April 10, 2024 • 34 mins
In the 1870s, Palisade, NV was the meanest little town west of the Mississippi. Every week, newspapers announced another gunpowder-fueled cowboy showdown. Palisade put the wild in the “Wild West.”
But there was a lot more to the story that didn’t make the papers.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Fireheart originals. This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Imagine it's eighteen seventy six and you're riding the passenger
trains from Chicago to San Francisco. The steam engine has
rumbled through the Great Plains, wheeled up the rockies, and
descended onto the vast salt flats of Utah. Now you're
surrounded by the desert of Nevada. The train bends around
(00:51):
a canyon and slows ahead. You see a little town
with a depot, a corral with some horses, and a saloon.
As the train lurches to a stop, the conductor tells
you that the engine is filling up on water. Passengers
have ten minutes to stretch their legs. You step outside
(01:13):
onto the station platform, and it feels like you've walked
into an oven.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
The town is dead.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
The horses at the corral swat flies with their tails.
A lone cowboy leans against the fence. Suddenly, the cowboy
spits in the dirt and points his finger at a
man walking down the street.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
There you are, you, low down pole cat.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
The cowboy's hand hovers over the ivory handle of a pistol.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
I've been waiting for you.
Speaker 5 (01:47):
I'm going to kill you because of what you did
to my sister.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
The cowboy pulls off an elaborate quick draw, and that
is your introduction to Palisade, Nevada. In the eighteen seventies,
Palisade was the keenest little town west of the Mississippi.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Every week, newspapers.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Announced a cowboy gunfight, or an Indian massacre, or some
gunpowder fueled drama with bank robbers duking it out against
highway bandits. Palisade put the wild in the wild West,
but there was a lot more to the story that
didn't make the papers. Welcome to very special episodes and
(02:36):
iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Danish Schwartz, and this
is Westward Hoax.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
Welcome to very special episodes. Indeed, my name is Jason
English and I'm joined by two California based podcast legends,
Danish Schwartz and Zaren Burnett. Hey, guys, what of just
thank you for that intro. I mentioned your state of
residence for a reason. Let me pull back the curtain here.
I'm in New Jersey. We're recording this on a Friday,
(03:07):
and I just slipped through my first earthquake.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Oh how are you feeling?
Speaker 5 (03:12):
You know, it's a lot of excitement. I would imagine
in California, a four point eight probably doesn't trigger multiple
emergency calls and texts and emails and push alerts and
alta state.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
I've actually, I've never felt an earthquake. I've lived in
California for a pretty long time, and I always either
just like sleep through them. I'm a really heavy sleeper,
so it's never been a thing that I've dealt with.
And I kind of feel left out. Like everyone on
Twitter and like you know, social media is always like,
oh my god, did you feel that?
Speaker 5 (03:42):
And I'm just like, no, Saren, have you lived through
your share?
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Oh my god, same experience as Dana. I've lived in
California for a long time. I lived in La through
a number of earthquakes, but I always happened to leave
town right before the earthquake, so I'd always miss it,
and then people would tell me, Burnette, you missed it again.
I was like, oh man. So when I finally got
to live through an earthquake, I was so excited. Everyone
else is like, man, this sucks, and I'm like, no,
this is the best. You feel that rumbling, oh my god,
(04:06):
the waves.
Speaker 5 (04:07):
Yeah, that feels evolutionary like in your bones, you know
when to get away from danger and advance.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
But I have the exact opposite with cars on fire.
So you know, given.
Speaker 5 (04:19):
So well the curtain is pulled back. This room is
not soundproof for aftershocks. I'm just letting you know. If
this is gonna become a thing, you're gonna hear it
in the recording. But today's story it's going to keep
you a little bit off balance too.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
I think the only thing that I love more than
sort of a hoax is one that basically involves an
entire town getting together to be an improv troop.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
It's very wholesome.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
That's the dream.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
It really is the dream.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
I always say yes. I like how the Nevada, the Palisades,
Nevada is like, well, just all of Nevada. It's like
the Australia of America. It's just amazing. And I don't
know if you know this. In Australia they have the
spirit of messing with authority figures that they call Alaricanism,
and this feels like Alaricanism in America.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Alericanism. That's a great vocab words the best.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I want to take you back to the start of
that gunfight because there was a part we missed.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
My poor, poor little sister.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
The dandy falls to the dirt. His body goes limp,
blood starts to soak through his shirt. Mayhem ensues. Men
pour out of the saloon. Little kids pull back curtains
and peer out of windows to see what the commotion
is about. Meanwhile, you and the gaggle of out of
(05:44):
towners push back into the train car. As the engine
lurches forward, You look out the window and see two
men dragging a lifeless body down the dusty street. A
group of wranglers have accosted the cowboy, apparently to take
him to the sheriff. Meanwhile, a fistfight has broken out
(06:04):
in front of the saloon. You hear distant gunshots and
whoops and shouts. As the train pulls away. Palisade disappears
behind you. Once you're out of sight, the cowboy and
his victim clink glasses.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
In the saloon.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
The rest of the townsfolk would be huddled around them,
slapping each other's backs with a laugh.
Speaker 6 (06:31):
Did you see the look on their faces?
Speaker 4 (06:33):
Boy?
Speaker 3 (06:34):
We got them good.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Palisade was reportedly home to hundreds, maybe thousands, of gunfights
like this. And all of them were fake. The gunfights,
the Indian massacres, even the blood were all part of
an elaborate, staged hoax. Palisade wasn't the most dangerous town
(07:00):
in the West, it was the prankiest. In the eighteen seventies. Palisade,
Nevada was just a humble way point along the Central
Pacific Railroad.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
It's a mining town, and so life would be very hard.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
That's Nicholas Witchy.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
He's a dean and professor of English at Western Michigan University.
He specializes in the Wild West and has written about Palisade.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
Most people would be working ten hour days, six days
a week, glowing up rock, smacking rock with a pickaxe,
hauling it in wagons or wheelbarrows that are getting paid
lousy day wages to move rock around all day long.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Life in this small, isolated desert town didn't resemble the
Wild West of popular imagination. In fact, here's how a
reporter of the weekly Eliko Independent described it back in
eighteen seventy six.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
The town is unusually dull, but still those who are
in busy business don't growl.
Speaker 7 (08:08):
They simply pray for better times.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
In other words, life in Palisade was kind of well boring.
People were barely scraping by. There wasn't a theater for entertainment,
and the saloon could only distract you for so long.
