MARK TWAIN'S HOAX.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1399, 27 March 1912, Page 5

MARK TWAIN'S HOAX.

"THE PETRIFIED. MAN."

Mark Twain never was regarded as es. pecially funny in his home town. It was not til he wcntWest and became associated with a now forgotten paper in a forgotten .mming centre that any real humoron strike was made. And it didn't look at hrst as if this would pan out for much. Tho paper was known as the Oiian Enterprise" and Samuel Clemens TV? , r , eCe,pt of t,le Progressive salary ot 25 dollars per. He earned this, or at east a good .part of it, says Albert Bigelow Pnmc in "Harper's," through a series of unholy hoaxes" which ho conceived and edited with rare skill. The that of "The Petrified Man." "Tho Petrified Man" hoax was directed at an official named Sewall, a coroner and justice of the peace at Humboldt, who had been pompously indifferent in the ma tor of supplying news. The storv, told with great circumstance and apparent care as to detail, related the finding , a P, ef , rl » e<l Prehistoric man partially embedded in a rock, in a cave in the desert, more than one hundred miles from Humboldt; also how Sewall had made the perilous five-day journey in tlie alkali waste to hold an inquest over a man that had been dead three hundred years and how "with that delicacy so characteristic of him, Sewall had forbidden the miners from blasting him from his position The account further stated that the hands of the deceased were arranged in a peculiar fashion, and the description of the arrangement was so skilfully woven in with other matters that at first or even second readine one might not <='ee that the position indicated was the ancient one which begins with the thumb at the nose, and in manv ages has been used impolitely to express ridicule and the word "sold." But the description was a shade "too" ingenious. The author expected that the exchanges would see the joke, and perhaps assist in (he fun he would have with Sewall. Ha did not contemplate a joke on the papers themselves. As a matter of fact, no one saw the sell, and most of the papers printed his story of the petrified man as n genuine discovery. This was a surprise and a momentary disappointment; then he realised that he had builded b»iter than he knew. He gathered up a bundle of (he exchanges and sent them to Sowall ; also he sent marked copies to scientific men in various parts of the United States. The papers had taken it seriously; perhaps the scientists would be as easily misled. Many of them were, and Sewall's days became unhappy because of letters received asking further information. .As literature the effect did not rank, hiirh. and a" a (rick on an obscure nffieial.it was hardly worth while; hut as a joke on (lie coast exchanges »nd press generally if was grcallv regarded, and ils author; (hough as yet unnamed, acquired prestige.