot of
improv people and we will do this.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Should we just should we crowdfund and buy this town
to make it an improv theater?
Speaker 3 (22:39):
Like?
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Can we just do like a week of these performances?
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Although then it would just become cowboy old Williamsburg, a
colonial Williamsburg, or like Westworld without you.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Say that, like, that's a really bad thing, and I
think it would be so fun.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Do you think people would go to Westworld with people?
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Yes? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe, But I think.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Part of the fun is also that the people watching
didn't know it was fake, that they thought it was real.
If they know you're acting, it's a less fun.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
I think it's I mean, I don't really want to
see anybody get murdered, so for me, it's more funy
is getting right hozy Logan got pushing, doesn't want to
see people murdered, hot take. I would rather pay for
admission to an interactive show than take a train ride
through a sleepy town and witness across.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Well. I mean people agreed with you, because clearly people
loved like wild West. Shows like Antie Oakley and like
you know, Buffalo Bill were wildly popular. But this would
have been the only show where they thought they were
getting the real thing. Maybe it was true. We can
there's no law that says we can't believe it.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
There is no law yet, And again.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
The article itself doesn't have any indicators that it was
fake and it was picked up by sources you know
at the time, it's plausible.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
It does seem sort of unlikely that in a thousand shows,
no one else like you would think after five hundred shows,
another a reporter from another newspaper would be like, I'm
gonna go check.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
This out, Like maybe the wild West was just so
wild these things are happening in all the time. They
were too busy making up stories about men going crazy
because they lost their fortune in crooked stock companies.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Do you think anything about the wild West was real?
Like do you think like did Davy Crockett fight a bear?
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah? And the shootout at Okay Corral was real? Yeah,
But but I think do you remember the Alamo? I don't. Actually,
I'm not.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I never, I genuinely never think about that.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
I'm almost embarrassed. I've spent so much time researching for
my other podcast, Noble Blood, like I know so much
more about European history than I do, like basic American history. Genuinely,
I'm like way better versed British history than I am
American history.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
I'm not well versed in either, So I'm a patriot.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
I also think a lot of I guess.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
It's pretty patriotic of me to be ignorant.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Classic America is America. It's just I think a lot
of our ideas about the wild West make it more
glamorous than it is. Like I think the violence was
mostly people like stealing livestock and there, you know, that's
what happened. There were gangs of people stealing livestock occasionally
and they would get shot. And I don't think it
was like glamorous heroes and villains the way that they
(25:35):
were portrayed in dime novels, because those were popular entertainment
and there's always been violence, and I think that there's
violent in cities, and there's violent in you know, a
rural areas, and I think that the idea of romanticizing
it because it's like an aesthetic that's appealing, doesn't make
it any more true than than you know, the reality,
(25:55):
which is probably way less glamorous, unless it's just people
putting on a show, which I.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Said that it was really fun. I would love that.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Can I leave you with one more Palisade story, please?
So Palisade got to be in the news one more
time In nineteen thirty two, when President Hoover was taking
the train back to California to vote.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
If you had paid me one thousand dollars, I could
not have told you who was president in nineteen thirty.
What if I gave you like five guesses, like Hoover
is just not a president that I know about.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
I remember, this is a tiny as side.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
I just would have said FDR. And I would have
gone to my grave saying FDR.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Close enough, Okay. I remember being in sixth grade and
sitting in my social studies class looking at a poster
of all the American presidents, and again sixth grade as well,
like eleven twelve. Yeah, and I saw on the poster
that there was a president named Chester Arthur. And I
distinctly remember being like, I have never heard that name before.
(27:03):
Every other name on this poster I have like heard
and I'm aware of as a president. That was the
moment where I was like, we had a president named
Chester Arthur.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
And now we can cut this if you want. That's
a very important name to you.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah, I have I have a son named Arthur. We
do not have to cut that. He's very important to me.
I wasn't going to cut it. I just if you
want his name on the pod on social media all
the time. But yeah, at that moment, I decided, if
I ever had a son, it American president America's most
forgettable I think he might be. I would argue that
(27:37):
that he's America's most forgettable.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Present, America's most forgettable president. Sorry, you were talking about
President Hoover.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
President Hoover was taking the train to California to vote
because he was going to vote in his home state
in the election.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
I didn't know he was from California.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I guess, I guess the Hoover dam Hoover dam.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
We're learning thank so much about American history in this episode.
Lizzy's really going through it.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Forget it, Jake, it's trying to.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
But the night before the President's train passed through Palisade,
a guard caught two men carrying seventeen sticks of dynamite
who were planning on blowing up the train and assassinating
the president.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Is this real or is this maybe a hoax? No?
Speaker 1 (28:23):
I mean the guard said that he did this. They
tried to.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
I mean, is this like from real newspapers and stuff?