There was also a lot of tension in the air too.
Mining and railroad towns like Palisade were home to a
(08:35):
lot of foreign laborers, particularly Chinese workers. Not everybody took
too kindly to the visitors.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Tensions over the Chinese coming in and taking jobs was
really ramping up.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Chinese workers were frequently victims of xenophobia and exclusionary laws.
The hard lifestyle, the boredom, the racial tensions. All of
this made life in this hard scrabbled town even more tough,
and people were desperate to blow off some steam. So,
(09:11):
rather than fight each other, the town found a common
target the gullible tourists passing through on the Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
What are you gonna do when train pulls into town
and you've been schlepping rock for ten hours a day,
Why not have a little fun.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
In eighteen seventy six, most people traveling west had no
concept of Nevada. Maybe they had read about cowboys and
Indians in the yellow Pages of tawdry dime novels, So
the people of Palisade decided to give them a show.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
The travelers would step out of the platform and next
thing you know, there'd be buckets of blood all over
the platform, and then screaming and dead bodies being hauled off.
And then the tourists would all pile into the train
and be shaking and frightened and worried about this wordless
wild West that they'd come into, and the train would
pull out of town, all the dead bodies would ry,
and everybody go to the saloon and have a good
(10:08):
laugh because they just put one over on a tourists.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Residents of Palisade leaned into the stereotype of the wild West,
you know, cowboys and big hats yelling yeeha as they
fight Native Americans, bounty hunters on horseback, lassoing murderous outlaws,
dragging them to the gallows for justice. The thing is,
these stereotypes aren't accurate now, and they weren't accurate then.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
What we think of the American West is a bunch
of guys blasting ay at each other. Yes, there was
a gunfight at the Ok Corral, but that lasted thirty seconds.
In the meantime, there were scores of people living, working,
going to shows, going to restaurants, doing what they do, coming,
going the mines, all sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
The fact is, life in the wild West wasn't that wild.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
It wasn't even that dangerous.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
The element of the American West that we often as
associate with lawlessness and violence, it was real. It was
a part of what was going on in the West.
But most scholars are pretty quick to point out that
in terms of numbers, the prevalence of gun use, the
prevalence of violence, the prevalence of hangings was really not
much greater than it was in other parts of the
(11:27):
country at that time.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Even the stereotypical image of cowboys, a white John Wayne
figure ready to get into a shootout at any moment,
isn't entirely correct.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Yes there were cowboys, Yes they wore big hats and chaps,
and some of them even carried guns. But at the
same time, fully half of them were either Hispanic or
African American.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
In fact, most of these stereotypes of a root and
tootin wild West started with novelists like Ned Buntline. In
eighteen sixty nine, Buntline interviewed William F. Cody, a buffalo
hunter and army scout who had served during the American
Indian Wars. The result was a sensationalist story called Buffalo Bill,
(12:15):
The King of the border Men. It would eventually become
part of a new genre of cheaply made books called
dime novels that swept the country. They introduced readers to
a world where cowboys and Indians, gun slingers and outlaws reigned.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
The dime novel certainly had their function as telling the
story that the American West and ways that are blood
and thunder is the phrase it's often use to describe
the dime novel experience.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
You know, the old journalism chestnut. If it bleeds, it leads,
That was the dime novel in a nutshell. In addition
to getting readers hooked on a fictional wild West, Ned
bunt Line helped convince Buffalo Bill to give up his
job hunting Buffalo for the glitzy lights of show business.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
Ned Buntline is the guy who also gets William F.
Cody Buffalo Bill to portray himself on stage, and so
eighteen seventy two, Buffalo Bill starts performing in New York
what It's like to be Buffalo Bill in the Wild.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Buffalo Bill would soon become a full time showman with
his own traveling circus. Audience members could watch re enactments
of Indian attacks and see live acts like the sharpshooter
Annie Oakley, who by the way, was born and raised
not in the Wild West, but in Ohio. All of
(13:41):
this is to say dime novels and Old West acts,
as well as newspaper coverage of the Indian Wars such
as Custer's Last Stand, built a stereotype that the West
was a violent, lawless place, perpetually clouded with gun smoke.
So the citizens of Palisade decided to help.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
I see a group of people who are like, Okay,
this is what the world expects of us, Let's give
it to them.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
In October of eighteen seventy six, a journalist with the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise witnessed the Palisaded prank in action.
Speaker 8 (14:21):
Half a dozen Native Americans, for a reasonable compensation, would
submit to being bound hand and foot and laid on
the platform during the stay of the train. Around their bodies,
a guard of citizens armed with immense revolvers long rifles
and bloodthirsted looking knives would march. Shotguns and revolvers would
(14:41):
loaded with powder ball omitted, and in a moment the
air would reek with powder, smoke, and profanity and blood
previously procured from the slaughterhouse besprinkled the platform as plentifully
as water. Sympathetic friends carried off the dead and wounded
to some neighboring saloon, while the frightened and bewildered immigrants
(15:02):
crawled from under seats and behind cars, their blanched faces
in tram blend limbs attesting their belief in the genuineness
of the thigh.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Hoaxes like this weren't exactly new. In eighteen sixty six,
the Union Pacific Railroad entertained its workers by staging a
phony fight between the Pawnee and Sioux. But in Palisade
this wasn't a one off. According to the historian Gerald B. Higgs,
who wrote the book Lost Legends of the Silver State,
(15:35):
the ruse lasted for three years. Over that time, the
Palisade Thesbian players, as they allegedly called themselves, put on
more than one thousand acts. Basically, the residents of Palisade
had become an improv troop that put on a show
(15:56):
every night. According to Higgs, local authorities and the railroad
workers were all in on the joke, and the hoax
was making Palisade sort of fakes. Palisade was getting write
ups in editorials across the country, with travelers complaining about
their terrifying experiences passing through the Nevada town. Frankly, it's
(16:19):
a brilliant tale. Decades before Wild West amusement parks like
Frontier Town Wherever invented, the residents of a real Frontier
town were playing the part and punking gullible, high falutin
outsiders on the daily. There's just one problem. There's no
(16:43):
evidence the Palisade pranks ever happened.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
One of the questions that I could never resolve was
were they actually real?
Speaker 2 (16:53):
The story of the Palisade hoax might be a hoax.
If you were alive during the eighteen seventies, you were
living through what was, if you'll pardon my French, a
(17:14):
golden age of bullshit. There were quacks, hucksters and Charlatan's galore.
