4 October 1862
The first printing of “Petrified Man” in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise is not extant, but at least three contemporary newspapers reprinted the complete text. Two of these papers attributed the piece to the Enterprise for 4 October 1862 and gave the title Clemens used in a letter to his brother Orion on October 21 : “Did you see that squib of mine headed ‘Petrified Man?’ ”
In the same letter Clemens went on to explain the motive behind his hoax: “It is an unmitigated lie, made from whole cloth. I got it up to worry Sewall. Every day, I send him some California paper containing it; moreover, I am getting things so arranged that he will soon begin to receive letters from all parts of the country, purporting to come from scientific men, asking for further information concerning the wonderful stone man. If I had plenty of time, I would worry the life out of the poor cuss.”1 The reasons for Clemens' dislike of G. T. Sewall remain obscure. Sewall had been a resident of Humboldt County since 1853 and had received his commission as judge of that county from Governor Nye in December 1861. Sewall was also active in mining. By October 1863 he was general superintendent and in charge of all mining operations of the Atlantic and Pacific Gold and Silver Mining Company, which controlled five mines in Humboldt township and aggressively claimed in its prospectus the rights to “all unclaimed or ‘blind ledges’ they may strike.”2 Sewall's status in the district is indicated by his accompanying the nationally famous scientist Benjamin Silliman, Jr., on Silliman's much- [begin page 152] publicized inspection of the Humboldt and Reese River mines in September 1864.3
It is unlikely that Clemens really enlisted “scientific men” in his project, but entirely plausible that he sent Sewall the California reprints. In 1870 Clemens recalled that for “about eleven months . . . Mr. Sewall's daily mail contained along in the neighborhood of half a bushel of newspapers . . . with the Petrified Man in them, marked around with a prominent belt of ink. I sent them to him. I did it for spite, not for fun.” In fact, the number of California papers that reprinted part or all of the hoax—at least ten are extant, the last appearing on 8 November 1862—suggests that Clemens had an ample supply to draw upon. “I hated Sewall in those days,” he explained, “and these things pacified me and pleased me. I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him without killing him.”4
Presumably Clemens and Sewall became acquainted while Clemens was prospecting in the Humboldt mining district in 1861–1862. In view of Sewall's aggressive policy toward “unclaimed or ‘blind ledges’ ” they may have clashed over mining rights. But Clemens' southern sympathies may also have been offensive to the Humboldt County judge. Seven months before this sketch appeared Clemens wrote from Carson City to his friend William Clagett: “I have heard from several reliable sources that Sewall will be here shortly, and has sworn to whip me on sight. . . . I don't see why he should dislike me. He is a Yankee,—and I natural[l]y love a Yankee.”5 However, it is not known whether political differences were the source of the animosity Clemens felt. Whatever caused the hard feelings, he was still plugging the hoax more than a month after its publication. He reported that “Mr. Herr Weisnicht” had brought “the head and one foot of the petrified man” with him to Virginia City, and that the remains could “be seen in a neat glass case in the third story of the Library Building.”6 And he retained enough animus toward Sewall in July 1863 to needle him in a letter to the San Francisco Morning Call: “Mr. Sewall is the profound Justice of the Peace who held an inquest last Fall at Gravelly Ford, on the Humboldt River, on a petrified man, who had been sitting there, cemented to the bed-rock, for the last three or four hundred years. The citizens wished to blast him out and bury him, but Judge S. refused to allow the sacrilege to be committed.”7
[begin page 157]Nevertheless, in 1870 Clemens recalled that his desire to annoy Sewall had been merely an incidental motive for the hoax. Instead, he claimed that he had wanted to “destroy” what he called a growing mania among newsmen for reporting “extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels. One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or two glorified discoveries of this kind.”8 An examination of surviving files of Nevada and California newspapers published just before October 1862 fails to substantiate his claim, almost certainly because so few papers are extant. As early as 1831 a Mississippi paper printed an account of an “ossified man,” who became “all bone, except the skin, eyes and entrails” because he incautiously fell “asleep in the open air during a state of perspiration.”9 And examples of similar marvels, usually reported seriously, crowd the local columns of western papers after 1862 when the files become more numerous and more complete. There are many reported discoveries of skeletons and fossils, petrified beehives and plums, and such artifacts as mummified bodies or bodies turned to solid marble, a silver man, living frogs encased in sandstone, monster serpents, and showers of fish. It seems implausible that such items did not also appear prior to 1862.
