Claims and Speculations: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age

3. Knowing the Mines “Interiorly”

54 Chapter Three Knowing the Mines “Interiorly” Y / This chapter takes as its focus the print culture of Nevada in the “silver age” and the journalism of writers such as Dan De Quille, James Gally, Fred H. Hart, Joe Goodman, James Townsend, and, most famously, Mark Twain.1 This is a body of work, usually gathered together under the name of Sagebrush writing, which responded with an easily recognized and consistent cynicism to the life of the silver mining region of Nevada, a space known variously as Washoe, the Comstock, or by reference to its biggest center , Virginia City.2 During the 1860s and 1870s, the silver mines in Nevada were, as Bernard DeVoto (1932) writes, “a spectacle” (133): extraordinary and paradigm-shifting in industrial terms, in terms of the wealth they produced, and in the raucous, violent social worlds they generated.3 The newspapers that the Sagebrush writers filled with their reports, stories, squibs, and hoaxes were, in consequence, read locally, nationally, and internationally for news of prospects and their progress. What I am interested in addressing here is these writers’ approach to writing mining, given their direct involvement in the industry. Twain claimed that he knew the mines “interiorly”: “I know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte knows them exteriorly.”4 The thrust of Twain’s Knowing the Mines “Interiorly” 55 point here was, as so often, the denigration of Harte, but his comment frames my discussion here. Insofar as the Sagebrush journalists were “insiders” to the industry, as I shall argue they were, how is that position and knowledge made manifest in their writing? I want to argue that their difficult position was shaped by censorship (including self-censorship), and as a result, their work displays a peculiar evasiveness with respect to the conflictual industrial setting of Nevada. Their insider status, in short, precluded the writing of material that did justice, broadly or in specific terms, to the mining industry or the experience of those who worked in it. Mark Twain’s involvement in this scene can loom very large, with Dan De Quille usually in attendance as his first mentor and Virginia City crony. Indeed, much of what we know about the print culture of the region has been gleaned by scholars of Twain. His fellow Sagebrush writers, meanwhile, have become obscure, to the point that, without the research of Lawrence I. Berkove, Richard A. Dwyer, and Richard E. Lingenfelter, most of the Sagebrushers would do no more than fill the lists of writers associated with Virginia City in its boom years, or provide a supporting cast in the opening act of Twain’s brilliant career.5 In this chapter, however, Twain’s writing takes its place alongside his fellow journalists’, not only because his work, over the few months when he was first publishing in Virginia City, was very similar to his colleagues’, but also because my interest here is in the shared situation of a group of writers deeply engaged in the mining cultures of Nevada: in the mines, in the leisure industries surrounding the mines, and in the vernacular culture of incoming migrants. Scholarship has given us a clear answer to the question about where these journalists stand with respect to Nevada and its silver industry: they occupy it as a remote frontier, a zone of freedom and undomesticated homosociality.6 The anthology of their work prepared by Duncan Emrich in 1950, Comstock Bonanza, celebrates their involvement as an “intricate fraternity” of young journalists in a highly democratic experience. For Emrich and others interested in the lore of the American West, their work formed part of local and regional culture: “something for the whole camp to laugh over” (xiv). Much more recently, Lawrence I. Berkove (2006) has also drawn on the language of frontiercomradeship,thoughhepositionsthe“fun”againstamuchgrimmer, more problematic space in which “almost anything could be done without regard to long term consequences to the environment or to population centers , because the land seemed empty and communities were disposable” (3). Chapter Three 56 Thesejournalistsare,forBerkove,“literallyfrontiersmen,”livingbytheirwits in an environment of laisser-faire, and developing their writing in the “virile ,” collaborative world of the newspaper office, rather than the introspective spaces of reading and study.7 These, then, are the circumstances, along with the magnificent but challenging landscape, that are argued to form the sources of an edgy and “pungent” body of satirical writing that attacks...