I then left.
Now, to show how really hard it is to foist a moral
or a truth upon an unsuspecting public through a burlesque
without entirely and absurdly missing one’s
mark, I will here set down two experiences of my own
in this thing. In the fall of 1862, in Nevada
and California, the people got to running wild about
extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels.
One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding
in it one or two glorified discoveries of this kind.
The mania was becoming a little ridiculous.
I was a brand-new local editor in Virginia City, and
I felt called upon to destroy this growing evil; we
all have our benignant, fatherly moods at one time
or another, I suppose. I chose to kill the petrifaction
mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire.
But maybe it was altogether too delicate, for nobody
ever perceived the satire part of it at all.
I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a
remarkably petrified man.
I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.——,
the new coroner and justice of the peace of Humboldt,
and thought I might as well touch him up a little
at the same time and make him ridiculous, and thus
combine pleasure with business. So I told, in
patient, belief-compelling detail, all about the finding
of a petrified-man at Gravelly Ford (exactly a hundred
and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail from
where —— lived); how all the savants
of the immediate neighborhood had been to examine
it (it was notorious that there was not a living creature
within fifty miles of there, except a few starving
Indians; some crippled grasshoppers, and four or five
buzzards out of meat and too feeble to get away);
how those savants all pronounced the petrified man
to have been in a state of complete petrifaction for
over ten generations; and then, with a seriousness
that I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated
that as soon as Mr.——heard the news
he summoned a jury, mounted his mule, and posted off,
with noble reverence for official duty, on that awful
five days’ journey, through alkali, sage brush,
peril of body, and imminent starvation, to hold an
inquest on this man that had been dead and turned
to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years!
And then, my hand being “in,” so to speak,
I went on, with the same unflinching gravity, to state
that the jury returned a verdict that deceased came
to his death from protracted exposure. This only
moved me to higher flights of imagination, and I said
that the jury, with that charity so characteristic
of pioneers, then dug a grave, and were about to give
the petrified man Christian burial, when they found
that for ages a limestone sediment had been trickling
down the face of the stone against which he was sitting,
and this stuff had run under him and cemented him
fast to the “bed-rock”; that the jury (they
were all silver-miners) canvassed the difficulty a
moment, and then got out their powder and fuse, and
proceeded to drill a hole under him, in order to blast
him from his position, when Mr.——,
“with that delicacy so characteristic of him,
forbade them, observing that it would be little less
than sacrilege to do such a thing.”
