Speaker 1: Fireheart originals. This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2: Imagine it's eighteen seventy six and you're riding the passenger
Speaker 2: trains from Chicago to San Francisco. The steam engine has
Speaker 2: rumbled through the Great Plains, wheeled up the rockies, and
Speaker 2: descended onto the vast salt flats of Utah. Now you're
Speaker 2: surrounded by the desert of Nevada. The train bends around
Speaker 2: a canyon and slows ahead. You see a little town
Speaker 2: with a depot, a corral with some horses, and a saloon.
Speaker 2: As the train lurches to a stop, the conductor tells
Speaker 2: you that the engine is filling up on water. Passengers
Speaker 2: have ten minutes to stretch their legs. You step outside
Speaker 2: onto the station platform, and it feels like you've walked
Speaker 2: into an oven.
Speaker 3: The town is dead.
Speaker 2: The horses at the corral swat flies with their tails.
Speaker 2: A lone cowboy leans against the fence. Suddenly, the cowboy
Speaker 2: spits in the dirt and points his finger at a
Speaker 2: man walking down the street.
Speaker 1: There you are, you, low down pole cat.
Speaker 2: The cowboy's hand hovers over the ivory handle of a pistol.
Speaker 4: I've been waiting for you.
Speaker 5: I'm going to kill you because of what you did
Speaker 5: to my sister.
Speaker 2: The cowboy pulls off an elaborate quick draw, and that
Speaker 2: is your introduction to Palisade, Nevada. In the eighteen seventies,
Speaker 2: Palisade was the keenest little town west of the Mississippi.
Speaker 3: Every week, newspapers.
Speaker 2: Announced a cowboy gunfight, or an Indian massacre, or some
Speaker 2: gunpowder fueled drama with bank robbers duking it out against
Speaker 2: highway bandits. Palisade put the wild in the wild West,
Speaker 2: but there was a lot more to the story that
Speaker 2: didn't make the papers. Welcome to very special episodes and
Speaker 2: iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Danish Schwartz, and this
Speaker 2: is Westward Hoax.
Speaker 5: Welcome to very special episodes. Indeed, my name is Jason
Speaker 5: English and I'm joined by two California based podcast legends,
Speaker 5: Danish Schwartz and Zaren Burnett. Hey, guys, what of just
Speaker 5: thank you for that intro. I mentioned your state of
Speaker 5: residence for a reason. Let me pull back the curtain here.
Speaker 5: I'm in New Jersey. We're recording this on a Friday,
Speaker 5: and I just slipped through my first earthquake.
Speaker 3: Oh how are you feeling?
Speaker 5: You know, it's a lot of excitement. I would imagine
Speaker 5: in California, a four point eight probably doesn't trigger multiple
Speaker 5: emergency calls and texts and emails and push alerts and
Speaker 5: alta state.
Speaker 2: I've actually, I've never felt an earthquake. I've lived in
Speaker 2: California for a pretty long time, and I always either
Speaker 2: just like sleep through them. I'm a really heavy sleeper,
Speaker 2: so it's never been a thing that I've dealt with.
Speaker 2: And I kind of feel left out. Like everyone on
Speaker 2: Twitter and like you know, social media is always like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, did you feel that?
Speaker 5: And I'm just like, no, Saren, have you lived through
Speaker 5: your share?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, same experience as Dana. I've lived in
Speaker 1: California for a long time. I lived in La through
Speaker 1: a number of earthquakes, but I always happened to leave
Speaker 1: town right before the earthquake, so I'd always miss it,
Speaker 1: and then people would tell me, Burnette, you missed it again.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh man. So when I finally got
Speaker 1: to live through an earthquake, I was so excited. Everyone
Speaker 1: else is like, man, this sucks, and I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: this is the best. You feel that rumbling, oh my god,
Speaker 1: the waves.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that feels evolutionary like in your bones, you know
Speaker 5: when to get away from danger and advance.
Speaker 1: But I have the exact opposite with cars on fire.
Speaker 1: So you know, given.
Speaker 5: So well the curtain is pulled back. This room is
Speaker 5: not soundproof for aftershocks. I'm just letting you know. If
Speaker 5: this is gonna become a thing, you're gonna hear it
Speaker 5: in the recording. But today's story it's going to keep
Speaker 5: you a little bit off balance too.