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Yeah, this is right, Okay, okay, the guard they tried
to stab and shoot this guard that the guy who
are trying to blow up the train, but he survived.
He prevented them from blowing up the train, and Hoover
was fine. This tiny town of three hundred people in
it was huge news because there's an attempt at assassination.
This one guard prevented it. Great job, thank you, tiny Palisade.
Except yeah, also, two weeks later the guard said he
(28:51):
made it up. So it happened in that it was
written about in newspapers, but in another sense, it didn't
happen because it never happened.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
I mean, so it's a town of liars. Yeah, So
either they lied in that they put on shows of
things that were fake, or they lied and that they
lied about putting on shows.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
And it also it is pretty clever on.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Lion journalists lied about them lying by pudding.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
To lie about putting on shows is funny. And you
don't have to get then animal blood out of your.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Clothes, Dana, This is all so funny.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
I know. I also have to shout the reason I
heard about the story in the first place is because
we talked about it on another podcast that I occasionally
host called Very Special Episodes, which you should listen to.
But the second I heard about the story, I was like,
I need to learn everything about it and also talk
to my friend Lizzie about it.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Yeah, this is like giving me so much to think.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
About starting a citywide improv troup.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
I mean, do you remember improv everywhere? Wow?
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Palisane? Did Palisane Nevada? And or Mark Twain invent improv everywhere?
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah? They were like no pants, subway rides and flash mobs.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Oh my god. That's kind of when the Internet peaked.
So that was when the Internet was good.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Yeah, that was like when like the YouTube to Ellen Pipeline.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Was do you remember when iPhones you could drink beer?
And that was the whole thing about all that.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Or when there was a it was an there was
an app first of all, that would just turn your
iPhone screen white so that you could use it as
a flashlight. Yes, or it would turn it like a
color so that you could use it as a lightsaber. Yeah,
it was Those were really good apps.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
It was kind of when phones were good because we're like,
I know this is powerful, but what is the point
of this And I'm like, no, no, it was worth
spending all this money because I can pretend to drink
a beer.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
See you said all this money. I was like those
like ninety nine cents. But then I realized you meant
the phone. The money that you spend on the phone
and apps used to cost nine I really did cost
ninety nine cents, and they didn't take all your data.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
So golden era of the Internet was improv everywhere, which
was actually invented by Pallas a Nevada. We actually don't
know that Mark Twain wrote that article. It doesn't have
a byline. He could have. He also might not have.
Probably yeah, statistically he didn't because we know most of
the articles he wrote for that newspaper.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
If nobody else made that up, like imagine doing a
Mark Twain level satire and you just don't take credit
for it in the era of Mark Twain.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
But also we can pause it again. It's really possible
that it is real that it happened. Like this is
a sleepy town where everyone is bored, and all the
pieces were already in place, that these city slickers looking
down on West the Westerners expected violence and expected, you know,
(31:49):
these spectacles, and it's possible that people just decided, hey,
let's put on the show.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Oh also should we talk about like who we would
get I mean, we have plenty of time. Should we
talk about who we would cast in the movie of
the Yeah? What is the or would you fall in
for this? Who would do?
Speaker 1 (32:02):
I absolutely would have fallen for this.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
I am fallen for this. I would need to believe
in this.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
I also would have done it if I was in
this town. I think I would have had so much
fun just joining joining the gang and being part of
the improv. Absolutely, yes, I would have fallen for it.
And I think the movie of this is like a
broad comedy. It's like a golden erage of apatoch comedy.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
It's also such a this is such a classic, like
you know on Tumblr the like and then everyone clapped,
you know what I mean? Like the thing of like
people writing little fictional stories that sort of reinforce what
they think of the world, and then they go viral
and like it's obviously fake, but you just kind of
want to believe it's real.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
I mean, this is a meta hoax, but it does
get at why people do believe hoaxes when they reinforce
what you already think. If you are someone from Chicago
taking a train to San Francisco, and you've read all
these dime novels about like, ah, people fighting Native Americans
and these cowboys and shootouts, and that's what you're expecting.
You want to see that, and when you see it,
(33:07):
you'll believe it because you're like, yeah, this is this
is what I was primed to believe. Would you want
to see a movie about this? Should we make a
movie about this?
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Sure? I mean there's got to be, like I feel like,
it's got to be like The Three Amigos or something
where like then there is an actual crime in town
and they the fake sheriff has to do a real
sheriff or like a Boy Who Cried Wolf situation where
nobody believes that there's a real crime in town because
they keep faking it.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
They already made this movie. Do you know what it is?
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Is it Galaxy Quests?
Speaker 1 (33:41):
We should we should watch a Bug's Life? Okay, they
should make wild They should make a Bugs Life sequel
set in the wild West.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Great Dana, Where can people find you?
