Sketches New and Old

  THE PETRIFIED MAN

  Now, to show how really hard it is to foist a moral or a truth upon anunsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdlymissing one's mark, I will here set down two experiences of my own inthis thing. In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the peoplegot to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other naturalmarvels. One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one ortwo glorified discoveries of this kind. The mania was becoming a littleridiculous. I was a brand-new local editor in Virginia City, and I feltcalled upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have our benignant,fatherly moods at one time or another, I suppose. I chose to kill thepetrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe itwas altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part ofit at all. I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkablypetrified man.

  I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.----, the new coroner andjustice of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch himup a little at the same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combinepleasure with business. So I told, in patient, belief-compelling detail,all about the finding of a petrified-man at Gravelly Ford (exactly ahundred and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail from where---- lived); how all the savants of the immediate neighborhood had been toexamine it (it was notorious that there was not a living creature withinfifty miles of there, except a few starving Indians, some crippledgrasshoppers, and four or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to getaway); how those savants all pronounced the petrified man to have been ina state of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, witha seriousness that I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated thatas soon as Mr.----heard the news he summoned a jury, mounted his mule,and posted off, with noble reverence for official duty, on that awfulfive days' journey, through alkali, sage brush, peril of body, andimminent starvation, to hold an inquest on this man that had been deadand turned to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years!And then, my hand being "in," so to speak, I went on, with the sameunflinching gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict thatdeceased came to his death from protracted exposure. This only moved meto higher flights of imagination, and I said that the jury, with thatcharity so characteristic of pioneers, then dug a grave, and were aboutto give the petrified man Christian burial, when they found that for agesa limestone sediment had been trickling down the face of the stoneagainst which he was sitting, and this stuff had run under him andcemented him fast to the "bed-rock"; that the jury (they were allsilver-miners) canvassed the difficulty a moment, and then got out theirpowder and fuse, and proceeded to drill a hole under him, in order toblast him from his position, when Mr.----, "with that delicacy socharacteristic of him, forbade them, observing that it would be littleless than sacrilege to do such a thing."

  From beginning to end the "Petrified Man" squib was a string of roaringabsurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretense of truth thateven imposed upon me to some extent, and I was in some danger ofbelieving in my own fraud. But I really had no desire to deceiveanybody, and no expectation of doing it. I depended on the way thepetrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle.Yet I purposely mixed that up with other things, hoping to make itobscure--and I did. I would describe the position of one foot, and thensay his right thumb was against the side of his nose; then talk about hisother foot, and presently come back and say the fingers of his right handwere spread apart; then talk about the back of his head a little, andreturn and say the left thumb was hooked into the right little finger;then ramble off about something else, and by and by drift back again andremark that the fingers of the left hand were spread like those of theright. But I was too ingenious. I mixed it up rather too much; and soall that description of the attitude, as a key to the humbuggery of thearticle, was entirely lost, for nobody but me ever discovered andcomprehended the peculiar and suggestive position of the petrified man'shands.

  As a satire on the petrifaction mania, or anything else, my Petrified Manwas a disheartening failure; for everybody received him in innocent goodfaith, and I was stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull downthe wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted tothe grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada hadproduced. I was so disappointed at the curious miscarriage of my scheme,that at first I was angry, and did not like to think about it; but by andby, when the exchanges began to come in with the Petrified Man copied andguilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satisfaction;and as my gentleman's field of travels broadened, and by the exchanges Isaw that he steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory,state after state, and land after land, till he swept the great globe andculminated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august LondonLancet, my cup was full, and I said I was glad I had done it. I thinkthat for about eleven months, as nearly as I can remember, Mr.----'sdaily mail-bag continued to be swollen by the addition of half a bushelof newspapers hailing from many climes with the Petrified Man in them,marked around with a prominent belt of ink. I sent them to him. I didit for spite, not for fun.

  He used to shovel them into his back yard and curse. And every dayduring all those months the miners, his constituents (for miners neverquit joking a person when they get started), would call on him and ask ifhe could tell them where they could get hold of a paper with thePetrified Man in it. He could have accommodated a continent with them.I hated ---- in those days, and these things pacified me and pleased me.I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him without killing him.