Speaker 2: I think the only thing that I love more than
Speaker 2: sort of a hoax is one that basically involves an
Speaker 2: entire town getting together to be an improv troop.
Speaker 3: It's very wholesome.
Speaker 1: That's the dream.
Speaker 3: It really is the dream.
Speaker 1: I always say yes. I like how the Nevada, the Palisades,
Speaker 1: Nevada is like, well, just all of Nevada. It's like
Speaker 1: the Australia of America. It's just amazing. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if you know this. In Australia they have the
Speaker 1: spirit of messing with authority figures that they call Alaricanism,
Speaker 1: and this feels like Alaricanism in America.
Speaker 3: Alericanism. That's a great vocab words the best.
Speaker 2: I want to take you back to the start of
Speaker 2: that gunfight because there was a part we missed.
Speaker 3: My poor, poor little sister.
Speaker 2: The dandy falls to the dirt. His body goes limp,
Speaker 2: blood starts to soak through his shirt. Mayhem ensues. Men
Speaker 2: pour out of the saloon. Little kids pull back curtains
Speaker 2: and peer out of windows to see what the commotion
Speaker 2: is about. Meanwhile, you and the gaggle of out of
Speaker 2: towners push back into the train car. As the engine
Speaker 2: lurches forward, You look out the window and see two
Speaker 2: men dragging a lifeless body down the dusty street. A
Speaker 2: group of wranglers have accosted the cowboy, apparently to take
Speaker 2: him to the sheriff. Meanwhile, a fistfight has broken out
Speaker 2: in front of the saloon. You hear distant gunshots and
Speaker 2: whoops and shouts. As the train pulls away. Palisade disappears
Speaker 2: behind you. Once you're out of sight, the cowboy and
Speaker 2: his victim clink glasses.
Speaker 3: In the saloon.
Speaker 2: The rest of the townsfolk would be huddled around them,
Speaker 2: slapping each other's backs with a laugh.
Speaker 6: Did you see the look on their faces?
Speaker 4: Boy?
Speaker 3: We got them good.
Speaker 2: Palisade was reportedly home to hundreds, maybe thousands, of gunfights
Speaker 2: like this. And all of them were fake. The gunfights,
Speaker 2: the Indian massacres, even the blood were all part of
Speaker 2: an elaborate, staged hoax. Palisade wasn't the most dangerous town
Speaker 2: in the West, it was the prankiest. In the eighteen seventies. Palisade,
Speaker 2: Nevada was just a humble way point along the Central
Speaker 2: Pacific Railroad.
Speaker 4: It's a mining town, and so life would be very hard.
Speaker 3: That's Nicholas Witchy.
Speaker 2: He's a dean and professor of English at Western Michigan University.
Speaker 2: He specializes in the Wild West and has written about Palisade.
Speaker 4: Most people would be working ten hour days, six days
Speaker 4: a week, glowing up rock, smacking rock with a pickaxe,
Speaker 4: hauling it in wagons or wheelbarrows that are getting paid
Speaker 4: lousy day wages to move rock around all day long.
Speaker 2: Life in this small, isolated desert town didn't resemble the
Speaker 2: Wild West of popular imagination. In fact, here's how a
Speaker 2: reporter of the weekly Eliko Independent described it back in
Speaker 2: eighteen seventy six.
Speaker 5: The town is unusually dull, but still those who are
Speaker 5: in busy business don't growl.
Speaker 7: They simply pray for better times.
Speaker 2: In other words, life in Palisade was kind of well boring.
Speaker 2: People were barely scraping by. There wasn't a theater for entertainment,
Speaker 2: and the saloon could only distract you for so long.
Speaker 2: There was also a lot of tension in the air too.
Speaker 2: Mining and railroad towns like Palisade were home to a
Speaker 2: lot of foreign laborers, particularly Chinese workers. Not everybody took
Speaker 2: too kindly to the visitors.
Speaker 4: Tensions over the Chinese coming in and taking jobs was
Speaker 4: really ramping up.
Speaker 2: Chinese workers were frequently victims of xenophobia and exclusionary laws.