Speaker 1 (33:51):
On Instagram At Dana Schwartz with three z's Where on
Instagram at Hoax the podcast? Uh so follow us, We'll
be posting stuff. We'll be on TikTok, Please rate, review, subscribe.
If you're liking the show, please share it with a friend, and,
as always, please hoax responsibly.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Bye. Hoax is a production of iHeart Podcasts. Our hosts
are Danish Schwortz and Lizzie Logan. Our executive producers are
Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, with supervising producer Rima L.
(34:29):
Kali and producers Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk. Our theme
music was composed by Laine Montgomery. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
You're listening to Hoax, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Folks, it's a hug.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
No one I have seen what us to see this latter.
Welcome to Hoax, a podcast about the lies we wish
we're true and truths that sound like lies.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Every episode we look at one story of a prank,
a grift from history so big and bold it makes
us question why we believe.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I'm the ghost of Danis Schwartz and I'm.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
The evil twin of Lizzie Logan. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Lizzie. What's your relationship to the idea of the wild West?
Just like the concept.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I think it's one of the best like songs written
for a movie ever. Will Smith did a great job,
and uh, you know, Kevin Klein freaked it. And that's
pretty much what I know about the wild West. I'm
thinking Saloon and Back to the Future three. That's what
I know about the West.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
I mean, it's kind of interesting that now the West
is just sort of an esthetic. There's like space and
there's cowboys. Yeah, it's just like, I don't think people
know a lot about the history of the West really.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I mean, so I'm I'm from California and A big
part of growing up in California is like every year
you're in middle school, your history curriculum module is like
learning about California. So like you learn about the gold Rush,
and you learn about the missions, and but you never
really learn about like Cowboy times, I think because it's
(01:37):
like pretty problematic. So I don't know, I learn. I
know a lot about like puayblows and like how to
pan for gold and the difference between like fools cold
and real gold, but I don't know anything about like
Wider or Billy the Kid.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
But you know, that's like a perfect segue because kind
of even at the time, the idea of the West
was just sort of this invented idea. Yeah, so I'm
going to before we get into the hoax, just a
little bit of like background. I think sort of people
point out with like the origin of the idea of
like the wild West. I'm doing like air quotes is
(02:14):
but kind of in the eighteen forties, the West as
an idea began to get really popular, with like minstrel
shows and P. T. Barnum presenting like reenactments of Native
American chiefs and tribal dances. In his exhibits, and exhibitions,
so it was like already a fetishized object sort of
(02:35):
where it's like, ooh, mysterious and exotic.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, and people were like, let's go die on the
organ trail because we totally want to be part of this.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Yeah. It was like, yeah, that sounds romantic and fun. Well,
in eighteen fifty nine, dime novels came out, so these
super cheap paperback novels with very simplistic themes of like
heroic cowboys, you know, savage Native American savage and air
quotes outlaws said. The tropes that people even now think
(03:03):
of as the cowboys were like invented for fiction in nineteen,
you know, eighteen fifty nine. They're written super super quickly.
People are writing like multiple dime novels about cowboys a month,
and people are eating them up. There's this guy named
Ned Buntline who is a writer who read this article
about wild Bill Hiccock, who is a soldier and a
(03:23):
scout and gun slinger, and Ned, this writer ran up
to wild Bill Hiccock in a saloon and said, there's
my man. I want you because he wanted to write
a dime novel about him. But Allegedly, Hiccock hated being surprised,
and the fact that a guy ran up to him
was like, you he pulled his gun out and told
him to get out of town.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I thought you were going to say that he just
shot him, Like it seems like a really bad idea
to surprise a gunslinger in a saloon.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah, but no, he just said get out, and you know,
get out of town in twenty four hours. And so
Buntline is like, fine, I'll talk to one of your
friends and write a dime novel about him. And he
finds this twenty three year old guy named William F. Cody,
aka Buffalo Bill. He intersting a guy he had fought
some battles against the Sioux and Cheyenne, and was, you know,
(04:09):
a buffalo wrangler hunter. And he and Ned Buntline become friends,
he writes. Buttline writes this very popular serialized novel called
Buffalo Bill The King of the Border, which is adapted
into a hit play, and then in like the eighteen seventies,
Buffalo Bill starts playing himself on stage in like wild
(04:29):
West shows, there's the show called The Scouts of the Prairie,
produced by Ned Buttline, New plays every year. This troop
tours for ten years. They do like big reenactments of
fights with Native Americans, and it's like goes all over
the world and that so even in the eighteen seventies,
the idea of the West as like a piece of
popular entertainment was being formed in real time.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Interesting, I have a fun fact that I wonder if
you're about to get to and I got no, please
yank in the rugout.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Because I'm about to change the sub and talk about
a hoax.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Oh okay, Well, do you know the thing about the
Lone Ranger?
Speaker 1 (05:05):
No?
