Samuel Clemens

Virginia City and Gold Hill

Virginia City was known as the Queen of the Comstock, the internationally famous mining district. Founded in 1859, the settlement was the focus of a gold rush and within a year, it became the region's largest community, a status it maintained in Nevada into the 1890s. Virginia City was incorporated under the Utah Territory in 1861.

Joseph Goodman

Joseph Goodman was born in Masonville, New York in 1838. He traveled to California with his father in 1856 and secured employment with Rollin Daggett, typesetting for The Golden Era, a San Francisco literary weekly. Goodman met fellow-printer Denis McCarthy, and the two traveled to Virginia City in 1861, where they acquired interests in the Territorial Enterprise.

Comstock Mining District

In 1849 while passing through the Great Basin to California, Abner Blackburn discovered gold at the junction of Gold Canyon and the Carson River, a place eventually called Dayton. He continued on his way, but his find marked the area for future exploration. The next year, placer miners began working gold-bearing sands in Gold Canyon.

William Wright, aka Dan De Quille

Most who knew William Wright, a colleague of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) on Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise, believed that of the two, Wright was the most likely to succeed. Instead, Twain went on to achieve immediate national and international fame while Wright, nineteenth-century Nevada’s most important literary figure, slipped into obscurity until recently.

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