Speaker 2: The hard lifestyle, the boredom, the racial tensions. All of
Speaker 2: this made life in this hard scrabbled town even more tough,
Speaker 2: and people were desperate to blow off some steam. So,
Speaker 2: rather than fight each other, the town found a common
Speaker 2: target the gullible tourists passing through on the Transcontinental Railroad.
Speaker 4: What are you gonna do when train pulls into town
Speaker 4: and you've been schlepping rock for ten hours a day,
Speaker 4: Why not have a little fun.
Speaker 2: In eighteen seventy six, most people traveling west had no
Speaker 2: concept of Nevada. Maybe they had read about cowboys and
Speaker 2: Indians in the yellow Pages of tawdry dime novels, So
Speaker 2: the people of Palisade decided to give them a show.
Speaker 4: The travelers would step out of the platform and next
Speaker 4: thing you know, there'd be buckets of blood all over
Speaker 4: the platform, and then screaming and dead bodies being hauled off.
Speaker 4: And then the tourists would all pile into the train
Speaker 4: and be shaking and frightened and worried about this wordless
Speaker 4: wild West that they'd come into, and the train would
Speaker 4: pull out of town, all the dead bodies would ry,
Speaker 4: and everybody go to the saloon and have a good
Speaker 4: laugh because they just put one over on a tourists.
Speaker 2: Residents of Palisade leaned into the stereotype of the wild West,
Speaker 2: you know, cowboys and big hats yelling yeeha as they
Speaker 2: fight Native Americans, bounty hunters on horseback, lassoing murderous outlaws,
Speaker 2: dragging them to the gallows for justice. The thing is,
Speaker 2: these stereotypes aren't accurate now, and they weren't accurate then.
Speaker 4: What we think of the American West is a bunch
Speaker 4: of guys blasting ay at each other. Yes, there was
Speaker 4: a gunfight at the Ok Corral, but that lasted thirty seconds.
Speaker 4: In the meantime, there were scores of people living, working,
Speaker 4: going to shows, going to restaurants, doing what they do, coming,
Speaker 4: going the mines, all sorts of things.
Speaker 2: The fact is, life in the wild West wasn't that wild.
Speaker 3: It wasn't even that dangerous.
Speaker 4: The element of the American West that we often as
Speaker 4: associate with lawlessness and violence, it was real. It was
Speaker 4: a part of what was going on in the West.
Speaker 4: But most scholars are pretty quick to point out that
Speaker 4: in terms of numbers, the prevalence of gun use, the
Speaker 4: prevalence of violence, the prevalence of hangings was really not
Speaker 4: much greater than it was in other parts of the
Speaker 4: country at that time.
Speaker 2: Even the stereotypical image of cowboys, a white John Wayne
Speaker 2: figure ready to get into a shootout at any moment,
Speaker 2: isn't entirely correct.
Speaker 4: Yes there were cowboys, Yes they wore big hats and chaps,
Speaker 4: and some of them even carried guns. But at the
Speaker 4: same time, fully half of them were either Hispanic or
Speaker 4: African American.
Speaker 2: In fact, most of these stereotypes of a root and
Speaker 2: tootin wild West started with novelists like Ned Buntline. In
Speaker 2: eighteen sixty nine, Buntline interviewed William F. Cody, a buffalo
Speaker 2: hunter and army scout who had served during the American
Speaker 2: Indian Wars. The result was a sensationalist story called Buffalo Bill,
Speaker 2: The King of the border Men. It would eventually become
Speaker 2: part of a new genre of cheaply made books called
Speaker 2: dime novels that swept the country. They introduced readers to
Speaker 2: a world where cowboys and Indians, gun slingers and outlaws reigned.
Speaker 4: The dime novel certainly had their function as telling the
Speaker 4: story that the American West and ways that are blood
Speaker 4: and thunder is the phrase it's often use to describe
Speaker 4: the dime novel experience.
Speaker 2: You know, the old journalism chestnut. If it bleeds, it leads,
Speaker 2: That was the dime novel in a nutshell. In addition
Speaker 2: to getting readers hooked on a fictional wild West, Ned
Speaker 2: bunt Line helped convince Buffalo Bill to give up his
Speaker 2: job hunting Buffalo for the glitzy lights of show business.
