This Wikipedia article seems oddly written to me? The original story about the "great horse manure crisis of 1894" seems to have no known basis in historical re

This Wikipedia article seems oddly written to me? The original story about the "great horse manure crisis of 1894" seems to have no known basis in historical record, but the Wikipedia article is written in such a way that this part is sort of obscured. Someone quickly reading through it might be under the impression that the claimed 1898 meeting was poorly documented or something, but going to the cited pieces it's much more fundamental than that. Reading through everything I get a kind of playful feeling about a lot of it, that it's all a sort of humorous, satirical way of making an important point, but this seems lost in the Wikipedia entry. I'm not sure why I'm fixated on it... maybe I'm having trouble figuring out if the crisis itself or the backstory to the story is of main interest?