JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Virginia City, Nevada, is a small, historic mining town of under 800 people. These days, it's mostly a tourist spot, and every year it hosts an extraordinary event - a camel race. That tradition started after a local newspaper printed a joke in the 1950s. Fil Corbitt was at this weekend's race and has this report.
FIL CORBITT, BYLINE: Virginia City, Nevada looks like a film set of the Old West. The sidewalks are wooden and the old storefronts are occupied by candy shops, souvenir emporiums and saloons. Off of the main street, at the base of a steep desert hill pocked with old mine shafts, dust whips through the fairgrounds. Joe Hendricks (ph) sits in a lawn chair between a livestock truck and a metal corral of about a dozen camels. I ask him what it feels like to ride one.
JOE HEDRICK: Well, I don't know quite how to answer that quick, what it feels like. It feels like you're on a camel.
CORBITT: Hendricks owns the camels, along with zebras and ostriches, and he brings them for the annual event. Anyone can sign up to ride them, and the jockeys kick around in the dirt behind the pens as the crowd gets ready for the first race.
KYLIE JACKSON: It felt like off-roading, where, you know, you're just going over a bunch of rocks.
CORBITT: Kylie Jackson will be racing today and rode a camel for the first time in a practice run this afternoon.
JACKSON: Owning an old truck that needs, you know, shocks replaced - I think I'm in a pretty good spot.
CORBITT: The handlers swing open the gates, and the animals dash into the arena, as the crowd claps and hollers.
UNIDENTIFIED HANDLER #1: Go, go, go.
UNIDENTIFIED HANDLER #2: Abu (ph), Run. Run. Run, Abu.
CORBITT: The origin of this race dates back to the 1950s, when the editor of the local newspaper, Bob Richards, was nursing a hangover at The Delta Saloon. He later recounted that he and the bartender were randomly joking about some nonexistent Labor Day camel races. When he went back to the paper, called the Territorial Enterprise, he found that he had space to fill and decided to write a joke story about the fictional race.
RICHARD MORENO: It was really kind of an inside joke. A year later, he did it again.
CORBITT: That's Richard Moreno, who researched the event for his book, "Frontier Fake News," about Nevada's history of journalistic hoaxes. He says this kind of fictional story was nothing new for the paper.
MORENO: The Enterprise, I think, deserves kind of a special place in history because it's the first place where Sam Clemens used the pen name Mark Twain.
CORBITT: He and his fellow journalists became known for their exaggerated missives.
MORENO: They decided to entertain themselves and their readership by making stories up.
CORBITT: When Richards wrote about the origins of the Labor Day camel race, he pointed to Twain in that history. For several years, the Enterprise carried on the joke by running stories about the nonexistent race. And then, in 1960, the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle had an idea.
MORENO: He called up Bob Richards and said, what if I bring camels?
CORBITT: The race finally happened, and the front page of the Territorial Enterprise said that the town was a joyous madhouse.
MORENO: And so that was the roots of the camel races - came out of this hoax that then grew into an event that has now turned into an annual celebration of Virginia City history.
(SOUNDBITE OF BUGLE CALL)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF GATES OPENING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Oh.
CORBITT: Back at the race, the gates open, and Jackson hangs on tight.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL CHIMING)
CORBITT: She's out in front for the first half, but her camel slows down, and a rival beats her to the finish line.
JACKSON: Dude, my whole body is like, what?
CORBITT: It seemed that she had little say in the animal's speed.
JACKSON: I tried to be like, let's go. Come on. You know, give it a good pep talk, but I don't think they care about any of that.
CORBITT: As we talk, the handlers lead the camels into the chutes and prepare for the next race.
(SOUNDBITE OF BUGLE CALL)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah.
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Whoa, ho-ho.
CORBITT: What began as a joke 70 years ago between a bartender and a hungover journalist became a hoax in the newspaper, then became reality. Bob Richards lied the thing right into existence.
For NPR News, I'm Fil Corbitt in Virginia City, Nevada.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMMON SONG, "GO!") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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