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Okay, So the Lone Ranger is a fictional character. Yeah,
but he was sort of based on a real US
Marshal named Bass Reeves who was like known as like
the most badass US Marshall in the West, and he
was black.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Whoa, yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
He like started his life as an enslaved person and
then became a US Marshal and then was like the
coolest US Marshal ever and is one of the like
he and some other people inspired the character of the
Lone Ranger. But like, what a cool figure from history
that got whitewashed. But like, fortunately now is getting un whitewashed.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
That's so cool. I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah, anyway, so cool, A cool figure from the old
fact Bass reeves.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
So the wild West is like at this point, even
in the eighteen seventies, when the Wild West is like
still ostensibly happening, even as it's happening, it's being like
romanticized in real time. And people who don't live in
the West, people live on the East Coast, people who
live in big cities, can see these Wild West shows,
can read these dime novels, and they have an idea
(06:08):
of what it's like to live in the wild West.
And the truth is not nearly as exciting as a
dime novel because it's like those are novels, and not
nearly as exciting as these shows because those are performing shows.
But case in point, a lot of people come out
West just for jobs and like boring jobs. There's a
town called Palisade in Nevada that's a very very sleepy
(06:31):
mining town. In eighteen sixty eight, it becomes a station
on the Central Pacific Railroad and it just basically only
exists as a transportation hub for eastern Nevada mining camps
and to live there is mostly because you're a miner
working in minds ten hours a day, six days a week.
It's really physical, boring work that the truth of living
(06:53):
there isn't very romantic. There's like a lot of xenophobia
happening because people think Chinese people are stealing their jobs,
and those jobs don't sound very fun in the first place. Nope,
it's a very small town with basically one saloon. I
guess probably what you're picturing for an old West town.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, I'm just picturing like and the only exciting thing
that happened in this time is that like jeans were invented. Yeah,
down the street invented jeans.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Well, what does become sort of exciting is in eighteen
sixty eight, because this sleepy mining town is a stop
on the Central Pacific Railroad, passenger trains will come through, Okay,
passenger trains from Chicago to San Francisco, which is basically
from Dana to.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Lizzy, the Dana Lizzy Express, the Dana Lizzy.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Express, and it would stop in Palisade usually as a
chance for these people to like stretch their legs. They
would fill up more water in the engine and like,
you know, wait ten minutes and something kind of unusual
started happening when the train stopped there these big city
you know, I don't know, what's like a cowboy way
(08:04):
to insult a big city person.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
You half a lutint, half fancy fancy city. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, So these city slickers would be walking stretching their
legs when they would see in the middle of the
street a cowboy lift his pistol and go up to
another man and say, I saw what you did with
my sister, and the man would deny it, and then
the cowboys shot, and the guy collapses and there's blood
on the street, and people drag his body away, and
(08:31):
a sheriff comes and chases, and then the train would
be like okay, all aboard, and you'd have to get
back on the train and be like, oh my god,
what did we just see. Basically, the passengers on this
train would stop. In the ten minutes that they would
be stretching their legs, a scene out of a Wild
West dime novel would happen.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Is this like that bus tour in New York where
it would like to and they would do a little
song and dance.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
I mean, basically, but this wasn't a thing that the
train hired people were just like, what is happening. There's wood,
you know, they dragged this body off. People would be like,
oh my god, the wild West is really wild. The
scene that I just described of a man shooting another guy.
In the news article to quote it, they say, sympathetic
friends carried off the dead and wounded to some neighboring saloon,
(09:25):
and then frightened and bewildered immigrants, which are the train passengers,
crawled from under seats and behind cars, their blanched faces
and trembling limbs attesting to their belief and the genuineness
of the fight. So train passengers passing through Palisade would
just always happen to witness some astonishingly entertaining and terrifying
moment of the wild West. One time, half a dozen
(09:48):
Native Americans ran into town and were like rounded up
by a cowboy. Sometimes there were bloody shootout. Sometimes sheriffs
would arrest people. And the reason that this was always happening,
that it was so entertaining was because it wasn't real.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah they're doing improv It was the.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Entire city of Palisade, the sleepy board mining tone decided
to give purpose to their sad, lonely mining, you know,
exhausted lives, that they would trick the city slickers on
big trains who expected the wild West to be some like,
you know, crazy gun slinging place. They're like, fine, you
(10:27):
want it, we'll give it to you.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Dan, I absolutely love this. I love this so because
my favorite, one of my favorite plots in a movie
or episode of television is Let's put on a show.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Let's put on a show.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Let's put on a show will get me pretty much anytime,
Like it really really delights me.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
So I'm going to quote from an article from a
newspaper called the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, who wrote about
this prank in October eighteenth.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Are they making money from this?