Obviously such reports of “marvels” shade off into deliberately tall stories and hoaxes. In fact, Clemens' piece was not the first western hoax about a petrified human being: an article entitled “Extraordinary and Shocking Death of Miner” was published four years earlier (1858) in the San Francisco Alta California and widely reprinted as “Extraordinary Account of Human Petrifaction.” This piece is unusually detailed and studded with technical terms, and is thus more akin to the scientific tall tales of Dan De Quille than it is to the seemingly legitimate reports of petrifaction that Clemens' hoax parodied. It purports to be a letter from Dr. Friedrich Lichtenberger, M.D., Ph.D., who describes the rapid silification of Ernest Flucterspiegel, a miner in the Frazer River area, who broke open a geode and incautiously drank the “water of crystallization” it contained. Within two and one-half hours Flucterspiegel was “inflexible.” Describing his dissection of the corpse, Dr. Lichtenberger found that the heart “strongly resembled a piece of red jasper. . . . By means of a small hatchet, I separated the heart from its connections with the aorta, pulmonary artery and vena cava and with some difficulty was able to break it in pieces. . . . The larger blood vessels were all as rigid as pipe stems, and in some cases the petrified blood could be cracked out from the veins, exhibiting a beautiful moulding upon the valves of the latter.” The silicic acid in the geode water had reacted with “the [begin page 158] conjugated acids of the bile, (acting as an alkali) and with the albuminose of the ingesta” and had formed a “silicate of albumen” with the blood. The doctor announced his intention to send specimens of the body to the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia for examination.10
Clemens recalled in 1870 that “as a satire on the petrifaction mania” his piece had been a “disheartening failure; for everybody received” the petrified man “in innocent good faith.” He remembered that the hoax was widely reprinted in newspapers across the country, until it “swept the great globe and culminated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august ‘London Lancet.’ ”11 Of course, this is certainly an exaggeration—but it contains an element of truth. Of the twelve California and Nevada papers that are known to have reprinted “Petrified Man,” eight of them gave no sign whatever that they doubted the truth of the story. San Francisco newspapers were shrewd enough: the Alta called it a “sell” and the Evening Bulletin “A Washoe Joke.” But the Sacramento Bee asserted more tentatively that it was “probably a hoax,” and the Bulletin reported that “the interior journals seem to be copying [it] in good faith.”12
A Ⓐemendation petrified manⒶemendation was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly FordⒺexplanatory note. Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which has Ⓐemendation Ⓐtextual noteevidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner—which lifetime,Ⓐemendation by the way, came to a close about a century ago, Ⓐemendationin the opinion of a savan Ⓐemendationwho has examined the defunct. Ⓐemendation The body was in a sitting posture,Ⓐemendation and leaning against a huge mass of croppings; the attitude was pensive, the right thumb resting Ⓐemendation Ⓐtextual noteagainst the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the fore-finger Ⓐemendationpressing the inner corner of the left eye and Ⓐemendationdrawing it partly open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apartⒺexplanatory note.Ⓐemendation Ⓐtextual note This strange freak of nature created a profound Ⓐemendation sensation in the vicinity, and our informant states that Ⓐemendationby request, Justice Sewell or Sowell,Ⓐemendation of Humboldt CityⒺexplanatory note,Ⓐemendation at once proceeded to the spot and held an inquest on the body.Ⓐemendation The verdict of the jury was that “deceased came to his death from Ⓐemendationprotracted exposure,” etc. ⒶemendationThe people of the neighborhood volunteered to bury the poor unfortunate, and were even anxious to do so; Ⓐemendationbut it was discovered, Ⓐemendation when they attempted to remove him, Ⓐemendationthat the water which had dripped upon him for ages from the crag above, Ⓐemendationhad coursed down his back and deposited a limestone sediment under him Ⓐemendationwhich had glued him to the bed rock Ⓐemendationupon which he sat, Ⓐemendationas with a cement of adamant, and Judge S. refused to allow the charitable citizens to blast him from his position. The opinion expressed by his Honor that such a course would be littleⒶemendation Ⓐtextual note less than sacrilege, was eminently just and proper. Everybody Ⓐemendationgoes to see the stone man, as many as three hundred Ⓐemendation Ⓐtextual note having visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.Ⓐemendation
The first printing in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise for 4 October 1862 is not extant. The sketch survives in four contemporary reprintings of the Enterprise:
P1 “A Petrified Man,” Sacramento Union, 9 October 1862, p. 2.P2 “Petrified Man,” Nevada City (Calif.) Nevada Democrat, 11 October 1862, p. 2.
