 | Mark Twain's sketches, new and old |  |
THE PETRIFIED MAN.
NOW, to show how really hard it
is to foist a moral or a truth
upon an unsuspecting public
through a burlesque without entirely
and absurdly missing one's mark, I
will here set down two experiences of
my own in this thing. In the fall of
1862, in Nevada and California, the
people got to running wild about extraordinary
petrifications and other
natural marvels. One could scarcely
pick up a paper without finding in it
one or two glorified discoveries of this
kind. The mania was becoming a little ridiculous. I was a bran-new local editor
in Virginia City, and I felt called upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have
petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it was altogether
too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all. I put my
scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably petrified man.
I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.—, the new coroner and justice
of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch him up a little at the
same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combine pleasure with business. So
I told, in patient belief-compelling
detail, all about the finding of a
petrified man at Gravelly Ford
(exactly a hundred and twenty miles,
over a breakneck mountain trail,
from where — lived); how all the
savants of the immediate neighborhood
had been to examine it (it was
notorious that there was not a
living creature within fifty miles
of there, except a few starving Indians,
some crippled grasshoppers,
and four or five buzzards out of
meat and too feeble to get away);
how those savants all pronounced the
petrified man to have been in a state
of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, with a seriousness that
I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated that as soon as Mr. — heard
the news he summoned a jury, mounted his mule, and posted off, with noble reverence
for official duty, on that awful five days' journey, through alkali, sage-brush,
peril of body, and imminent starvation, to hold an inquest on this man that had
been dead and turned to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years!
And then, my hand being “in,” so to speak, I went on, with the same unflinching
gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict that deceased came to his death
from protracted exposure. This only moved me to higher flights of imagination,
grave, and were about to give the petrified man Christian burial, when they found
that for ages a limestone sediment had been trickling down the face of the stone
against which he was sitting, and this stuff had run under him and cemented him
fast to the “bed-rock;” that the jury (they were all silver-miners) canvassed the
difficulty a moment, and then got out their powder and fuse, and proceeded to
drill a hole under him, in order to blast him from his position, when Mr.—, “with
that delicacy so characteristic of him, forbade them, observing that it would be
little less than sacrilege to do such a thing.”
From beginning to end the “Petrified Man” squib was a string of roaring
absurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretence of truth that even imposed
upon me to some extent, and I was in some danger of believing in my own fraud.
But I really had no desire to deceive anybody, and no expectation of doing it. I
depended on the way the petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he
was a swindle. Yet I purposely mixed that up with other things, hoping to make
it obscure—and I did. I would describe the position of one foot, and then say his
right thumb was against the side of his nose; then talk about his other foot, and
presently come back and say the fingers of his right hand were spread apart; then
talk about the back of his head a little, and return and say the left thumb was
hooked into the right little finger; then ramble off about something else, and by
and by drift back again and remark that the fingers of the left hand were spread
like those of the right. But I was too ingenious. I mixed it up rather too much;
and so all that description of the attitude, as a key to the humbuggery of the
article, was entirely lost, for nobody but me ever discovered and comprehended
the peculiar and suggestive position of the petrified man's hands.
As a satire on the petrifaction mania, or anything else, my Petrified Man was a
disheartening failure; for everybody received him in innocent good faith, and I
was stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down the wonder-business
with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted to the grand chief place in the list
of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced. I was so disappointed at the
curious miscarriage of my scheme, that at first I was angry, and did not like to
think about it; but by and by, when the exchanges began to come in with the
and as my gentleman's field of travels broadened, and by the exchanges I
saw that he steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory, State after
State, and land after land, till he swept the great globe and culminated in sublime
and unimpeached legitimacy in the august London Lancet, my cup was full, and I
said I was glad I had done it. I think that for about eleven months, as nearly as
I can remember, Mr. —'s daily mail-bag continued to be swollen by the addition
of half a bushel of newspapers hailing from many climes 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. He used to shovel them into his back yard and curse. And
every day during all those months the miners, his constituents (for miners never
quit joking a person when they get started), would call on him and ask if he could
tell them where they could get hold of a paper with the Petrified Man in it. He
could have accommodated a continent with them. I hated — in those days,
and these things pacified me and pleased me. I could not have gotten more real
comfort out of him without killing him.
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