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also worked out in detail in his free silver journalism and in his final work of
fiction, Dives and Lazarus, an allegory of the pilgrim’s progress of a poor
prospector beyond a rich gold merchant. De Quille’s hoaxes were his private and
public vendetta against the powerful Eastern interests victimizing his longtime
friends and neighbors.
This portrait of De Quille’s hoaxing acts as a corrective to prior
assessments of De Quille’s hoaxes as lighthearted games (Wright 2: 20). The
editors of the San Francisco Stock Report cut to the core of the issue when they
criticized the “Eyeless Fish” for starting a dangerous rumor about the future of
silver in the West: “A joke is a joke, but such a joke as this becomes serious in its
consequences in proportion as it is successful” (ctn. 2, scrapbk. 2). A hoax
becomes epistemologically and politically serious when many people start
believing it. That De Quille was serious about people believing his hoaxes is
evident in the copious sequels he wrote to his hoaxes. He persisted in defending
some of them for as long as thirty years. He used scientific rhetoric, not only in
his hoaxes but also in his mining histories, to build the West that he wanted to live
in and that he wanted to project to the East. He playfully exploited the authority
he had earned with his readers through legitimate mining reporting to construct
for them and for outsiders a West full of wonders. If, in the process, he caught
some important Eastern scientists and businessmen in his net, all the better for his
project of championing the pioneer as a scrappy folk hero triumphing over the
silk-vested Eastern fat cat.
In the end, the legacy of De Quille’s hoaxing moves beyond the valiant
but losing fight he waged against the East and the gold standard. His hoaxing
practices utilize the foundational strategies developed by Poe thirty years prior,
adapting them to a popular science rhetoric that demonstrated through its matterof-fact language the control that American science had extended over nature in
the intervening thirty years. In addition, De Quille’s hoaxes clearly demonstrate
their inheritance of Twain’s conception of the hoax as local political activism.
But De Quille was an innovator. He developed rhetorical strategies of hoaxing—
like forged testimonies and sequels—that specifically exploited the power of print
to build reality over time. His legacy to us is the idea of the West as a perpetual
frontier where the possible and impossible regularly change places through the
translation of scientific rhetoric, as a liminal realm that divulges its mysteries only
to those who go there and write about it. With his hoaxes, De Quille—just as
significantly as other, more canonical Western writers like Twain and Bret
Harte—conditioned his readers to believe that the West was a region of American
experience where words, in fact, made the world.
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Lynda Walsh