Schmucks and spiritualists occupied every street corner, hawking snake oil,
salvation and direct lines to the dead p T. Barnum
had turned the art of the prank into a money
(17:35):
making bonanza. Meanwhile, at every carnival funhouse you could see
the bodies of petrified giants and the flaky husks of
desiccated mermaids.
Speaker 4 (17:46):
It's an interesting time for a lot of people fooling
around or being fooled.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
That again is Professor Nick Witchie of Western Michigan University,
and he explained that people in Palisade, Nevada were living
smack in the middle of bullshit Central.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
Why were the residents of Palisades seemingly interested in punkin
travelers coming through? The shortest, quickest answer is they were
living in a part of the country that was already
well deeply invested in hoaxes, in satires, in poking fun
at people's misconceptions.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Nevada was a hoaxter's paradise, he tells us. One of
the big reasons is because it was home to a
little newspaper called the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, located in
a silver boomtown in West Nevada. The Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise was a paper where good and honest journalism shared
(18:47):
the page with Shenanigan filled fake news. If you picked
up the newspaper on October twenty eighth, eighteen sixty three,
you could read an account of a bloody massacre that
happened in nearby Carson, Nevada. Apparently a man had gone
mad and butchered his wife and six of his chi children.
(19:07):
Then he hopped on a horse and took the knife
to himself.
Speaker 6 (19:12):
About ten o'clock on Monday evening, Hopkins dashed into Carson
on horseback with his throat cut from ear to ear
and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp from which
the warm, smoking blood was still dripping.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
But the story was fake, totally made up. And just
guess what happened to the journalist who concocted this fiction.
Did he get fired? Was he tarred and feathered, banished
from the writing business forever? Of course not. He became famous.
(19:51):
The reporter's name was Samuel Clemens, who you probably know
better as Mark Twain.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
This is a part of the country where Mark Twain
got his name. But he really started in journalism with
satires and hoaxes, publishing news stories about things that never happened,
or silly or horrific things that would frighten people if
they didn't know better.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
At the Virginia City Paper, Twain was making up stories
all the time, and he wasn't alone.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
He had a whole fellow crew of journalists at the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise who were writing up hoaxes.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Like Twain, journalists Dan de Quill and Fred Hart were
routinely publishing phony satires.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
There was the story.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
About a dead man who had turned into solid.
Speaker 6 (20:41):
Rock a petrified man was found some time ago in
the mountains south of gravelly Ford.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
And a story about a man who turned into a
human popsicle under the glaring desert sun.
Speaker 6 (20:55):
He was dead and frozen stiff. An icicle over a
foot in length hung from his nose.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Years after leaving the newspaper, Mark Twain reed called the
joy of making up stories in the Territorial Enterprise Office.
Speaker 7 (21:12):
We never hesitated about devising hoaxes when the public needed
matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil Enterprise
Office was a guest lif factory of slaughter, mulation, and
general destruction in those days.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Nowadays, these journalists are remembered as the sagebrush school of writers.
They were a product of their time. The media landscape
was changing fast. Telegraphs, literacy rates, and newspaper distribution were booming,
and these writers decided to exploit it.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
The right mix of people suddenly landed all in the
same place and felt like, you know what, we can
have some fun with this.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
So they used humor and tall tales to write satires
poking fun at the people in power. Readers were okay
with this because BS was a currency in the West.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
There was a.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
World where value shifted rapidly. One day the price of
silver could be fought through the roof, and the next
day of the price of silver would be so low
that it wouldn't be worthwhile to I'd pull it out
of the ground. In a world of shifting values, what
can you hang your hat on. Some people think that
the hoaxes all came about because of that very reason,
that this was a world where the one thing you
(22:34):
could know for certain was the ability to bs, was
the ability to bullshit someone into thinking you had the
key to a really interesting piece of knowledge.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
But also, let's be real, the writers also enjoyed a
certain pastime.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Dave drank a lot. They were a thirsty group.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Now, a lot of the stories by the sage Brush
writers got picked up by other newspapers and published as truth.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
Some stories were published in.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Places as far away as all Australia. Local readers, however,
weren't so gullible. They usually knew the stories were fake.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
The local journalist would put in enough clues to let
the reader in on the joke, but the reader farther
away would not necessarily know.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
And that brings us back to the Palisade prank. Because
here's the weird thing about it. According to lore, the
people of Palisade pranked unsuspecting train passengers more than one
thousand times. You'd imagine this would get a lot of
write ups in various newspapers, but when we scoured databases
(23:46):
in search of evidence of the prank, we only found
one article and it was from the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Yeah,
the newspaper riddled with hoaxes and fake news. Doctor Witchie
bumped into the same problem back when he was researching
the Palisades.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
When I first was researching this and writing this paper,
historians in the editing process kept asking me, but is
it real? Did it happen? Could things like this have happened.
Were there other examples of this sort of thing happening?
Speaker 2 (24:20):
He didn't have an answer.
Speaker 4 (24:22):
I personally have never found anything to corroborate that they
actually happened.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Most accounts about the prank, including ours, come from Gerald B. Higgs,
an amateur historian who wrote about the hoax back in
nineteen seventy six. Higgs says he learned about it by
talking to old timers and visiting every county recorder's office
in Nevada. However, he doesn't cite any sources in his
(24:50):
telling of the Palisade pranks. Is it possible that the
Palisade prank was just another prank pulled off by the
writers of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
It's hard to tell.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Doctor Witchie told us that newspaper hoaxes usually contained telltale
clues that would tip off local readers that the story
was phony, but he couldn't find any hints in the
Palisades story.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
This is one of the things that's sustinctive about that
report about the Palisade hoax. If it really is a pox,
this journalist is describing it in such a way that
makes a plane like guess what the folks over Pallisader
are doing to tourists.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
The story is written like a plane news item. If
the article itself is a hoax, it's a subtle one.
But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. The Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise is, after all, famous for duping people. Even into
the twentieth century, the newspaper was publishing pranks. In the
(25:57):
nineteen fifties, the editors published a fake story about a
camel race coming to town. There was no camel race,
of course. It was all a joke, but another newspaper
decided to call them on it, and now Virginia City
hosts an annual Camel and Ostra Trace, which, if you
(26:20):
haven't seen adults ride ostriches down a desert dragstrip, is
worth the trip. Meanwhile, Palisade today is a ghost town.
