Sketches New and Old eBook

MY BLOODY MASSACRE

The other burlesque I have referred to was my fine satire upon the financial expedients of “cooking dividends,” a thing which became shamefully frequent on the Pacific coast for a while.  Once more, in my self-complacent simplicity I felt that the time had arrived for me to rise up and be a reformer.  I put this reformatory satire, in the shape of a fearful “Massacre at Empire City.”  The San Francisco papers were making a great outcry about the iniquity of the Daney Silver-Mining Company, whose directors had declared a “cooked” or false dividend, for the purpose of increasing the value of their stock, so that they could sell out at a comfortable figure, and then scramble from under the tumbling concern.  And while abusing the Daney, those papers did not forget to urge the public to get rid of all their silver stocks and invest in, sound and safe San Francisco stocks, such as the Spring Valley Water Company, etc.  But right at this unfortunate juncture, behold the Spring Valley cooked a dividend too!  And so, under the insidious mask of an invented “bloody massacre,” I stole upon the public unawares with my scathing satire upon the dividend cooking system.  In about half a column of imaginary human carnage I told how a citizen hard murdered his wife and nine children, and then committed suicide.  And I said slyly, at the bottom, that the sudden madness of which this melancholy massacre was the result had been brought about by his having allowed himself to be persuaded by the California papers to sell his sound and lucrative Nevada silver stocks, and buy into Spring Valley just in time to get cooked along with that company’s fancy dividend, and sink every cent he had in the world.

Ah, it was a deep, deep satire, and most ingeniously contrived.  But I made the horrible details so carefully and conscientiously interesting that the public devoured them greedily, and wholly overlooked the following distinctly stated facts, to wit:  The murderer was perfectly well known to every creature in the land as a bachelor, and consequently he could not murder his wife and nine children; he murdered them “in his splendid dressed-stone mansion just in the edge of the great pine forest between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s,” when even the very pickled oysters that came on our tables knew that there was not a “dressed-stone mansion” in all Nevada Territory; also that, so far from there being a “great pine forest between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s,” there wasn’t a solitary tree within fifteen miles of either place; and, finally, it was patent and notorious that Empire City and Dutch Nick’s were one and the same place, and contained only six houses anyhow, and consequently there could be no forest between them; and on top of all these absurdities I stated that this diabolical murderer, after inflicting a wound upon himself that the reader ought to have seen would kill an elephant in the twinkling of an eye, jumped on his horse and rode four miles, waving his wife’s reeking scalp in the air, and thus performing entered Carson City with tremendous eclat, and dropped dead in front of the chief saloon, the envy and admiration of all beholders.