This literary bomb really had two objects, one of which was to punish the San Francisco Bulletin for its persistent attacks on Washoe interests; the other, though this was merely incidental, to direct an unpleasant attention to a certain Carson saloon, the Magnolia, which was supposed to dispense whisky of the “forty rod” brand—­that is, a liquor warranted to kill at that range.  It was the Bulletin that was to be made especially. ridiculous.  This paper had been particularly disagreeable concerning the “dividend-cooking” system of certain of the Comstock mines, at the same time calling invidious attention to safer investments in California stocks.  Samuel Clemens, with “half a trunkful” of Comstock shares, had cultivated a distaste for California things in general:  In a letter of that time he says: 

“How I hate everything that looks or tastes or smells like California!” With his customary fickleness of soul, he was glorifying California less than a year later, but for the moment he could see no good in that Nazareth.  To his great satisfaction, one of the leading California corporations, the Spring Valley Water Company, “cooked” a dividend of its own about this time, resulting in disaster to a number of guileless investors who were on the wrong side of the subsequent crash.  This afforded an inviting opportunity for reprisal.  With Goodman’s consent he planned for the California papers, and the Bulletin in particular, a punishment which he determined to make sufficiently severe.  He believed the papers of that State had forgotten his earlier offenses, and the result would show he was not mistaken.

There was a point on the Carson River, four miles from Carson City, known as “Dutch Nick’s,” and also as Empire City, the two being identical.  There was no forest there of any sort nothing but sage-brush.  In the one cabin there lived a bachelor with no household.  Everybody in Virginia and Carson, of course, knew these things.

Mark Twain now prepared a most lurid and graphic account of how one Phillip Hopkins, living “just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between Empire City and ’Dutch Nick’s’,” had suddenly gone insane and murderously assaulted his entire family consisting of his wife and their nine children, ranging in ages from one to nineteen years.  The wife had been slain outright, also seven of the children; the other two might recover.  The murder had been committed in the most brutal and ghastly fashion, after which Hopkins had scalped his wife, leaped on a horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, and ridden four miles into Carson City, dropping dead at last in front of the Magnolia saloon, the red-haired scalp of his wife still clutched in his gory hand.  The article further stated that the cause of Mr. Hopkins’s insanity was pecuniary loss, he having withdrawn his savings from safe Comstock investments and, through the advice of a relative, one of the editors of the San Francisco Bulletin, invested them in the Spring Valley Water Company.  This absurd tale with startling head-lines appeared in the Enterprise, in its issue of October 28, 1863.