The mines in the area went bust, the local post
office skadaddled in the sixties. In two thousand and five,
the news website SFGate described what left of Palisade as
(26:42):
quote tumblewheed rattlesnake holes, half of a rusted car, the
remains of an old washing machine, and a cemetery all
that's really left is a story that Nevadens love to share.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
It is utterly fascinating to me that a story that
may or may not be true regardless, has become a
story that the people of Nevada love to tell about themselves,
love the tell each other that this is the kind
of place that we've inherited, this is the place we
live in.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
The stories we choose to tell and the stories we
choose to believe say a lot about who we are
and how we identify. So perhaps it's appropriate to close
with a coda. One last story about how Palisade, for
the briefest of moments, was the most talked about town
in the country. It was election day nineteen thirty two.
(27:35):
President Herbert Hoover was riding a train back to his
home state of California to vote, but as the train
came upon Palisade, it lurched to a stop.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
The Associated Press reported.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
That the night before, two men had been caught carrying
seventeen sticks of dynamite, apparently in an attempt to blow
up the bridge and quote wreck the Hoover train. They
even tried to shoot and stab the guard keeping watch
over the tracks. This was huge news an election assassination
(28:13):
attempt in Palisade, the town of three hundred, was making
front page headlines in papers across the country. Two weeks later,
a follow up appeared in the papers. The guard who
had witnessed the dastardly assassination plot had a confession he
had made it all up. Palisades Fifteen Minutes of Fame
(28:38):
was a hoax too.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
So do you think it was real?
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yes? I think it was real the first time, and
then after that.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
I think it at least happened once. And they were like,
this is so funny. It's like a great bit.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
I don't want a great bit to die.
Speaker 5 (28:56):
You only need to do it once because no one
wants to be the only people who got fooled, so
they'll everyone will play it up for you.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Exactly. That's the whole nature of the Old West. Something
happens once, and everybody gets their hand at the storytelling,
and it gets bigger and better through the over and
over storytelling.
Speaker 5 (29:11):
My very special character for this one, kind of a
very special cameo, my man Mark Twain, who pops up
out of nowhere, gets some quality minutes off the bench.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
There Missouri's finest.
Speaker 5 (29:23):
You know, the classic thing where TV show will spin
off a minor character into its own show. Frasier. The
most obvious example from Cheers saw Goodman from Breaking Bad,
Missus Garrett Facts of Life to Different Hell.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Yeah, wow, a lot of I mean people who are
familiar with the Good Wife.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
That whole universe.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
El Sbeth is that the new spin off?
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
One of the first spinoffs was Gomer Pyle from Andy Griffith,
and then that became a more popular show. It was
the bigger hit.
Speaker 5 (29:52):
Well in that spirit, Zaren is working on another episode
Mark Twain centric. It's kind of like Mark Twain's origin story,
and so we're just teasing that here that we're going
to spin him off into his own bigger thing, so
to be on the lookout.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
It's a whole episode where you learn that he basically
is part of a bar fight that starts American literature.
It's a wild story. And then also you get more
of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, which is an amazing newspaper.
Speaker 5 (30:17):
Did you happen to cast this one?
Speaker 1 (30:19):
I did, actually, thank you for asking this one. I
went with a comical variety of casting. So imagine this
as a comedy, right, So we have Buffalo bill as
the showman played by John c Riley, right, the Ned
Buntline the novelist played by Owen Wilson. Then how about that,
Oh you like that one, Daniel Okay, Nicholas Ritchie, the
historian Sam Elliott as our narrator.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
I kind of feel like this is a Wes Anderson ensemble.
Oh we're building it feels like a Wes Anderson movie.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
You nailed it, right. And then so now for the
Palisade thespian players, your favorites, the improv artists themselves. I
just imagined a group, right, So we have the Mayor
of Palisade that would be played by Walton Goggint. We
have the cool gunfighter Lakeith Stanfield, saloon owner Danny McBride.
How about for our lady of entertainment in the night,
Billie Eilish in her first dramatic role. And then finally
(31:12):
gullible tourist couple Tom Holland and Zendaya.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
You know what, for mine, I'm gonna really go with
the Wes Anderson theme. Yes, and the people in the
town are like Jason Schwartzman Okay, Edward Norton, Adrian Brodie,
is the journalist, and then like one of the hapless
tourists is like is a couple and it's like Bob
Balaban and like Tilda Swinton them on the train.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yeah, that the antimet Bob Balaban, I mean, you got me.
I'm already pulling money out of my wallet.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Can't you picture him as just like a hapless tourist
watching this, And then Tilda Swinton just like being a guest,
a little other person.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
The faces she could pull come on now, oh.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yeah, probably wearing weird teeth all time.
Speaker 5 (31:53):
You guys nailed the dramatic recreations. I think there's also
a competition reality show Angle where improv troops are brought
into small towns that have to pull off some major
scam like this.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
See but Jason here. That's my main takeaway. It's not
a scam, if it's not for profit, if you're not
a benevolent scam, is a hoax exactly. This is a hoax,
and I actually think that we need more hoaxes in
this country. Totally just good spirited, entertaining hoaxes. We're not
trying to hurt anyone, We're not trying to steal anyone's money.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
This is just a hoax.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yeah, just put the vibe in the air and that
people have a good laugh.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
I love that, let people have a good time. Let's
self mythologize what America is, and I think that that's
what this episode is. This episode is about America self
mythologizing in real time totally.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
And also the tendencies that we have because we're okay,
the Old West, right, they had the dime novels like
pumping the story and the newspapers carrying it back east.
But it basically the Old West was the Oakland or
the Chicago of back then where it's just a hype
of crime. It wasn't really as bad as people made
it up. Or they're like, oh man, I hate to
go out to the Old West or you know, I
guess the Wild West at that point, just like people
(33:02):
don't want to go to Chicago or where I live, Oakland,
where it's come on out here, man, We're ready for you.
It'll be fun.
Speaker 5 (33:07):
No baseball, but.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Yeah, don't talk about that. Come on now, Sacramento taking
our team like that.
Speaker 5 (33:16):
Very special episodes is made by some very special people.
This show is hosted by Danish Wartz Zaren Burnett and
me Jason English. Today's episode was written by Lucas Riley.
Our producer is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by
Chris Childs, Mixing and mastering by Beheid Fraser. Original music
(33:39):
by Elise McCoy. Research in fact checking by Austin Thompson
and Lucas Riley. Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Special thanks
to our voice actors Zaron Josh and Carl Catele. I'm
your executive producer. We'll see you back here next Wednesday.
