Harry Hedrick, the veteran journalist of Far Western mining camps, sent his newspaper this:
To stand on twenty different claims in one day, as I have done; to take the virgin rock from the ledge, to reduce it to pulp and then to watch a string of the saint-seducing dross encircle the pan; to peer over the shoulder of the assayer while he takes the precious button from the crucible--these are the convincing things about this newest and greatest of gold camps. It is not a novelty to have assays run into the thousands. In fact, it is commonplace. To report strikes of a few hundred dollars to the ton seems like an anticlimax.
There were scores of actual happenings in Rawhide that make it possible for me to say in reviewing the vigorous publicity campaign which marked its first year's phenomenal growth, that ninety per cent. of the correspondence, including the special dispatches sent from the camp and from Reno, which was published in newspapers of the United States, was not only based on fact but was literally true in so far as any newspaper reporter can be depended upon accurately to describe events.
Ask any high-class newspaper owner or editor to express his sentiments regarding the "faking" which formed about ten per cent. of the Rawhide press work described herein and he will tell you that such work is a reproach to journalism. Maybe it is, but we are living in times when such work on the part of press-agents is the rule and not the exception. The publicity-agent who can successfully perform this way is generally able to command an annual stipend as big as that of the President of the United States. There was nothing criminal about the performance in Rawhide, because there was no intentional misrepresentation regarding the character or quality of any mine in the Rawhide camp. Correspondents were repeatedly warned to be extremely careful not to overstep the bounds in this regard.
Confessedly there are grades of "faking" which no press-agent would care to stoop to.
Somewhere in De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater" he describes one of his pipe-dreams as perfect moonshine, and, like the sculptured imagery of the pendulous lamp in "Christabel," _all carved from the carver's brain_. Rawhide and Reno correspondents were guilty of very little work which De Quincey's description would exactly fit. There was a basis for nearly everything they wrote about, even the alleged discovery of Death Valley Scotty's secret storehouse of wealth, that story having been in circulation in Nevada, although not theretofore published, for upward of eighteen months. Unsubstantial, baseless, ungrounded fiction had been resorted to, it is true, during the Manhattan boom, in a single story about the madman in charge of the hoist on the Jumping Jack, but this was an exception to the rule and the story was harmless.