Dan De Quille and the Scientific Hoax as a
Technology of Resistance
Dan De Quille (William Wright) was a Nevada journalist and one of the
first technical writers in the postbellum West. He maintained a solid reputation
among his contemporaries for trustworthy mining reports and regional histories—
no small feat considering that he was also America’s most successful scientific
hoaxer (Drury 213-4). More than merely pranks or ethical aberrations, De
Quille’s hoaxes help illuminate current questions about the popularization of
science and technology in the postbellum West and how it helped to build a tense
relationship between Westerners and the Eastern govemmental/industrial
complex.
De Quille and his colleague on the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise,
Mark Twain, both wrestled with science and politics in their writings. On the one
hand, they evinced excitement at the increasing order and control that science and
technology were helping pioneers to extend over the Wild West; on the other
hand, they were both nervous about the ends toward which the federal
government and Eastern industry were appropriating Western resources and
industrial technologies. Twain dedicated A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
Court to demonstrating the catastrophe of trying to force technological progress
on unindustrialized cultures. De Quille used his late-life novella Dives and
Lazarus to dramatize the sufferings of silver miners at the hands of a federal
government that persisted in enforcing the gold standard. Science and society
were inextricably connected in their social journalism and fiction.
De Quille’s activism on these issues has recently drawn scholarly
attention. In his survey of Western innovation in industrial practices, Dave Igler
points out that De Quille publicized the fact that the mines were destroying acres
of precious old-growth forest (12). Igler goes on to argue that these easily
exploited natural resources in the West, coupled with the business acumen of San
Francisco entrepreneurs, created a second industrial revolution in America; this
assessment revises previous assumptions that the West was always a passive
victim for predatory Eastern business and governmental programs. De Quille’s
hoaxes are further evidence for I v