(33:59):
Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Fireheart originals. This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Imagine it's eighteen seventy six and you're riding the passenger
trains from Chicago to San Francisco. The steam engine has
rumbled through the Great Plains, wheeled up the rockies, and
descended onto the vast salt flats of Utah. Now you're
surrounded by the desert of Nevada. The train bends around
(00:51):
a canyon and slows ahead. You see a little town
with a depot, a corral with some horses, and a saloon.
As the train lurches to a stop, the conductor tells
you that the engine is filling up on water. Passengers
have ten minutes to stretch their legs. You step outside
(01:13):
onto the station platform, and it feels like you've walked
into an oven.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
The town is dead.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
The horses at the corral swat flies with their tails.
A lone cowboy leans against the fence. Suddenly, the cowboy
spits in the dirt and points his finger at a
man walking down the street.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
There you are, you, low down pole cat.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
The cowboy's hand hovers over the ivory handle of a pistol.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
I've been waiting for you.
Speaker 5 (01:47):
I'm going to kill you because of what you did
to my sister.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
The cowboy pulls off an elaborate quick draw, and that
is your introduction to Palisade, Nevada. In the eighteen seventies,
Palisade was the keenest little town west of the Mississippi.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Every week, newspapers.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Announced a cowboy gunfight, or an Indian massacre, or some
gunpowder fueled drama with bank robbers duking it out against
highway bandits. Palisade put the wild in the wild West,
but there was a lot more to the story that
didn't make the papers. Welcome to very special episodes and
(02:36):
iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Danish Schwartz, and this
is Westward Hoax.
Speaker 5 (02:47):
Welcome to very special episodes. Indeed, my name is Jason
English and I'm joined by two California based podcast legends,
Danish Schwartz and Zaren Burnett. Hey, guys, what of just
thank you for that intro. I mentioned your state of
residence for a reason. Let me pull back the curtain here.
I'm in New Jersey. We're recording this on a Friday,
(03:07):
and I just slipped through my first earthquake.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Oh how are you feeling?
Speaker 5 (03:12):
You know, it's a lot of excitement. I would imagine
in California, a four point eight probably doesn't trigger multiple
emergency calls and texts and emails and push alerts and
alta state.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
I've actually, I've never felt an earthquake. I've lived in
California for a pretty long time, and I always either
just like sleep through them. I'm a really heavy sleeper,
so it's never been a thing that I've dealt with.
And I kind of feel left out. Like everyone on
Twitter and like you know, social media is always like,
oh my god, did you feel that?
Speaker 5 (03:42):
And I'm just like, no, Saren, have you lived through
your share?
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Oh my god, same experience as Dana. I've lived in
California for a long time. I lived in La through
a number of earthquakes, but I always happened to leave
town right before the earthquake, so I'd always miss it,
and then people would tell me, Burnette, you missed it again.
I was like, oh man. So when I finally got
to live through an earthquake, I was so excited. Everyone
else is like, man, this sucks, and I'm like, no,
this is the best. You feel that rumbling, oh my god,
(04:06):
the waves.
Speaker 5 (04:07):
Yeah, that feels evolutionary like in your bones, you know
when to get away from danger and advance.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
But I have the exact opposite with cars on fire.
So you know, given.
Speaker 5 (04:19):
So well the curtain is pulled back. This room is
not soundproof for aftershocks. I'm just letting you know. If
this is gonna become a thing, you're gonna hear it
in the recording. But today's story it's going to keep
you a little bit off balance too.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
I think the only thing that I love more than
sort of a hoax is one that basically involves an
entire town getting together to be an improv troop.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
It's very wholesome.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
That's the dream.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
It really is the dream.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
I always say yes. I like how the Nevada, the Palisades,
Nevada is like, well, just all of Nevada. It's like
the Australia of America. It's just amazing. And I don't
know if you know this. In Australia they have the
spirit of messing with authority figures that they call Alaricanism,
and this feels like Alaricanism in America.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Alericanism. That's a great vocab words the best.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I want to take you back to the start of
that gunfight because there was a part we missed.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
My poor, poor little sister.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
The dandy falls to the dirt. His body goes limp,
blood starts to soak through his shirt. Mayhem ensues. Men
pour out of the saloon. Little kids pull back curtains
and peer out of windows to see what the commotion
is about. Meanwhile, you and the gaggle of out of
(05:44):
towners push back into the train car. As the engine
lurches forward, You look out the window and see two
men dragging a lifeless body down the dusty street. A
group of wranglers have accosted the cowboy, apparently to take
him to the sheriff. Meanwhile, a fistfight has broken out
(06:04):
in front of the saloon. You hear distant gunshots and
whoops and shouts. As the train pulls away. Palisade disappears
behind you. Once you're out of sight, the cowboy and
his victim clink glasses.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
In the saloon.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
The rest of the townsfolk would be huddled around them,
slapping each other's backs with a laugh.
Speaker 6 (06:31):
Did you see the look on their faces?
Speaker 4 (06:33):
Boy?
Speaker 3 (06:34):
We got them good.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Palisade was reportedly home to hundreds, maybe thousands, of gunfights
like this. And all of them were fake. The gunfights,
the Indian massacres, even the blood were all part of
an elaborate, staged hoax. Palisade wasn't the most dangerous town
(07:00):
in the West, it was the prankiest. In the eighteen seventies. Palisade,
Nevada was just a humble way point along the Central
Pacific Railroad.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
It's a mining town, and so life would be very hard.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
That's Nicholas Witchy.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
He's a dean and professor of English at Western Michigan University.
He specializes in the Wild West and has written about Palisade.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
Most people would be working ten hour days, six days
a week, glowing up rock, smacking rock with a pickaxe,
hauling it in wagons or wheelbarrows that are getting paid
lousy day wages to move rock around all day long.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Life in this small, isolated desert town didn't resemble the
Wild West of popular imagination. In fact, here's how a
reporter of the weekly Eliko Independent described it back in
eighteen seventy six.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
The town is unusually dull, but still those who are
in busy business don't growl.
Speaker 7 (08:08):
They simply pray for better times.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
In other words, life in Palisade was kind of well boring.
People were barely scraping by. There wasn't a theater for entertainment,
and the saloon could only distract you for so long.
There was also a lot of tension in the air too.