Speaker 1 (10:59):
No? No, They're just doing it to quote to quote,
a half dozen Native Americans, for a reasonable compensation, would
submit to being bound hand and foot and laid on
the platform during the stay of the train, and around
their prostate bodies, a guard of citizens armed with immense revolvers,
(11:19):
long rifles, and bloodthirsty looking bowie knives would march with
Marshall Maine, meanwhile entertaining the gaping, open mouthed greenhorns with
blood curdling tails of border warfare. So they also got
Native Americans that they're paying a reasonable wage.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
To participate in this. Who is paying them?
Speaker 1 (11:39):
I think the city?
Speaker 2 (11:40):
No one, Okay, So they have like a fund, they
have like a entertain the tourists.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
But yeah, and according to this article, they used animal
blood from the local slaughterhouse. They would load guns with
pot powder but no ball, so that the guns would
actually fire, but there would be no bullet of it,
because they just thought it was fun to trick city
folks who were looking down on the dangerous like savage West.
And also, according to lore, train passengers were complaining that
(12:11):
the wild West they expected was really boring. So like
train passengers had been like complaining to the train and
complaining to people in the town that they're like, well,
we expected something out of these wild West shows or
like you know what we had been reading in dime novels,
and really it's it's so boring. So they decided they
would put on a show.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
This is incredible.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
According to one source, they did like a thousand of
these shows, which means like one a day for three years.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
This is incredible and is making me feel a lot
of things because so I'm from San Francisco, Yeah, which
has a really bad reputation right now, like and you know,
don't take conservative's word for anything, but like people will
say the most like whack shit about San Francisco. That
would be offensive if you said it about other cities. Yeah,
(12:59):
like people, well, like I've told people that I'm from
San Francisco just in the course of conversation, and people
will be like.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Oh, god, you know a lot of drugs or like,
oh a lot of homelessness, or like, oh a lot
of You're like into a city and I'm like, would
you say to someone from Detroit like a lot of
gang violence, like oh a lot of gun violece.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
I'm like this is not like or like if someone
said they were from New York, would you just be
like a lot of terrorism, Like yes, like it has problems,
like every city has problem. But now I'm just like
we should start doing this, Like anytime you see someone
from out of town, like we should just like just
like drop your pants, take a shit, offer them the fentanyl,
like shoot up like saline, like you know what I mean,
(13:41):
Like we should just if you know what you want
bad San Francisco like, let's do it. Let's give it
to that is.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
It's like you get little tour buses of people from
Texas to bring up to San Francisco and put on
the little show.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I want to do this now. I'm like, yeah, let's
lean into it.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
You like be like, where are your children? I would
like to teach them pro noun.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yes, I would like to take their gender away and
give them two items of crack cocaine.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
So that's I mean, that's the sources that that's what's happening.
That these people are just so bored and exhausted from
their lives working ten hour days. This town is so
small they don't even have a theater to distract them,
so like what are they going to do? And in actuality,
crime was so low that Palis did not even have
a sheriff. So in this place where they were doing
elaborate shootouts every day, it's like, actually, no, everyone was
(14:33):
getting along and there was no sheriff.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
I would like to think that they did a raffle
every week to decide who got to play the sheriff.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
It'd be so.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Sweet, would be like, oh, well, it's Frank's birthday coming up,
so he gets to play the sheriff and to go.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Yeah, and they have an endless supply of new audience
members of unwilling audience members every single day.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
That's incredible.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
But I'm going to break your heart just a little bit.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, I thought it. Maybe a twist might be kind.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I'm so sorry, because it's possible that this hoax is
itself a hoax. Because that newspaper I quoted above, the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, It is a real newspaper, but
it's it's our main and only contemporary source on this hoax.
And it also was a newspaper that frequently had joke
(15:30):
and satire articles one.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Of the main guys writing the onion of its day.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
But not not quite Okay, So here's the thing. One
guy writing for it is a man you might have
heard of by a little name name Mark Twain.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Okay, not to spoil this entire podcast, but Mark Twain
wrote satire in newspapers that I just cannot get my
head around.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Well, hopefully, I think I'm gonna still clear.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
That was funny that I just don't get so.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
In a letter he wrote about his experience writing for
the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and he said these stories
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. So you know he's
(16:25):
admitting that they just had fun writing bloody hoax articles. Okay,
he made up this story about a newly discovered petrified man,
like a man who had turned to stone in the
desert that from thousands of years ago. And then he
also wrote this famous hoax article for this newspaper about
a man going crazy and murdering his wife and kids,
(16:45):
which sounds like a laugh riot.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
See this is what I'm saying. I don't like Mark Mark. Yeah,
mister Twain, I don't understand your humor.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Well, okay, I'm going to try to explain it for you, please.
