Dan DeQuille
He was best known for his written accounts of the people, events, and silver mining operations on the Comstock Lode at Virginia City, Nevada, including his non-fiction book History of the Big Bonanza (American Publishing Company, 1876).
Highly regarded for his knowledge of silver mining techniques and his ability to explain them in simple terms, he was also appreciated for his humor, similar in style to that of his associate and friend Mark Twain, and of a type very popular in the United States at that time, now referred to as the Sagebrush School literary genre.
His original intent was to write a small book which could be sold to overland train passengers and to continue expanding it with new information and additional sketches until it eventually became a volume which could be published for a broader audience.
Under Twain's mentorship during the summer of 1875, DeQuille pieced together a sizable volume which contained a mixture of technical chapters on silver mining interspersed with lighter accounts of Nevada events and individuals, including the Northern Paiute group of Native Americans living in the vicinity.
As a journalist and author Dan DeQuille contributed significantly to Americans' understanding of the events in Nevada and the procurement of vast fortunes from the Comstock Lode in the late 19th century.
During Virginia City's heyday, DeQuille was one of the most widely read journalists on the Pacific Coast because of his wit coupled with his ability to explain in non-technical terms the significance of events on the Comstock Lode.
The style of humor that flourished in the United States during the latter half of the 19th century was shared by DeQuille, Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Kerr, Petroleum V. Nasby, Major Jack Downing, and most notably Mark Twain.
It has since been theorized that America's hunger for this type of humor sprang from a sort of national psychic need from the aftermath of the American Civil War, the grief over the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the hardships of industrial pioneering in the West.
The town has become a popular tourist attraction with one of its features being the building which housed the Enterprise and on display therein the desk once used by DeQuille, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and other frontier journalists.
In 1950 DeQuille was represented in an anthology of Western Americana entitled Comstock Bonanza, collected and edited by Duncan Emrich and published by Vanguard.
English professor Lawrence I. Berkove collected the best of DeQuille's works and published them in 1990 as The Fighting Horse of the Stanislaus: Stories and Essays (University of Iowa Press).