Mining and railroad towns like Palisade were home to a
(08:35):
lot of foreign laborers, particularly Chinese workers. Not everybody took
too kindly to the visitors.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Tensions over the Chinese coming in and taking jobs was
really ramping up.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Chinese workers were frequently victims of xenophobia and exclusionary laws.
The hard lifestyle, the boredom, the racial tensions. All of
this made life in this hard scrabbled town even more tough,
and people were desperate to blow off some steam. So,
(09:11):
rather than fight each other, the town found a common
target the gullible tourists passing through on the Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
What are you gonna do when train pulls into town
and you've been schlepping rock for ten hours a day,
Why not have a little fun.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
In eighteen seventy six, most people traveling west had no
concept of Nevada. Maybe they had read about cowboys and
Indians in the yellow Pages of tawdry dime novels, So
the people of Palisade decided to give them a show.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
The travelers would step out of the platform and next
thing you know, there'd be buckets of blood all over
the platform, and then screaming and dead bodies being hauled off.
And then the tourists would all pile into the train
and be shaking and frightened and worried about this wordless
wild West that they'd come into, and the train would
pull out of town, all the dead bodies would ry,
and everybody go to the saloon and have a good
(10:08):
laugh because they just put one over on a tourists.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Residents of Palisade leaned into the stereotype of the wild West,
you know, cowboys and big hats yelling yeeha as they
fight Native Americans, bounty hunters on horseback, lassoing murderous outlaws,
dragging them to the gallows for justice. The thing is,
these stereotypes aren't accurate now, and they weren't accurate then.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
What we think of the American West is a bunch
of guys blasting ay at each other. Yes, there was
a gunfight at the Ok Corral, but that lasted thirty seconds.
In the meantime, there were scores of people living, working,
going to shows, going to restaurants, doing what they do, coming,
going the mines, all sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
The fact is, life in the wild West wasn't that wild.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
It wasn't even that dangerous.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
The element of the American West that we often as
associate with lawlessness and violence, it was real. It was
a part of what was going on in the West.
But most scholars are pretty quick to point out that
in terms of numbers, the prevalence of gun use, the
prevalence of violence, the prevalence of hangings was really not
much greater than it was in other parts of the
(11:27):
country at that time.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Even the stereotypical image of cowboys, a white John Wayne
figure ready to get into a shootout at any moment,
isn't entirely correct.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Yes there were cowboys, Yes they wore big hats and chaps,
and some of them even carried guns. But at the
same time, fully half of them were either Hispanic or
African American.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
In fact, most of these stereotypes of a root and
tootin wild West started with novelists like Ned Buntline. In
eighteen sixty nine, Buntline interviewed William F. Cody, a buffalo
hunter and army scout who had served during the American
Indian Wars. The result was a sensationalist story called Buffalo Bill,
(12:15):
The King of the border Men. It would eventually become
part of a new genre of cheaply made books called
dime novels that swept the country. They introduced readers to
a world where cowboys and Indians, gun slingers and outlaws reigned.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
The dime novel certainly had their function as telling the
story that the American West and ways that are blood
and thunder is the phrase it's often use to describe
the dime novel experience.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
You know, the old journalism chestnut. If it bleeds, it leads,
That was the dime novel in a nutshell. In addition
to getting readers hooked on a fictional wild West, Ned
bunt Line helped convince Buffalo Bill to give up his
job hunting Buffalo for the glitzy lights of show business.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
Ned Buntline is the guy who also gets William F.
Cody Buffalo Bill to portray himself on stage, and so
eighteen seventy two, Buffalo Bill starts performing in New York
what It's like to be Buffalo Bill in the Wild.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Buffalo Bill would soon become a full time showman with
his own traveling circus. Audience members could watch re enactments
of Indian attacks and see live acts like the sharpshooter
Annie Oakley, who by the way, was born and raised
not in the Wild West, but in Ohio. All of
(13:41):
this is to say dime novels and Old West acts,
as well as newspaper coverage of the Indian Wars such
as Custer's Last Stand, built a stereotype that the West
was a violent, lawless place, perpetually clouded with gun smoke.
So the citizens of Palisade decided to help.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
I see a group of people who are like, Okay,
this is what the world expects of us, Let's give
it to them.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
In October of eighteen seventy six, a journalist with the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise witnessed the Palisaded prank in action.
Speaker 8 (14:21):
Half a dozen Native Americans, for a reasonable compensation, would
submit to being bound hand and foot and laid on
the platform during the stay of the train. Around their bodies,
a guard of citizens armed with immense revolvers long rifles
and bloodthirsted looking knives would march. Shotguns and revolvers would
(14:41):
loaded with powder ball omitted, and in a moment the
air would reek with powder, smoke, and profanity and blood
previously procured from the slaughterhouse besprinkled the platform as plentifully
as water. Sympathetic friends carried off the dead and wounded
to some neighboring saloon, while the frightened and bewildered immigrants
(15:02):
crawled from under seats and behind cars, their blanched faces
in tram blend limbs attesting their belief in the genuineness
of the thigh.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Hoaxes like this weren't exactly new. In eighteen sixty six,
the Union Pacific Railroad entertained its workers by staging a
phony fight between the Pawnee and Sioux. But in Palisade
this wasn't a one off. According to the historian Gerald B. Higgs,
who wrote the book Lost Legends of the Silver State,
(15:35):
the ruse lasted for three years. Over that time, the
Palisade Thesbian players, as they allegedly called themselves, put on
more than one thousand acts. Basically, the residents of Palisade
had become an improv troop that put on a show
(15:56):
every night. According to Higgs, local authorities and the railroad
workers were all in on the joke, and the hoax
was making Palisade sort of fakes. Palisade was getting write
ups in editorials across the country, with travelers complaining about
their terrifying experiences passing through the Nevada town. Frankly, it's
(16:19):
a brilliant tale. Decades before Wild West amusement parks like
Frontier Town Wherever invented, the residents of a real Frontier
town were playing the part and punking gullible, high falutin
outsiders on the daily. There's just one problem. There's no
(16:43):
evidence the Palisade pranks ever happened.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
One of the questions that I could never resolve was
were they actually real?
Speaker 2 (16:53):
The story of the Palisade hoax might be a hoax.
If you were alive during the eighteen seventies, you were
living through what was, if you'll pardon my French, a
(17:14):
golden age of bullshit. There were quacks, hucksters and Charlatan's galore.
