The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac
Donnell.
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BOOK REVIEW

 _Before the Big Bonanza: Dan De Quille's Early Comstock Accounts_. Edited
by Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence I. Berkove. University of Missouri Press,
2015. Pp. 316. Hardback. $60.00    ISBN 978-0-8262-2038-7. Ebook: ISBN
978-0-8262-7331-4.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Kevin Mac Donnell

Copyright (c) 2015 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


It would be front-page news in the Mark Twain community if a cache of
forty-eight letters by Mark Twain, not seen in print since the 1860s, plus
two articles written during his western years, suddenly made their
appearance in a handsome book with ample footnotes, well-organized and
indexed. Admittedly, Mark Twain's friend and fellow journalist Dan De
Quille is not Mark Twain, but this book of forty-eight such letters and two
articles by De Quille should excite Twainians just the same.


Dan De Quille ("dandy quill") was the _nom de plume_ of William Wright, who
arrived in Nevada shortly before Sam Clemens. He trained the newly hired
Sam Clemens at the _Virginia City Territorial Enterprise_, and except for a
period of eight months in 1863 when he returned to Iowa (during which time
Sam filled in for him) and a stay of a few months in Hartford years later
to work on his book, he would remain in Nevada three decades after Sam
Clemens returned east as Mark Twain. De Quille came from Iowa, where young
Sam Clemens had spent some of his formative years, and like Twain he took
an interest in mining when he arrived in Nevada. Both men were autodidacts,
but unlike Twain De Quille became an expert on mining. It might surprise
some to learn that although De Quille's and Twain's writings sometimes
appeared side-by-side in newspapers, it was Dan De Quille who was generally
the better-liked of the two. His brand of humor was less aggressive than
Twain's, and raised as a Quaker, he often expressed an aversion to the
greed and violence that motivated or excited many of his colleagues. If he
did not always display Mark Twain's wit or constantly strive to be
entertaining, his reporting stands apart from much of the reportage of that
time and place for its honesty and its informative tone, and these letters
exhibit exactly those virtues.


De Quille is best-remembered for his book, _The Big Bonanza_, published by
Mark Twain's publisher in 1876 with a brief preface by Twain. That book
provides an excellent overview of the Comstock, but these letters are alive
with details about the places and events that both men experienced. Twain
and De Quille borrowed from each other, from their fellow journalists, and
from their wide reading, and some of these letters, which appeared mostly
in _The Golden Era_ and De Quille's hometown Iowa newspaper between June
1860 and the end of 1863, deal with themes Twain later developed in
_Roughing It_ and _The Gilded Age_. Twainians who read De Quille's poem,
'Old Dog Turk' will see shades of Emmeline Grangerford's poetry in
_Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_.


Although the two friends differed in their views of Mormons and food, they
were both part of the Sagebrush school of journalism, and the letters in
this book and the annotations on each letter make clear the mutual
influence they had on each other, as well as the influence of Artemus Ward
and the Phunny Phellow school of humor on both of them. Appended to these
four dozen letters are two articles written by De Quille during the same
period, one being a tour of a silver mine, and the other being a letter of
January 1862 that reflects the influence of Charles Geoffrey Leland on De
Quille's writing. Leland, like Artemus Ward, was for a time the editor of
_Vanity Fair_, the popular comic magazine where the phrase "Mark Twain" had
appeared as a proper name for the first time in print exactly one year
before.


Because this is the Mark Twain Forum, fair warning must be given: Readers
of this book might find themselves sufficiently distracted from their
fixation on Mark Twain to seek out Dan De Quille's other writings like _The
Big Bonanza_, or _Washoe Rambles_, a previous collection of letters
published in 1963, or Larry Berkove's previous collection of De Quille's
writings, _The Fighting Horse of Stanislaus_ (1990). But even if they get
no further than the present volume they will have learned a lot about both
men.