Digital Bob Archive

The Silent City was undoubtedly the most successful, financially at least, of Uncle Dick Willoughby's considerable array of hoaxes. It also gave him the satisfaction of stirring up a number of people who went to some trouble to prove him a fraud and a liar. The Silent City ranked well above his giant bearskin and far above the only existing skin of the Steller sea cow.

The bear hide was a big one to start with and much bigger after it had been stretched while green. Tourists could view it for only 25 cents, with a tall tale or two about Alaskan bears thrown in. Just what the sea cow skin was is unclear. In a picture, it appears to have been several assorted hides sewn together. Uncle Dick said he had bought it from a very old Indian who had inherited it from his grandfather, but it does not seem to have remained a part of the repertoire for very long, so perhaps it was too crude to fool even a tourist.

Whether the famous Silent City hoax came about by accident or with malice aforethought is not known, but anyone who knew the Professor, as Willoughby was sometimes called, would have suspected the latter.

Sometime in the 1880's Willoughby got together the wherewithal for a trip to Victoria, the city where in the 1860's he had spent a winter and \"blowed in\" a good many thousand dollars in Cariboo gold. He probably did not cut quite such a swath during his 1880's visit but one of the things he did do was purchase a camera and a number of glass photographic plates, some of which had already been exposed and developed.

One of the exposed plates held the faint image of a distant city with towers and spires. Willoughby printed it or had it printed and asserted that it was a picture of a mirage which could be seen over Muir Glacier at high noon and only on the longest day of the year. He sold dozens of prints of the picture to tourists, even after it had been established that it was actually a very poor picture of the city of Bristol, in England. A few strangers took the Professor to task, but the locals felt that he was only fooling tourists, which was not reprehensible.

And Willoughby had his defenders. In 1889 a man named Alexander Badlam made a trip to Alaska, met Willoughby, and later published a book titled \"The Wonders of Alaska.\" Badlam thought that Willoughby himself had been the victim of a hoax. \"There is no doubt in my mind,\" he wrote, \"but that some humorist furnished the Professor with his dry plates and ran this in as a glacial joke. I have implicit confidence in the integrity of the Professor, as he is well known in Alaska as an honest man: but having left civilization thirty years or more ago, and having chosen the wilds of Alaska for his home, he has become a simple child of nature, and is recognized as such in all parts of the Territory. He has never seen a locomotive, and is as fair a sample of credulous humanity as one would meet in a lifetime, and the very man upon whom a practical joke could easily be perpetrated.\"

If Willoughby ever read Badlam's book, he must have chortled mightily.