Schmucks and spiritualists occupied every street corner, hawking snake oil,
salvation and direct lines to the dead p T. Barnum
had turned the art of the prank into a money
(17:35):
making bonanza. Meanwhile, at every carnival funhouse you could see
the bodies of petrified giants and the flaky husks of
desiccated mermaids.
Speaker 4 (17:46):
It's an interesting time for a lot of people fooling
around or being fooled.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
That again is Professor Nick Witchie of Western Michigan University,
and he explained that people in Palisade, Nevada were living
smack in the middle of bullshit Central.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
Why were the residents of Palisades seemingly interested in punkin
travelers coming through? The shortest, quickest answer is they were
living in a part of the country that was already
well deeply invested in hoaxes, in satires, in poking fun
at people's misconceptions.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Nevada was a hoaxter's paradise, he tells us. One of
the big reasons is because it was home to a
little newspaper called the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, located in
a silver boomtown in West Nevada. The Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise was a paper where good and honest journalism shared
(18:47):
the page with Shenanigan filled fake news. If you picked
up the newspaper on October twenty eighth, eighteen sixty three,
you could read an account of a bloody massacre that
happened in nearby Carson, Nevada. Apparently a man had gone
mad and butchered his wife and six of his chi children.
(19:07):
Then he hopped on a horse and took the knife
to himself.
Speaker 6 (19:12):
About ten o'clock on Monday evening, Hopkins dashed into Carson
on horseback with his throat cut from ear to ear
and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp from which
the warm, smoking blood was still dripping.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
But the story was fake, totally made up. And just
guess what happened to the journalist who concocted this fiction.
Did he get fired? Was he tarred and feathered, banished
from the writing business forever? Of course not. He became famous.
(19:51):
The reporter's name was Samuel Clemens, who you probably know
better as Mark Twain.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
This is a part of the country where Mark Twain
got his name. But he really started in journalism with
satires and hoaxes, publishing news stories about things that never happened,
or silly or horrific things that would frighten people if
they didn't know better.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
At the Virginia City Paper, Twain was making up stories
all the time, and he wasn't alone.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
He had a whole fellow crew of journalists at the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise who were writing up hoaxes.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Like Twain, journalists Dan de Quill and Fred Hart were
routinely publishing phony satires.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
There was the story.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
About a dead man who had turned into solid.
Speaker 6 (20:41):
Rock a petrified man was found some time ago in
the mountains south of gravelly Ford.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
And a story about a man who turned into a
human popsicle under the glaring desert sun.
Speaker 6 (20:55):
He was dead and frozen stiff. An icicle over a
foot in length hung from his nose.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Years after leaving the newspaper, Mark Twain reed called the
joy of making up stories in the Territorial Enterprise Office.
Speaker 7 (21:12):
We never hesitated about devising hoaxes when the public needed
matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil Enterprise
Office was a guest lif factory of slaughter, mulation, and
general destruction in those days.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Nowadays, these journalists are remembered as the sagebrush school of writers.
They were a product of their time. The media landscape
was changing fast. Telegraphs, literacy rates, and newspaper distribution were booming,
and these writers decided to exploit it.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
The right mix of people suddenly landed all in the
same place and felt like, you know what, we can
have some fun with this.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
So they used humor and tall tales to write satires
poking fun at the people in power. Readers were okay
with this because BS was a currency in the West.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
There was a.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
World where value shifted rapidly. One day the price of
silver could be fought through the roof, and the next
day of the price of silver would be so low
that it wouldn't be worthwhile to I'd pull it out
of the ground. In a world of shifting values, what
can you hang your hat on. Some people think that
the hoaxes all came about because of that very reason,
that this was a world where the one thing you
(22:34):
could know for certain was the ability to bs, was
the ability to bullshit someone into thinking you had the
key to a really interesting piece of knowledge.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
But also, let's be real, the writers also enjoyed a
certain pastime.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Dave drank a lot. They were a thirsty group.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Now, a lot of the stories by the sage Brush
writers got picked up by other newspapers and published as truth.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
Some stories were published in.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Places as far away as all Australia. Local readers, however,
weren't so gullible. They usually knew the stories were fake.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
The local journalist would put in enough clues to let
the reader in on the joke, but the reader farther
away would not necessarily know.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
And that brings us back to the Palisade prank. Because
here's the weird thing about it. According to lore, the
people of Palisade pranked unsuspecting train passengers more than one
thousand times. You'd imagine this would get a lot of
write ups in various newspapers, but when we scoured databases
(23:46):
in search of evidence of the prank, we only found
one article and it was from the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Yeah,
the newspaper riddled with hoaxes and fake news. Doctor Witchie
bumped into the same problem back when he was researching
the Palisades.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
When I first was researching this and writing this paper,
historians in the editing process kept asking me, but is
it real? Did it happen? Could things like this have happened.
Were there other examples of this sort of thing happening?
Speaker 2 (24:20):
He didn't have an answer.
Speaker 4 (24:22):
I personally have never found anything to corroborate that they
actually happened.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Most accounts about the prank, including ours, come from Gerald B. Higgs,
an amateur historian who wrote about the hoax back in
nineteen seventy six. Higgs says he learned about it by
talking to old timers and visiting every county recorder's office
in Nevada. However, he doesn't cite any sources in his
(24:50):
telling of the Palisade pranks. Is it possible that the
Palisade prank was just another prank pulled off by the
writers of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
It's hard to tell.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Doctor Witchie told us that newspaper hoaxes usually contained telltale
clues that would tip off local readers that the story
was phony, but he couldn't find any hints in the
Palisades story.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
This is one of the things that's sustinctive about that
report about the Palisade hoax. If it really is a pox,
this journalist is describing it in such a way that
makes a plane like guess what the folks over Pallisader
are doing to tourists.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
The story is written like a plane news item. If
the article itself is a hoax, it's a subtle one.
But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. The Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise is, after all, famous for duping people. Even into
the twentieth century, the newspaper was publishing pranks. In the
(25:57):
nineteen fifties, the editors published a fake story about a
camel race coming to town. There was no camel race,
of course. It was all a joke, but another newspaper
decided to call them on it, and now Virginia City
hosts an annual Camel and Ostra Trace, which, if you
(26:20):
haven't seen adults ride ostriches down a desert dragstrip, is
worth the trip. Meanwhile, Palisade today is a ghost town.