The petrified man article, he describes it, and it reads
like a straight article, except he also describes the position
they found the man in is with his thumb against
his nose, like thumbing his nose at the audience. So
that was the big joke there, okay, and the other one,
this story, which truly was just an article about a
(17:15):
man going crazy and murdering his wife and kids. He
begins by saying that the man was residing with his
family in the loghouse just at the edge of the
Great Pine Forest between Empire City and Dutch Nicks. There's
no actual pine forest there, which means that he wrote
this article with like a hint for the people reading
it that it wasn't real. Where He's like, people who
(17:37):
live here will know that this is made up. And
when this bloody story that people love, like when it
travels all over the world, because people love these bloody stories,
they won't know it's made up. But we will know
it's made up because I planted these little hints here.
And more importantly, he was actually kind of trying to
make a point with that article, because at the end
of that article about a husband going crazy, they say
(17:59):
that the husband went crazy because he invested in this company,
Spring Valley Water Company of San Francisco, which was a
real company and was crooked and went under and they
were like, and he lost all his money and went crazy.
And so the end of the article says the newspapers
of San Francisco permitted this water company to go on
borrowing money and cooking dividends under cover of which cunning
(18:21):
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 this fearful massacre
detailed above may prove the saddest result of their silence.
So later, when he admits it to hoax, he says
it was necessary to publish the story in order to
(18:44):
get the fact into the San Francisco papers that the
Spring Valley Water Company was cooking dividends by borrowing money.
The only way you could get that fact into a
San Francisco journal is to smuggle it in or some
great tragedy. You're making a concerned face.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
I'm just thinking, I'm thinking, and I'm considering.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
It's not all good, But I understand why. Some'm like,
I don't know, little writer would have fun with this,
being like people are gobbling up stories about about men
murdering people, but no one cares about a story about
a stock company.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
I mean, okay, so that I understand, like has a
point to me, that is not like that is a
different thing from like it's a like, that's not funny.
But I'm like, okay, so he was.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
But I think he did think it was funny.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Okay, I think he was wrong.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
I think he thought it was funny to write these
stories that he knew the public would eat up for
his own little like ends, whatever those ends may be,
whether it was just like thumbing their nose or being like, hey,
this stock company, this company, I want to like expose
the fact that they were cooking dividends. And I think
he thought it was funny to leave hints that certain
people reading it would know it was made up, but
(19:56):
not everyone.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Hmmm, Well, I'll have an answer for you on our
new podcast Dissecting Mark Twain, hundreds of years after his death.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Mark Twain, funny or not?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah, I want to go back to living in the
world of five minutes ago, when I thought that a
whole town did a fun prey.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Well, but here's here's what I want to say. The
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise did publish real articles.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
There are real articles, okay.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
And also when it did publish joke articles, there were
usually those specific hints of like the petrified man was
thumbing his nose, or it says that there's like a.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Did Mark Twain write for the Virginia Okay, so he
wrote for this paper?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
And you know when there were joke articles, they usually
had those hints of like there's a big pine forest here,
but there's not. And the Palisade hoax story does not
have any of those markers.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
But there's no other contemporary accounts, like there's nobody who wrote.
We don't don't have any like letters from someone being
like I was on the train today and I saw
the craziest thing. No, although you did your cousin see
that when they took the same drain.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
There's an amateur historian named Gerald B. Higgs who wrote
like a pretty well regarded account of the palis Ataks
in nineteen seventy six, and he said that his sources
was visiting the County Recorder's offices in Nevada and was like,
I was boots on the ground. But he doesn't actually
cite his sources, so we don't know. And our only
(21:31):
contemporary contemporary source is the Virginia Newspaper, where there were
hoax articles.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Is this town real?
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Do they I mean, are there like descendants of the
people who live there? Could we ask?
Speaker 1 (21:45):
I don't know, Well I could tell you, so what
happened next?
Speaker 2 (21:48):
If we have listeners in Nevada, can you like go
there and check for us?
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Well, that might be a little tricky.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Does nobody live there?
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Because so in eighteen eighty five there were Eureka minds
just declined and so most people just started to move away.
In nineteen ten, there was a flood that destroyed most
of the town. The post office was discontinued in nineteen
sixty one, and then, in a Shit's Creek twist, the
entire town was sold at auction April twenty six, two
(22:16):
thousand and five, for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
to an unidentified bitter. Okay, because it's just a ghost town.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Now, if you own this town, if you're the unidentified bitter,
can you please you know what? Can you make this reel?
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Like?
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Can you say I will? I know a lot of
improv people and we will do this.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Should we just should we crowdfund and buy this town
to make it an improv theater?
Speaker 3 (22:39):
Like?
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Can we just do like a week of these performances?
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Although then it would just become cowboy old Williamsburg, a
colonial Williamsburg, or like Westworld without you.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Say that, like, that's a really bad thing, and I
think it would be so fun.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Do you think people would go to Westworld with people?
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Yes? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe, But I think.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Part of the fun is also that the people watching
didn't know it was fake, that they thought it was real.