Speaker 4: Ned Buntline is the guy who also gets William F.
Speaker 4: Cody Buffalo Bill to portray himself on stage, and so
Speaker 4: eighteen seventy two, Buffalo Bill starts performing in New York
Speaker 4: what It's like to be Buffalo Bill in the Wild.
Speaker 2: Buffalo Bill would soon become a full time showman with
Speaker 2: his own traveling circus. Audience members could watch re enactments
Speaker 2: of Indian attacks and see live acts like the sharpshooter
Speaker 2: Annie Oakley, who by the way, was born and raised
Speaker 2: not in the Wild West, but in Ohio. All of
Speaker 2: this is to say dime novels and Old West acts,
Speaker 2: as well as newspaper coverage of the Indian Wars such
Speaker 2: as Custer's Last Stand, built a stereotype that the West
Speaker 2: was a violent, lawless place, perpetually clouded with gun smoke.
Speaker 2: So the citizens of Palisade decided to help.
Speaker 4: I see a group of people who are like, Okay,
Speaker 4: this is what the world expects of us, Let's give
Speaker 4: it to them.
Speaker 2: In October of eighteen seventy six, a journalist with the
Speaker 2: Virginia City Territorial Enterprise witnessed the Palisaded prank in action.
Speaker 8: Half a dozen Native Americans, for a reasonable compensation, would
Speaker 8: submit to being bound hand and foot and laid on
Speaker 8: the platform during the stay of the train. Around their bodies,
Speaker 8: a guard of citizens armed with immense revolvers long rifles
Speaker 8: and bloodthirsted looking knives would march. Shotguns and revolvers would
Speaker 8: loaded with powder ball omitted, and in a moment the
Speaker 8: air would reek with powder, smoke, and profanity and blood
Speaker 8: previously procured from the slaughterhouse besprinkled the platform as plentifully
Speaker 8: as water. Sympathetic friends carried off the dead and wounded
Speaker 8: to some neighboring saloon, while the frightened and bewildered immigrants
Speaker 8: crawled from under seats and behind cars, their blanched faces
Speaker 8: in tram blend limbs attesting their belief in the genuineness
Speaker 8: of the thigh.
Speaker 2: Hoaxes like this weren't exactly new. In eighteen sixty six,
Speaker 2: the Union Pacific Railroad entertained its workers by staging a
Speaker 2: phony fight between the Pawnee and Sioux. But in Palisade
Speaker 2: this wasn't a one off. According to the historian Gerald B. Higgs,
Speaker 2: who wrote the book Lost Legends of the Silver State,
Speaker 2: the ruse lasted for three years. Over that time, the
Speaker 2: Palisade Thesbian players, as they allegedly called themselves, put on
Speaker 2: more than one thousand acts. Basically, the residents of Palisade
Speaker 2: had become an improv troop that put on a show
Speaker 2: every night. According to Higgs, local authorities and the railroad
Speaker 2: workers were all in on the joke, and the hoax
Speaker 2: was making Palisade sort of fakes. Palisade was getting write
Speaker 2: ups in editorials across the country, with travelers complaining about
Speaker 2: their terrifying experiences passing through the Nevada town. Frankly, it's
Speaker 2: a brilliant tale. Decades before Wild West amusement parks like
Speaker 2: Frontier Town Wherever invented, the residents of a real Frontier
Speaker 2: town were playing the part and punking gullible, high falutin
Speaker 2: outsiders on the daily. There's just one problem. There's no
Speaker 2: evidence the Palisade pranks ever happened.
Speaker 4: One of the questions that I could never resolve was
Speaker 4: were they actually real?
Speaker 2: The story of the Palisade hoax might be a hoax.
Speaker 2: If you were alive during the eighteen seventies, you were
Speaker 2: living through what was, if you'll pardon my French, a
Speaker 2: golden age of bullshit. There were quacks, hucksters and Charlatan's galore.
Speaker 2: Schmucks and spiritualists occupied every street corner, hawking snake oil,
Speaker 2: salvation and direct lines to the dead p T. Barnum
Speaker 2: had turned the art of the prank into a money
Speaker 2: making bonanza. Meanwhile, at every carnival funhouse you could see
Speaker 2: the bodies of petrified giants and the flaky husks of
Speaker 2: desiccated mermaids.
