The Fighting Horse of the Stanislaus: Stories & Essays by Dan De Quille ed. by Lawrence I. Berkove (review)

272 WesternAmerican Literature an excellent summary of London’s life and his work, the introduction manages to avoid common inaccurate myths surrounding the author. London suffered from a variety of ailments, not just drink, and died “from stroke and heart failure, according to the most recent evidence.” His last seven years saw the production of “his best—and certainly his most original—stories.”This collec­ tion certainly does contain some of London’s most outstanding and neglected work, thus contradicting the popular one-dimensional view of him as “dog-story writer”and Klondike Kipling. The editors deserve special praise for reprinting the 1985Jack London Research Center’s limited editions of his neglected “All Gold Canyon,” ‘The Night Born,” “The Red One,” and “War,” as well as featuring his satiric masterpiece, ‘Told in the Drooling Ward.” “The Night Born”aptly combinesJungian individuation, wilderness romance, and feminist spiritual fulfillment, while “War” is appropriately described as “another littleknown gem, reminiscent of Stephen Crane in its imagistic precision and of Ambrose Bierce in its sharp irony.” The editors praise ‘Told in the Drooling Ward”in its anticipation of subjective techniques found in Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Kesey. “Samuel”reveals interesting experiments with dialect. While this edition could have included more of London’s socialist and ironic modes, it is a highly useful introduction. TONYWILLIAMS SouthernIllinois University at Carbondale The Fighting Horse of the Stanislaus: Stories & Essays by Dan De Quille. Edited by Lawrence I. Berkove. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. 257 pages, $25.00.) Those of us who have read the literature of California and Nevada from one-hundred and twenty-five years ago may very well know the name Dan De Quille. We get several snapshots of him in Franklin Walker’s San Francisco’s Literary Frontier. There, for instance, we learn that his given name was William Wright, that he was also a mining engineer in addition to being a star reporter on the boomtown newspaper Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nevada, during the richest days of Comstock lode mining. De Quille was perhaps best known for his many satires on the area; “Petrified: or, the Stewed Chicken Monster”being perhaps the most famous from a long line of such “humorous” sketches. But De Quille’s most serious problem with living in the Washoe was that other star reporter—Mark Twain. True, Clemens fairly soon decided that there would be better pickings in San Francisco, but while he went on to fame, fortune, and romance, De Quille basically got leftbehind in the dust. For a writer who lived as long and wrote as much as Dan De Quille, a surprisingly small amount of his work is in book form. True, he did author The Reviews 273 Big Bonanza (1876), still in print and still regarded as the best contemporary account of Comstock lode mining tales and shenanigans. But Dan De Quille never seemed to get around to collecting the best of his numerous short pieces. His daughter tried to do this and failed, but, almost one-hundred years after his death, Lawrence Berkove has managed to get this material carefully and pretty accurately into print. To accomplish this task, the amount of travel, released time from teaching, reviewing anonymous and suspect sources, andjust plain sheer drudgery must have been, in the parlance of today, awesome. The scholar­ ship here seems very good and very careful. The actual quality of the selections, however, is another matter. Here, one may question whether all of the time and effort of editing and introduction writing were worth the work involved. True, shorter works these days are getting more respect as these best short stories and biographical accounts deserve, but there are still a lot of problems with this book. Much of what De Quille wrote were humorous anecdotal reminiscences that only a young male would find to be quality. When De Quille gets more serious, aswith the title story, he sounds appallingly like a refried version of melodramatic Bret Harte. Most of this material, however, is certainly a leap and a bound better than Robert Service, but the incidents in the volume we can see mostly used to be funny. There are some exceptions. “Tongue...