Insider Stories of the Comstock Lode and Nevada’s Mining Frontier, 1859–1909 ed. by Lawrence I. Berkove (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s 3 2 5 interpretation and bridge pieces by the author. The section on film, “The Reel West,” provides insightful and accessible essays, both critical and historical, by Thomas Schatz and Richard Slotkin. Also included is the introduction to Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything (1993). The variety in the essay topics and discussion questions is a clear nod to academics who work to explore western mythology through multiple genres, such as film, literature, and politics. This second edition includes contributions by stalwarts of western criticism. It gives us essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Wallace Stegner, American studies professor Michael Marsden, sociologist Robert Bellah, film studies professor Thomas Schatz, and critic/historian Richard Slotkin. The essays move chronologically from an early article on American character by Frenchman Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in 1781 to discussions on the evolution of the western hero in film and conclude with a recent piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday. Momaday ties in themes from the book’s title that challenge western mythology and encourage continued reimagining of the western identity. The essays throughout this collection intertwine and reference each other, linking major concepts in western criticism and pro­ moting further scholarly exploration of the cultural choices that characterized Frost’s “gift outright.” Insider Stories of the Comstock Lode and Nevada's Mining Frontier, 1 8 5 9 -1 9 0 9 . Edited by Lawrence I. Berkove. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. 2 vols., 1076 pages, $199.95. Reviewed by Charles L. Crow Rockville, Maryland This two-volume set is a literary and historical treasure and a remarkable piece of scholarship. For many years, Lawrence I. Berkove has prospected the dusty archives of the West, recovering literature of the Comstock era of Nevada and educating the rest of us about its history and its value. During the period of the “silver age,” Nevada boomed and so did the journalism of its frontier communities, especially Virginia City. The best-known writer to emerge from this rough-and-ready era was, of course, Mark Twain, who adopted his pseud­ onym while working for The Territorial Enterprise. Western specialists, at least, also know of Dan De Quille (William Wright), Twain’s one-time colleague. Berkove’s mission, through a series of publications, most recently his Sagebrush Anthology (2006), has been to recover and promote the work of De Quille and other talented Comstock writers, including Samuel Davis, Joseph T. Goodman, Charles C. Goodwin, and Rollin Daggett. Insider Stories presents a lost and forgotten series of columns, called “By-the-Bye,” run in The Nevada Mining News in 1908 and 1909. The columns continued for a short time after this trade paper moved from Reno to New York. The Reno-based publication survives in microfilm at the University of 3 2 6 W E S T E R N A M E R IC A N L ITE R A T U R E F a l l 2 0 0 8 Nevada, but no archive of the paper’s New York successor, The Mining Financial News, has been found. However, the tireless Berkove has located, in the pos­ session of Samuel Davis’s heirs, a Mining Financial News column by Goodman about his old friend Mark Twain, written upon Clemens’s death in 1910. This column is included as a “Mark Twain Appendix” to the collection. Another remarkable appendix contains an essay written by Davis, also found among his papers, concerning the nefarious silver king and US senator from Nevada James G. Fair. This column was submitted to The Mining Financial News but was not published because, one assumes, its revelations about Fair’s involve­ ment in several murders (long suspected but never proved) were still too con­ troversial for the journal. Even in their somewhat truncated form, the “By-the-Bye” columns are an amazing cycle of work. Beginning as a response to the dedication of a statue to John Mackay, one of the Comstock tycoons, the series continues with wideranging reminiscences about the history of Nevada’s mining frontier, from the discovery of silver and the founding of Virginia City to...