Speaker 4: It's an interesting time for a lot of people fooling
Speaker 4: around or being fooled.
Speaker 2: That again is Professor Nick Witchie of Western Michigan University,
Speaker 2: and he explained that people in Palisade, Nevada were living
Speaker 2: smack in the middle of bullshit Central.
Speaker 4: Why were the residents of Palisades seemingly interested in punkin
Speaker 4: travelers coming through? The shortest, quickest answer is they were
Speaker 4: living in a part of the country that was already
Speaker 4: well deeply invested in hoaxes, in satires, in poking fun
Speaker 4: at people's misconceptions.
Speaker 2: Nevada was a hoaxter's paradise, he tells us. One of
Speaker 2: the big reasons is because it was home to a
Speaker 2: little newspaper called the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, located in
Speaker 2: a silver boomtown in West Nevada. The Virginia City Territorial
Speaker 2: Enterprise was a paper where good and honest journalism shared
Speaker 2: the page with Shenanigan filled fake news. If you picked
Speaker 2: up the newspaper on October twenty eighth, eighteen sixty three,
Speaker 2: you could read an account of a bloody massacre that
Speaker 2: happened in nearby Carson, Nevada. Apparently a man had gone
Speaker 2: mad and butchered his wife and six of his chi children.
Speaker 2: Then he hopped on a horse and took the knife
Speaker 2: to himself.
Speaker 6: About ten o'clock on Monday evening, Hopkins dashed into Carson
Speaker 6: on horseback with his throat cut from ear to ear
Speaker 6: and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp from which
Speaker 6: the warm, smoking blood was still dripping.
Speaker 2: But the story was fake, totally made up. And just
Speaker 2: guess what happened to the journalist who concocted this fiction.
Speaker 2: Did he get fired? Was he tarred and feathered, banished
Speaker 2: from the writing business forever? Of course not. He became famous.
Speaker 2: The reporter's name was Samuel Clemens, who you probably know
Speaker 2: better as Mark Twain.
Speaker 4: This is a part of the country where Mark Twain
Speaker 4: got his name. But he really started in journalism with
Speaker 4: satires and hoaxes, publishing news stories about things that never happened,
Speaker 4: or silly or horrific things that would frighten people if
Speaker 4: they didn't know better.
Speaker 2: At the Virginia City Paper, Twain was making up stories
Speaker 2: all the time, and he wasn't alone.
Speaker 4: He had a whole fellow crew of journalists at the
Speaker 4: Virginia City Territorial Enterprise who were writing up hoaxes.
Speaker 2: Like Twain, journalists Dan de Quill and Fred Hart were
Speaker 2: routinely publishing phony satires.
Speaker 3: There was the story.
Speaker 2: About a dead man who had turned into solid.
Speaker 6: Rock a petrified man was found some time ago in
Speaker 6: the mountains south of gravelly Ford.
Speaker 2: And a story about a man who turned into a
Speaker 2: human popsicle under the glaring desert sun.
Speaker 6: He was dead and frozen stiff. An icicle over a
Speaker 6: foot in length hung from his nose.
Speaker 2: Years after leaving the newspaper, Mark Twain reed called the
Speaker 2: joy of making up stories in the Territorial Enterprise Office.
Speaker 7: We never hesitated about devising hoaxes when the public needed
Speaker 7: matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil Enterprise
Speaker 7: Office was a guest lif factory of slaughter, mulation, and
Speaker 7: general destruction in those days.
Speaker 2: Nowadays, these journalists are remembered as the sagebrush school of writers.
Speaker 2: They were a product of their time. The media landscape
Speaker 2: was changing fast. Telegraphs, literacy rates, and newspaper distribution were booming,
Speaker 2: and these writers decided to exploit it.
Speaker 4: The right mix of people suddenly landed all in the
Speaker 4: same place and felt like, you know what, we can
Speaker 4: have some fun with this.
Speaker 2: So they used humor and tall tales to write satires
Speaker 2: poking fun at the people in power. Readers were okay
Speaker 2: with this because BS was a currency in the West.
