"The Greatest Liar on Earth"

 

(No, not the Mean Tangerine and his gang of mendacious morons.  They should remember what Dean Wormer said: "Loud and stupid is no way to go through life, son.")

John Hance was born into a family of fifteen in Tennessee in 1838.   Things did not go really well for him earlier in life.  After joining the Confederate army, he was captured, imprisoned in the awful Alton, Illinois camp but was fortunately exchanged.  He headed West with Wild Bill Hickok's brother as a teamster and scout and escaped death again after being wounded three times in brush-ups with native Americans.  

John then went prospecting, but like most, found pretty much nothing.   Did he finally give up?  Not at all -- he headed to the Grand Canyon and built a legend for himself as he became a guide and host for visitors.  Theodore Roosevelt was so amused by Hance's tall tales while exploring the trails in 1903 he bestowed that "Greatest Liar" title.   Well deserved:  two that are remembered was that he claimed to have dug the Canyon by himself, and that his horse could fly over it on top of the fog.   If he was not used by Mark Twin as a model for a character, he should have been.

John's last home was a cabin at the beginning of the Bright Angel Trail.  He was the first person interred, in 1919, in the Grand Canyon Pioneer Cemetery.  Would that we had someone like him in the news today.

  Reclusive artist Arthur Harold Beal, another endearing eccentric, left behind a more tangible legend in the form of gigantic folk art.  In 1928 he purchased a steep tract in Cambria, California, and spent the next fifty years building Nitt Witt Ridge, a sprawling "castle on the hill" using only manual tools.  It was made of wood, concrete, car parts, appliance parts, stone, cans, shells and beach debris, and supposedly parts of the nearby Hearst Castle where he is said to have worked for a time.

Neglected and vandalized for seven years after his death in the early 1990s, it was bought and opened for tours.  Today Nitt Witt Ridge is a California Historical Landmark.  So Beal finally attained some respectability and stature, things he probably could have cared less about!