44
Popular Culture Review
A most singular discovery was yesterday made in the Savage
mine. This is the fading of living fish in the water now
flooding both the Savage and Hale and Norcross mines. The of
the vertical shaft. The fishes are eyeless, and are only about
three fish found were five in number, and were yesterday
afternoon hoisted up the incline ii the large iron hoisting tank
and dumped into the pump tank at the bottom or four inches in
length. They are blood red in color, (ctn. 1, fldr. 120)
The rhetorical mechanics deployed throughout the rest of this hoax are typical of
De Quille at the height of his hoaxing career. They include moves like the
fabrication of eyewitnesses, arguments for the existence of these fish by analogy
to real fish living in Kentucky caves, a refutatio-type strategy of anticipating
reader objections to the story and rebutting them, an “emperor’s new clothes”
type argument that “anyone who knows anything about science will immediately
know that these fish are real,” and a clever performance of the codependence of
belief and doubt in which De Quille portrays himself as a doubter who was
eventually convinced of the existence of the fish by the sheer weight of
accumulated evidence.
These rhetorical tricks must have been quite successful, as the hoax
ended up being reprinted extensively and attracting high-level scientific attention.
De Quille pumped the public enthusiasm for the fish with three and possibly four
follow-ups. A New York paper, probably the Sun, for which De Quille was a
regular Western correspondent, reprinted the story verbatim (ctn. 1, fldr. 120).
Reactions to the story by local papers, on the other hand, were split, and the
argument quickly derailed into the issue of water in the mines signaling the
depletion of the Comstock Lode. The Grass Valley Union reprinted the story and
reflected, “We regard those fish as evil omen, so to speak. A big cavern fall of
water will not probably contain much silver ore.” The paper went on to warn that
those San Francisco merchants who were already refusing to take silver “trade
dollars” had better mend their ways before silver production fell off dramatically
and silver became more dear than gold (ctn. 2, scrapbk. 2).
The San Francisco Stock Report, on the other hand, seemed to catch on
to the hoax and therefore did not appreciate the alarmist rhetoric of the Grass
Valley Union. The Stock Report writer worried that the Union was not alone in
its naive conclusion-jumping about the “canard” printed by the Enterprise:
That the story was a palpable “yam” on its very face to all who
understand the conditions of the great mines on their lower
levels does not in the least prevent its gaining credit among
people who do not understand those conditions, and as the
obvious inference is that where there are fish, eyeless or