Speaker 5: There was a.
Speaker 4: World where value shifted rapidly. One day the price of
Speaker 4: silver could be fought through the roof, and the next
Speaker 4: day of the price of silver would be so low
Speaker 4: that it wouldn't be worthwhile to I'd pull it out
Speaker 4: of the ground. In a world of shifting values, what
Speaker 4: can you hang your hat on. Some people think that
Speaker 4: the hoaxes all came about because of that very reason,
Speaker 4: that this was a world where the one thing you
Speaker 4: could know for certain was the ability to bs, was
Speaker 4: the ability to bullshit someone into thinking you had the
Speaker 4: key to a really interesting piece of knowledge.
Speaker 2: But also, let's be real, the writers also enjoyed a
Speaker 2: certain pastime.
Speaker 4: Dave drank a lot. They were a thirsty group.
Speaker 2: Now, a lot of the stories by the sage Brush
Speaker 2: writers got picked up by other newspapers and published as truth.
Speaker 3: Some stories were published in.
Speaker 2: Places as far away as all Australia. Local readers, however,
Speaker 2: weren't so gullible. They usually knew the stories were fake.
Speaker 4: The local journalist would put in enough clues to let
Speaker 4: the reader in on the joke, but the reader farther
Speaker 4: away would not necessarily know.
Speaker 2: And that brings us back to the Palisade prank. Because
Speaker 2: here's the weird thing about it. According to lore, the
Speaker 2: people of Palisade pranked unsuspecting train passengers more than one
Speaker 2: thousand times. You'd imagine this would get a lot of
Speaker 2: write ups in various newspapers, but when we scoured databases
Speaker 2: in search of evidence of the prank, we only found
Speaker 2: one article and it was from the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the newspaper riddled with hoaxes and fake news. Doctor Witchie
Speaker 2: bumped into the same problem back when he was researching
Speaker 2: the Palisades.
Speaker 4: When I first was researching this and writing this paper,
Speaker 4: historians in the editing process kept asking me, but is
Speaker 4: it real? Did it happen? Could things like this have happened.
Speaker 4: Were there other examples of this sort of thing happening?
Speaker 2: He didn't have an answer.
Speaker 4: I personally have never found anything to corroborate that they
Speaker 4: actually happened.
Speaker 2: Most accounts about the prank, including ours, come from Gerald B. Higgs,
Speaker 2: an amateur historian who wrote about the hoax back in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy six. Higgs says he learned about it by
Speaker 2: talking to old timers and visiting every county recorder's office
Speaker 2: in Nevada. However, he doesn't cite any sources in his
Speaker 2: telling of the Palisade pranks. Is it possible that the
Speaker 2: Palisade prank was just another prank pulled off by the
Speaker 2: writers of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
Speaker 3: It's hard to tell.
Speaker 2: Doctor Witchie told us that newspaper hoaxes usually contained telltale
Speaker 2: clues that would tip off local readers that the story
Speaker 2: was phony, but he couldn't find any hints in the
Speaker 2: Palisades story.
Speaker 4: This is one of the things that's sustinctive about that
Speaker 4: report about the Palisade hoax. If it really is a pox,
Speaker 4: this journalist is describing it in such a way that
Speaker 4: makes a plane like guess what the folks over Pallisader
Speaker 4: are doing to tourists.
Speaker 2: The story is written like a plane news item. If
Speaker 2: the article itself is a hoax, it's a subtle one.
Speaker 2: But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. The Virginia City Territorial
Speaker 2: Enterprise is, after all, famous for duping people. Even into
Speaker 2: the twentieth century, the newspaper was publishing pranks. In the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties, the editors published a fake story about a
Speaker 2: camel race coming to town. There was no camel race,
Speaker 2: of course. It was all a joke, but another newspaper
Speaker 2: decided to call them on it, and now Virginia City
Speaker 2: hosts an annual Camel and Ostra Trace, which, if you
Speaker 2: haven't seen adults ride ostriches down a desert dragstrip, is
Speaker 2: worth the trip. Meanwhile, Palisade today is a ghost town.