If they know you're acting, it's a less fun.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
I think it's I mean, I don't really want to
see anybody get murdered, so for me, it's more funy
is getting right hozy Logan got pushing, doesn't want to
see people murdered, hot take. I would rather pay for
admission to an interactive show than take a train ride
through a sleepy town and witness across.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Well. I mean people agreed with you, because clearly people
loved like wild West. Shows like Antie Oakley and like
you know, Buffalo Bill were wildly popular. But this would
have been the only show where they thought they were
getting the real thing. Maybe it was true. We can
there's no law that says we can't believe it.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
There is no law yet, And again.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
The article itself doesn't have any indicators that it was
fake and it was picked up by sources you know
at the time, it's plausible.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
It does seem sort of unlikely that in a thousand shows,
no one else like you would think after five hundred shows,
another a reporter from another newspaper would be like, I'm
gonna go check.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
This out, Like maybe the wild West was just so
wild these things are happening in all the time. They
were too busy making up stories about men going crazy
because they lost their fortune in crooked stock companies.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Do you think anything about the wild West was real?
Like do you think like did Davy Crockett fight a bear?
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah? And the shootout at Okay Corral was real? Yeah,
But but I think do you remember the Alamo? I don't. Actually,
I'm not.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I never, I genuinely never think about that.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
I'm almost embarrassed. I've spent so much time researching for
my other podcast, Noble Blood, like I know so much
more about European history than I do, like basic American history. Genuinely,
I'm like way better versed British history than I am
American history.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
I'm not well versed in either, So I'm a patriot.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
I also think a lot of I guess.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
It's pretty patriotic of me to be ignorant.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Classic America is America. It's just I think a lot
of our ideas about the wild West make it more
glamorous than it is. Like I think the violence was
mostly people like stealing livestock and there, you know, that's
what happened. There were gangs of people stealing livestock occasionally
and they would get shot. And I don't think it
was like glamorous heroes and villains the way that they
(25:35):
were portrayed in dime novels, because those were popular entertainment
and there's always been violence, and I think that there's
violent in cities, and there's violent in you know, a
rural areas, and I think that the idea of romanticizing
it because it's like an aesthetic that's appealing, doesn't make
it any more true than than you know, the reality,
(25:55):
which is probably way less glamorous, unless it's just people
putting on a show, which I.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Said that it was really fun. I would love that.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Can I leave you with one more Palisade story, please?
So Palisade got to be in the news one more
time In nineteen thirty two, when President Hoover was taking
the train back to California to vote.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
If you had paid me one thousand dollars, I could
not have told you who was president in nineteen thirty.
What if I gave you like five guesses, like Hoover
is just not a president that I know about.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
I remember, this is a tiny as side.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
I just would have said FDR. And I would have
gone to my grave saying FDR.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Close enough, Okay. I remember being in sixth grade and
sitting in my social studies class looking at a poster
of all the American presidents, and again sixth grade as well,
like eleven twelve. Yeah, and I saw on the poster
that there was a president named Chester Arthur. And I
distinctly remember being like, I have never heard that name before.
(27:03):
Every other name on this poster I have like heard
and I'm aware of as a president. That was the
moment where I was like, we had a president named
Chester Arthur.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
And now we can cut this if you want. That's
a very important name to you.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah, I have I have a son named Arthur. We
do not have to cut that. He's very important to me.
I wasn't going to cut it. I just if you
want his name on the pod on social media all
the time. But yeah, at that moment, I decided, if
I ever had a son, it American president America's most
forgettable I think he might be. I would argue that
(27:37):
that he's America's most forgettable.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Present, America's most forgettable president. Sorry, you were talking about
President Hoover.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
President Hoover was taking the train to California to vote
because he was going to vote in his home state
in the election.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
I didn't know he was from California.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I guess, I guess the Hoover dam Hoover dam.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
We're learning thank so much about American history in this episode.
Lizzy's really going through it.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Forget it, Jake, it's trying to.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
But the night before the President's train passed through Palisade,
a guard caught two men carrying seventeen sticks of dynamite
who were planning on blowing up the train and assassinating
the president.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Is this real or is this maybe a hoax? No?
Speaker 1 (28:23):
I mean the guard said that he did this. They
tried to.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
I mean, is this like from real newspapers and stuff?
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Yeah, this is right, Okay, okay, the guard they tried
to stab and shoot this guard that the guy who
are trying to blow up the train, but he survived.
He prevented them from blowing up the train, and Hoover
was fine. This tiny town of three hundred people in
it was huge news because there's an attempt at assassination.
This one guard prevented it. Great job, thank you, tiny Palisade.
