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Popular Culture Review
prefers his own species for food” (ctn. 1, scrapbk. 120). The article turns into a
comic allegory about how San Francisco and Eastern mining interests were
scamming Nevadans.
De Quille’s mature hoaxing tactics in the “Eyeless Fish” earned not only
a wide readership for the hoax but also, more importantly, a request from Spencer
Baird, curator of the Smithsonian Institution, for a specimen of the fish preserved
in alcohol. Thomas Donaldson, Baird’s secretary, wrote to De Quille: “If the
statement in the slip enclosed be true, a very important discovery has been made.”
De Quille’s scribbled commentary on the back of the envelope to this letter is
significant. He wrote: “A Sold Professor—The ‘Eyeless Fish’ biz.”
This was not the only of De Quille’s hoaxes to attract Eastern scientific
attention. In 1880, De Quille apparently wrote another hoax, still unlocated,
called the “Highland Alligator,” about a 7-foot-long alligator living in the
mountains of Nevada.2 This hoax prompted an eager response from no less a
personage than famed evolutionary paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. Cope
addressed his letter to “Wm. Blackheath,” the supposed finder of the alligator,
care of the Territorial Enterprise. The text of the letter expresses some doubt
about the truth of the reports of the alligator, but nonetheless, Cope’s eagerness to
get his hands on any part of the alligator, even the “dirty and broken” skin, is
almost cloying. After all, Cope could not be too picky about which stories he
believed if he wanted to prove Darwin’s theory of evolution and beat out Othniel
Marsh as the premier naturalist of the late nineteenth century. De Quille
annotated the envelope to this letter, beneath the address, “A Professor who was
sold on the ‘Highland Alligator.’”
De Quille’s commentary on the duping of these Eastern scientific
professors, whose expeditions and collections were funded by the American
government, is crucial for understanding the larger project of his scientific
hoaxing. He exults that he has “sold” these government representatives the
“business” of eyeless fish and mountain alligators. The economic metaphors are
not accidental. At the time of De Quille’s hoaxing, Nevada’s resources were
being bought up cheaply by the national government in Washington. This
national “yard sale” included the begging, buying, or stealing of Nevada’s fossils
and minerals by government-paid collectors like Baird and Cope. So, De Quille
found a great deal of satisfaction in hoaxing Baird and Cope into “buying” thin air
for a change. That “sell” in De Quille’s mind leveled the playing field a little for
the pioneers against Eastern money and political power. His hoaxes constituted a
creative resistance to nationalism and a creative exploitation of the East as a
market for the West as a scientific wonderland.
De Quille also used hoaxes as a mechanic of resistance against the
American government on another front: the free silver movement. Nevada was
made a territory in 1861 by Lincoln so that its burgeoning silver yields would
serve the Union and not the Confederacy during the Civil War. The silver