Speaker 2: The mines in the area went bust, the local post
Speaker 2: office skadaddled in the sixties. In two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: the news website SFGate described what left of Palisade as
Speaker 2: quote tumblewheed rattlesnake holes, half of a rusted car, the
Speaker 2: remains of an old washing machine, and a cemetery all
Speaker 2: that's really left is a story that Nevadens love to share.
Speaker 4: It is utterly fascinating to me that a story that
Speaker 4: may or may not be true regardless, has become a
Speaker 4: story that the people of Nevada love to tell about themselves,
Speaker 4: love the tell each other that this is the kind
Speaker 4: of place that we've inherited, this is the place we
Speaker 4: live in.
Speaker 2: The stories we choose to tell and the stories we
Speaker 2: choose to believe say a lot about who we are
Speaker 2: and how we identify. So perhaps it's appropriate to close
Speaker 2: with a coda. One last story about how Palisade, for
Speaker 2: the briefest of moments, was the most talked about town
Speaker 2: in the country. It was election day nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 2: President Herbert Hoover was riding a train back to his
Speaker 2: home state of California to vote, but as the train
Speaker 2: came upon Palisade, it lurched to a stop.
Speaker 3: The Associated Press reported.
Speaker 2: That the night before, two men had been caught carrying
Speaker 2: seventeen sticks of dynamite, apparently in an attempt to blow
Speaker 2: up the bridge and quote wreck the Hoover train. They
Speaker 2: even tried to shoot and stab the guard keeping watch
Speaker 2: over the tracks. This was huge news an election assassination
Speaker 2: attempt in Palisade, the town of three hundred, was making
Speaker 2: front page headlines in papers across the country. Two weeks later,
Speaker 2: a follow up appeared in the papers. The guard who
Speaker 2: had witnessed the dastardly assassination plot had a confession he
Speaker 2: had made it all up. Palisades Fifteen Minutes of Fame
Speaker 2: was a hoax too.
Speaker 3: So do you think it was real?
Speaker 1: Yes? I think it was real the first time, and
Speaker 1: then after that.
Speaker 3: I think it at least happened once. And they were like,
Speaker 3: this is so funny. It's like a great bit.
Speaker 2: I don't want a great bit to die.
Speaker 5: You only need to do it once because no one
Speaker 5: wants to be the only people who got fooled, so
Speaker 5: they'll everyone will play it up for you.
Speaker 1: Exactly. That's the whole nature of the Old West. Something
Speaker 1: happens once, and everybody gets their hand at the storytelling,
Speaker 1: and it gets bigger and better through the over and
Speaker 1: over storytelling.
Speaker 5: My very special character for this one, kind of a
Speaker 5: very special cameo, my man Mark Twain, who pops up
Speaker 5: out of nowhere, gets some quality minutes off the bench.
Speaker 3: There Missouri's finest.
Speaker 5: You know, the classic thing where TV show will spin
Speaker 5: off a minor character into its own show. Frasier. The
Speaker 5: most obvious example from Cheers saw Goodman from Breaking Bad,
Speaker 5: Missus Garrett Facts of Life to Different Hell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, wow, a lot of I mean people who are
Speaker 2: familiar with the Good Wife.
Speaker 3: That whole universe.
Speaker 1: El Sbeth is that the new spin off?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the first spinoffs was Gomer Pyle from Andy Griffith,
Speaker 1: and then that became a more popular show. It was
Speaker 1: the bigger hit.
Speaker 5: Well in that spirit, Zaren is working on another episode
Speaker 5: Mark Twain centric. It's kind of like Mark Twain's origin story,
Speaker 5: and so we're just teasing that here that we're going
Speaker 5: to spin him off into his own bigger thing, so
Speaker 5: to be on the lookout.
Speaker 1: It's a whole episode where you learn that he basically
Speaker 1: is part of a bar fight that starts American literature.
Speaker 1: It's a wild story. And then also you get more
Speaker 1: of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, which is an amazing newspaper.
Speaker 5: Did you happen to cast this one?
Speaker 1: I did, actually, thank you for asking this one. I
Speaker 1: went with a comical variety of casting. So imagine this
Speaker 1: as a comedy, right, So we have Buffalo bill as
Speaker 1: the showman played by John c Riley, right, the Ned
Speaker 1: Buntline the novelist played by Owen Wilson. Then how about that,
Speaker 1: Oh you like that one, Daniel Okay, Nicholas Ritchie, the
Speaker 1: historian Sam Elliott as our narrator.
