Thanks, Kevin. As usual, an excellent bit of guidance and a helpful
eye-opener.
On Sep 28, 2015 9:23 AM, "Barbara Schmidt" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac
> Donnell.
> ~~~~~
>
> 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.
>
> Many books reviewed on the Forum are available at discounted prices from
> the TwainWeb Bookstore, and purchases from this site generate commissions
> that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit <http://www.twainweb.net
> >.
>
> 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 This review may not be published or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.
>