Frontier Fake News: Nevada''s Sagebrush Humorists and Hoaxsters

When readers see the names Mark Twain or Dan De Quille, fake news may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But these legendary journalists were some of the original fake news writers in Nevada's early years. Frontier Fake News puts a spotlight on the hoaxes, feuds, pranks, outright lies, and other literary devices utilized by a number of the Silver State's frontier newsmen during the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.

While Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who got his start at Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise, and Dan De Quille (William Wright), who some felt was a better writer than Twain, are the best known members of the Sagebrush School of Writers, author Richard Moreno includes others such as Fred Hart, who reported on the activities of a fake social club for Austin's Reese River Reveille, and William Forbes, who enjoyed sprinkling clever puns with political undertones in his news columns. Moreno traces the beginnings of genuine fake news from founding father Benjamin Franklin's reporting to the fake news articles of New York and Baltimore papers in the early 1800s. But these examples are only a prelude to the amazing accounts of petrified men, freeze-inducing solar armor, blood-curdling massacres, and other nonsense stories that appeared in Nevada's frontier newspapers and beyond. See more