Speaker 2: I kind of feel like this is a Wes Anderson ensemble.
Speaker 2: Oh we're building it feels like a Wes Anderson movie.
Speaker 1: You nailed it, right. And then so now for the
Speaker 1: Palisade thespian players, your favorites, the improv artists themselves. I
Speaker 1: just imagined a group, right, So we have the Mayor
Speaker 1: of Palisade that would be played by Walton Goggint. We
Speaker 1: have the cool gunfighter Lakeith Stanfield, saloon owner Danny McBride.
Speaker 1: How about for our lady of entertainment in the night,
Speaker 1: Billie Eilish in her first dramatic role. And then finally
Speaker 1: gullible tourist couple Tom Holland and Zendaya.
Speaker 2: You know what, for mine, I'm gonna really go with
Speaker 2: the Wes Anderson theme. Yes, and the people in the
Speaker 2: town are like Jason Schwartzman Okay, Edward Norton, Adrian Brodie,
Speaker 2: is the journalist, and then like one of the hapless
Speaker 2: tourists is like is a couple and it's like Bob
Speaker 2: Balaban and like Tilda Swinton them on the train.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that the antimet Bob Balaban, I mean, you got me.
Speaker 1: I'm already pulling money out of my wallet.
Speaker 2: Can't you picture him as just like a hapless tourist
Speaker 2: watching this, And then Tilda Swinton just like being a guest,
Speaker 2: a little other person.
Speaker 1: The faces she could pull come on now, oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, probably wearing weird teeth all time.
Speaker 5: You guys nailed the dramatic recreations. I think there's also
Speaker 5: a competition reality show Angle where improv troops are brought
Speaker 5: into small towns that have to pull off some major
Speaker 5: scam like this.
Speaker 2: See but Jason here. That's my main takeaway. It's not
Speaker 2: a scam, if it's not for profit, if you're not
Speaker 2: a benevolent scam, is a hoax exactly. This is a hoax,
Speaker 2: and I actually think that we need more hoaxes in
Speaker 2: this country. Totally just good spirited, entertaining hoaxes. We're not
Speaker 2: trying to hurt anyone, We're not trying to steal anyone's money.
Speaker 3: This is just a hoax.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just put the vibe in the air and that
Speaker 1: people have a good laugh.
Speaker 2: I love that, let people have a good time. Let's
Speaker 2: self mythologize what America is, and I think that that's
Speaker 2: what this episode is. This episode is about America self
Speaker 2: mythologizing in real time totally.
Speaker 1: And also the tendencies that we have because we're okay,
Speaker 1: the Old West, right, they had the dime novels like
Speaker 1: pumping the story and the newspapers carrying it back east.
Speaker 1: But it basically the Old West was the Oakland or
Speaker 1: the Chicago of back then where it's just a hype
Speaker 1: of crime. It wasn't really as bad as people made
Speaker 1: it up. Or they're like, oh man, I hate to
Speaker 1: go out to the Old West or you know, I
Speaker 1: guess the Wild West at that point, just like people
Speaker 1: don't want to go to Chicago or where I live, Oakland,
Speaker 1: where it's come on out here, man, We're ready for you.
Speaker 1: It'll be fun.
Speaker 5: No baseball, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't talk about that. Come on now, Sacramento taking
Speaker 1: our team like that.
Speaker 5: Very special episodes is made by some very special people.
Speaker 5: This show is hosted by Danish Wartz Zaren Burnett and
Speaker 5: me Jason English. Today's episode was written by Lucas Riley.
Speaker 5: Our producer is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by
Speaker 5: Chris Childs, Mixing and mastering by Beheid Fraser. Original music
Speaker 5: by Elise McCoy. Research in fact checking by Austin Thompson
Speaker 5: and Lucas Riley. Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Special thanks
Speaker 5: to our voice actors Zaron Josh and Carl Catele. I'm
Speaker 5: your executive producer. We'll see you back here next Wednesday.
Speaker 5: Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.