Except yeah, also, two weeks later the guard said he
(28:51):
made it up. So it happened in that it was
written about in newspapers, but in another sense, it didn't
happen because it never happened.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
I mean, so it's a town of liars. Yeah, So
either they lied in that they put on shows of
things that were fake, or they lied and that they
lied about putting on shows.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
And it also it is pretty clever on.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Lion journalists lied about them lying by pudding.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
To lie about putting on shows is funny. And you
don't have to get then animal blood out of your.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Clothes, Dana, This is all so funny.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
I know. I also have to shout the reason I
heard about the story in the first place is because
we talked about it on another podcast that I occasionally
host called Very Special Episodes, which you should listen to.
But the second I heard about the story, I was like,
I need to learn everything about it and also talk
to my friend Lizzie about it.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Yeah, this is like giving me so much to think.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
About starting a citywide improv troup.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
I mean, do you remember improv everywhere? Wow?
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Palisane? Did Palisane Nevada? And or Mark Twain invent improv everywhere?
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah? They were like no pants, subway rides and flash mobs.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Oh my god. That's kind of when the Internet peaked.
So that was when the Internet was good.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Yeah, that was like when like the YouTube to Ellen Pipeline.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Was do you remember when iPhones you could drink beer?
And that was the whole thing about all that.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Or when there was a it was an there was
an app first of all, that would just turn your
iPhone screen white so that you could use it as
a flashlight. Yes, or it would turn it like a
color so that you could use it as a lightsaber. Yeah,
it was Those were really good apps.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
It was kind of when phones were good because we're like,
I know this is powerful, but what is the point
of this And I'm like, no, no, it was worth
spending all this money because I can pretend to drink
a beer.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
See you said all this money. I was like those
like ninety nine cents. But then I realized you meant
the phone. The money that you spend on the phone
and apps used to cost nine I really did cost
ninety nine cents, and they didn't take all your data.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
So golden era of the Internet was improv everywhere, which
was actually invented by Pallas a Nevada. We actually don't
know that Mark Twain wrote that article. It doesn't have
a byline. He could have. He also might not have.
Probably yeah, statistically he didn't because we know most of
the articles he wrote for that newspaper.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
If nobody else made that up, like imagine doing a
Mark Twain level satire and you just don't take credit
for it in the era of Mark Twain.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
But also we can pause it again. It's really possible
that it is real that it happened. Like this is
a sleepy town where everyone is bored, and all the
pieces were already in place, that these city slickers looking
down on West the Westerners expected violence and expected, you know,
(31:49):
these spectacles, and it's possible that people just decided, hey,
let's put on the show.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Oh also should we talk about like who we would
get I mean, we have plenty of time. Should we
talk about who we would cast in the movie of
the Yeah? What is the or would you fall in
for this? Who would do?
Speaker 1 (32:02):
I absolutely would have fallen for this.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
I am fallen for this. I would need to believe
in this.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
I also would have done it if I was in
this town. I think I would have had so much
fun just joining joining the gang and being part of
the improv. Absolutely, yes, I would have fallen for it.
And I think the movie of this is like a
broad comedy. It's like a golden erage of apatoch comedy.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
It's also such a this is such a classic, like
you know on Tumblr the like and then everyone clapped,
you know what I mean? Like the thing of like
people writing little fictional stories that sort of reinforce what
they think of the world, and then they go viral
and like it's obviously fake, but you just kind of
want to believe it's real.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
I mean, this is a meta hoax, but it does
get at why people do believe hoaxes when they reinforce
what you already think. If you are someone from Chicago
taking a train to San Francisco, and you've read all
these dime novels about like, ah, people fighting Native Americans
and these cowboys and shootouts, and that's what you're expecting.
You want to see that, and when you see it,
(33:07):
you'll believe it because you're like, yeah, this is this
is what I was primed to believe. Would you want
to see a movie about this? Should we make a
movie about this?
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Sure? I mean there's got to be, like I feel like,
it's got to be like The Three Amigos or something
where like then there is an actual crime in town
and they the fake sheriff has to do a real
sheriff or like a Boy Who Cried Wolf situation where
nobody believes that there's a real crime in town because
they keep faking it.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
They already made this movie. Do you know what it is?
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Is it Galaxy Quests?
Speaker 1 (33:41):
We should we should watch a Bug's Life? Okay, they
should make wild They should make a Bugs Life sequel
set in the wild West.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Great Dana, Where can people find you?
Speaker 1 (33:51):
On Instagram At Dana Schwartz with three z's Where on
Instagram at Hoax the podcast? Uh so follow us, We'll
be posting stuff. We'll be on TikTok, Please rate, review, subscribe.
If you're liking the show, please share it with a friend, and,
as always, please hoax responsibly.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Bye. Hoax is a production of iHeart Podcasts. Our hosts
are Danish Schwortz and Lizzie Logan. Our executive producers are
Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, with supervising producer Rima L.
(34:29):
Kali and producers Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk. Our theme
music was composed by Laine Montgomery. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.