The mines in the area went bust, the local post
office skadaddled in the sixties. In two thousand and five,
the news website SFGate described what left of Palisade as
(26:42):
quote tumblewheed rattlesnake holes, half of a rusted car, the
remains of an old washing machine, and a cemetery all
that's really left is a story that Nevadens love to share.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
It is utterly fascinating to me that a story that
may or may not be true regardless, has become a
story that the people of Nevada love to tell about themselves,
love the tell each other that this is the kind
of place that we've inherited, this is the place we
live in.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
The stories we choose to tell and the stories we
choose to believe say a lot about who we are
and how we identify. So perhaps it's appropriate to close
with a coda. One last story about how Palisade, for
the briefest of moments, was the most talked about town
in the country. It was election day nineteen thirty two.
(27:35):
President Herbert Hoover was riding a train back to his
home state of California to vote, but as the train
came upon Palisade, it lurched to a stop.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
The Associated Press reported.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
That the night before, two men had been caught carrying
seventeen sticks of dynamite, apparently in an attempt to blow
up the bridge and quote wreck the Hoover train. They
even tried to shoot and stab the guard keeping watch
over the tracks. This was huge news an election assassination
(28:13):
attempt in Palisade, the town of three hundred, was making
front page headlines in papers across the country. Two weeks later,
a follow up appeared in the papers. The guard who
had witnessed the dastardly assassination plot had a confession he
had made it all up. Palisades Fifteen Minutes of Fame
(28:38):
was a hoax too.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
So do you think it was real?
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yes? I think it was real the first time, and
then after that.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
I think it at least happened once. And they were like,
this is so funny. It's like a great bit.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
I don't want a great bit to die.
Speaker 5 (28:56):
You only need to do it once because no one
wants to be the only people who got fooled, so
they'll everyone will play it up for you.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Exactly. That's the whole nature of the Old West. Something
happens once, and everybody gets their hand at the storytelling,
and it gets bigger and better through the over and
over storytelling.
Speaker 5 (29:11):
My very special character for this one, kind of a
very special cameo, my man Mark Twain, who pops up
out of nowhere, gets some quality minutes off the bench.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
There Missouri's finest.
Speaker 5 (29:23):
You know, the classic thing where TV show will spin
off a minor character into its own show. Frasier. The
most obvious example from Cheers saw Goodman from Breaking Bad,
Missus Garrett Facts of Life to Different Hell.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Yeah, wow, a lot of I mean people who are
familiar with the Good Wife.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
That whole universe.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
El Sbeth is that the new spin off?
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
One of the first spinoffs was Gomer Pyle from Andy Griffith,
and then that became a more popular show. It was
the bigger hit.
Speaker 5 (29:52):
Well in that spirit, Zaren is working on another episode
Mark Twain centric. It's kind of like Mark Twain's origin story,
and so we're just teasing that here that we're going
to spin him off into his own bigger thing, so
to be on the lookout.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
It's a whole episode where you learn that he basically
is part of a bar fight that starts American literature.
It's a wild story. And then also you get more
of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, which is an amazing newspaper.
Speaker 5 (30:17):
Did you happen to cast this one?
Speaker 1 (30:19):
I did, actually, thank you for asking this one. I
went with a comical variety of casting. So imagine this
as a comedy, right, So we have Buffalo bill as
the showman played by John c Riley, right, the Ned
Buntline the novelist played by Owen Wilson. Then how about that,
Oh you like that one, Daniel Okay, Nicholas Ritchie, the
historian Sam Elliott as our narrator.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
I kind of feel like this is a Wes Anderson ensemble.
Oh we're building it feels like a Wes Anderson movie.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
You nailed it, right. And then so now for the
Palisade thespian players, your favorites, the improv artists themselves. I
just imagined a group, right, So we have the Mayor
of Palisade that would be played by Walton Goggint. We
have the cool gunfighter Lakeith Stanfield, saloon owner Danny McBride.
How about for our lady of entertainment in the night,
Billie Eilish in her first dramatic role. And then finally
(31:12):
gullible tourist couple Tom Holland and Zendaya.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
You know what, for mine, I'm gonna really go with
the Wes Anderson theme. Yes, and the people in the
town are like Jason Schwartzman Okay, Edward Norton, Adrian Brodie,
is the journalist, and then like one of the hapless
tourists is like is a couple and it's like Bob
Balaban and like Tilda Swinton them on the train.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yeah, that the antimet Bob Balaban, I mean, you got me.
I'm already pulling money out of my wallet.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Can't you picture him as just like a hapless tourist
watching this, And then Tilda Swinton just like being a guest,
a little other person.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
The faces she could pull come on now, oh.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yeah, probably wearing weird teeth all time.
Speaker 5 (31:53):
You guys nailed the dramatic recreations. I think there's also
a competition reality show Angle where improv troops are brought
into small towns that have to pull off some major
scam like this.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
See but Jason here. That's my main takeaway. It's not
a scam, if it's not for profit, if you're not
a benevolent scam, is a hoax exactly. This is a hoax,
and I actually think that we need more hoaxes in
this country. Totally just good spirited, entertaining hoaxes. We're not
trying to hurt anyone, We're not trying to steal anyone's money.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
This is just a hoax.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yeah, just put the vibe in the air and that
people have a good laugh.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
I love that, let people have a good time. Let's
self mythologize what America is, and I think that that's
what this episode is. This episode is about America self
mythologizing in real time totally.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
And also the tendencies that we have because we're okay,
the Old West, right, they had the dime novels like
pumping the story and the newspapers carrying it back east.
But it basically the Old West was the Oakland or
the Chicago of back then where it's just a hype
of crime. It wasn't really as bad as people made
it up. Or they're like, oh man, I hate to
go out to the Old West or you know, I
guess the Wild West at that point, just like people
(33:02):
don't want to go to Chicago or where I live, Oakland,
where it's come on out here, man, We're ready for you.
It'll be fun.
Speaker 5 (33:07):
No baseball, but.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Yeah, don't talk about that. Come on now, Sacramento taking
our team like that.
Speaker 5 (33:16):
Very special episodes is made by some very special people.
This show is hosted by Danish Wartz Zaren Burnett and
me Jason English. Today's episode was written by Lucas Riley.
Our producer is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by
Chris Childs, Mixing and mastering by Beheid Fraser. Original music
(33:39):
by Elise McCoy. Research in fact checking by Austin Thompson
and Lucas Riley. Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Special thanks
to our voice actors Zaron Josh and Carl Catele. I'm
your executive producer. We'll see you back here next Wednesday.
(33:59):
Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Dana Schwartz
Jason English
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