16–18 April 1863
“Horrible Affair” was first published in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise but is extant only in the Oroville (Calif.) Butte Record, from which our text is taken. The double murder by John Campbell to which the piece alludes occurred in the early morning hours of 12 April 1863, and Campbell was captured by April 13. Since Clemens says that the events following this murder had been rumored “for a day or two,” he probably wrote the item between April 14 and 16, and published it between April 16 and 18.
The Butte Record gave no indication which Enterprise staff member wrote “Horrible Affair,” but such a story normally fell to the local editor— at that time Samuel Clemens. Clemens, indeed, is linked to the piece by several bits of convincing evidence. In a letter of April 11 he wrote to his mother and sister, “P. S. I have just heard five pistol shots down street—as such things are in my line, I will go and see about it.” At 5 a.m. on the twelfth he added a second postscript to his letter: “The pistol did its work well—one man—a Jackson County Missourian, shot two of my friends, (police officers,) through the heart—both died within three minutes. Murderer's name is John Campbell.”1
According to a contemporary newspaper account dated April 13, the two murdered policemen were Dennis McMahon and Thomas Reed; Campbell, who was twenty-six years old, was arrested after the momentary escape alluded to in the sketch.2 All these events would of course have interested Clemens, as would the rumor of the five suffocated Indians—the “horrible affair” supposedly resulting from the effort to apprehend Campbell.
[begin page 245]Some five years later in a letter to the Enterprise Clemens recalled this story of the dead Indians:
To find a petrified man, or break a stranger's leg, or cave an imaginary mine, or discover some dead Indians in a Gold Hill tunnel, or massacre a family at Dutch Nick's, were feats and calamities that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil Enterprise office was a ghastly factory of slaughter, mutilation and general destruction in those days.3
It is of some interest that Clemens here grouped the tale of the Indians with his two most famous Nevada hoaxes and with other newspaper “sensation” stories, which were not unknown to sacrifice truth to their readers' appetite for gory detail. “Horrible Affair” takes on verisimilitude by being linked with the Campbell murders, but its content is based entirely on rumor. Despite Clemens' concluding protestation that he believed the Indian story, the possibility remains that it was in reality “a sensation hoax” that he acquiesced in publicizing or perhaps even invented. This was, at any rate, the opinion of the San Francisco Herald and Mirror, which concluded its brief paraphrase of the story with the following observation: “The Enterprise is given to ‘sells,’ and we shouldn't wonder if the above is one of them. We don't forget the story about [the] stony natured toll-keeper, from the same source, which went the rounds.”4
For a day or two a rumor has been floating around, that five Indians had been smothered to death in a tunnel back of Gold Hill, but no one seemed to regard it in any other light than as a sensation hoax gotten up for the edification of strangers sojourning within our gates. However, we asked a Gold Hill man about it yesterday, and he said there was no shadow of a jest in it—that it was a dark and terrible reality. He gave us the following story as being the version generally accepted in Gold Hill:—That town was electrified on Sunday morning with the intelligence that a noted desperado had just murdered two Virginia policemen, and had fled in the general direction of Gold Hill. Shortly afterward, some one arrived with the exciting news that a man had been seen to run and hide in a tunnel a mile or a mile and a half west of Gold Hill. Of course it was Campbell—who else would do such a thing, on that particular morning, of all others? So a party of citizens repaired to this spot, but each felt a natural delicacy about approaching an armed and desperate man in the dark, and especially in such confined quarters; wherefore they stopped up the mouth of the tunnel, calculating to hold on to their prisoner until some one could be found whose duty would oblige him to undertake the disagreeable task of bringing forth the captive. The next day a strong posse went up, rolled away the stones from the mouth of the sepulchre, went in and found five dead Indians!—three men, one squaw and one child, who had gone in there to sleep, perhaps, and been smothered by the foul atmosphere after the tunnel had been closed up. We still [begin page 247] hope the story may prove a fabrication, notwithstanding the positive assurances we have received that it is entirely true. The intention of the citizens was good, but the result was most unfortunate. To shut up a murderer in a tunnel was well enough, but to leave him there all night was calculated to impair his chances for a fair trial—the principle was good, but the application was unnecessarily “hefty.” We have given the above story for truth—we shall continue to regard it as such until it is disproven.
The first printing in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, probably sometime between 16 and 18 April 1863, is not extant. The sketch survives in the only known contemporary reprinting of the Enterprise, the Oroville (Calif.) Butte Record for 2 May 1863 (p. 4), which is copy-text. Copy: PH from Bancroft. There are no textual notes or emendations.