P3 “A Washoe Joke,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 15 October 1862, p. 1.
P4 “Petrified Men,” Auburn (Calif.) Placer Herald, 18 October 1862, p. 1.
Copies: PH of P1 and P3 from Bancroft; PH of P2 and P4 from California State Library at Sacramento. The sketch is a radiating text: there is no copy-text. All variants are recorded in a list of emendations and adopted readings, which also records any readings unique to the present edition, identified as I-C.
P1 attributes the piece to the “Territorial Enterprise,” and although it may derive from an unidentified reprinting instead of the Enterprise, its publication date shows that it cannot derive from any known reprinting. None of the other reprints listed above can derive from P1, because they reprint so much more of the text. The publication date of P2 shows that it cannot derive from any other known reprinting, and its attribution of the item to the “Virginia City Enterprise, of the 4th instant” implies this as its source. P3 might well derive from an unidentified reprinting instead of the Enterprise itself, because it introduced the piece as follows: “The Territorial Enterprise has a joke of a ‘petrified man’ having been found on the plains[,] which the interior journals seem to be copying in good faith. Our authority gravely says.” But P3 probably does not derive from P2, because, along with P4, it has a superior reading (“be little” instead of “be a little” at 159.24): it seems unlikely that both reprintings would have dropped the indefinite article independently when copying P2. Furthermore, since P3 prints a unique sophistication (“persons” at 159.25), it clearly cannot be the source of P4. The balance of the evidence favors the supposition that all four reprintings derive independently from the Enterprise. Although any of the four could have been copied from a lost intervening printing, this is unlikely for all but P3. Even if the distance from the original printing is greater than can now be documented, all four printings may still preserve authorial readings among their variants.
Eight additional reprintings of the sketch have been identified in contemporary newspapers, but collation shows that all of these probably derive not from the Enterprise itself, but from P1, P2, or from each other. These include “A Petrified Man” in the following: Oroville (Calif.) Butte Record, 11 October 1862 (p. 4); Visalia (Calif.) Delta, 16 October 1862 (p. 3); Red Bluff (Calif.) Beacon, 16 October 1862 (p. 2); San Francisco Herald, 16 October 1862 (p. 2); Placer (Calif.) Courier, 18 October 1862 (p. 4); Eureka (Calif.) Humboldt Times, 8 November 1862 (p. 4). All of these derive, directly or indirectly, from P1. “A Petrified Man in Nevada Territory,” San Francisco Alta California, 15 October 1862 (p. 1) may derive from the Enterprise or from P2: it shares a problematic reading (“rested” instead of “resting” at 159.8) with P2, and this may indeed have been the reading of the Enterprise. But the Alta reproduces too little of the text to demonstrate its independence, and is here treated as a derivative text without authority. “That Piece of Petrified Humanity,” Sacramento Bee, 16 October 1862 (p. 4), appears to derive from the Alta and is likewise treated as without authority.
Clemens considered including this sketch in JF1 in January or February 1867, for he listed it among five alternates at the back of the Yale Scrapbook (see the textual introduction, p. 538).
The diagram of transmission records all known contemporary reprintings, including the derivative texts, but the list of emendations and adopted readings records only the variants among the independently radiating texts.