Scientific Hoax as a Technology of Resistance
43
his opinion, and men would say: ‘Maybe his interests prejudice him.’ But
everyone believed Dan” (214).
De Quille’s hoaxes imposed significantly on the implicit trust of his
readers. These articles had a serious tone closer to his high-register technical
writing. The only difference was that their subject matter was a complete
fabrication of De Quille’s fertile imagination. In a careful assay of De Quille’s
hoaxes, C. Grant Loomis found four major media hoaxes and twelve other minor
squibs having to do with fantastic discoveries in geology, biology, or
paleontology, all completely made up, most appearing in the Territorial
Enterprise between 1867 and 1878. A complete list of these can be found in
Loomis’s article “The Tall Tales of Dan De Quille.” In addition to Loomis’s
twelve, I have found a copy of one other hoax and mention of three more: these
are the “Mountain” or “Highland Alligator” hoax, which drew a letter from the
famous fossil collector Edward Drinker Cope; a hoax remembered by C.C.
Goodwin having to do with the “excessive” water in the Comstock mines being
an offshoot aquifer of Lake Tahoe; a hoax Wells Drury reported about a
perpetual-motion windmill; and a hoax about a scientist hatching a live bird from
a genetically engineered egg.
While De Quille’s first hoax, “The Wonder of the Age: A Silver Man,”
ran to four columns in the San Francisco Golden Era and was copiously packed
with evidence, it seems to have fooled no one, judging by the complete lack of
reader or editorial response in the local papers over the following weeks.
However,