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William Wright, Dan DeQuille
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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.
Wright was born in 1829 on a farm
in Ohio, to Quaker parents. At eighteen he moved with his family
to West Liberty, Iowa. There he married, fathered five children, and published
his first literary productions in local newspapers and the Knickerbocker Magazine, a respected periodical published in New
York.
In 1857, Wright went alone to California to prospect for gold. He was not noticeably successful and,
in 1860, went to Nevada, where gold and silver had been discovered on the Comstock Lode.
He was not successful mining there either, but the articles and sketches he
wrote and published in various regional periodicals such as the Golden Era, San Francisco's
distinguished literary magazine, came to the attention of Joseph Thompson
Goodman and Denis McCarthy, co-owners of the Territorial Enterprise. They hired him as a reporter in 1861, just
as that newspaper was on the verge of becoming the most important paper on the
West Coast.
Wright had been experimenting with
various pen names, but when he hit upon Dan De Quille, it stuck, and soon
all but replaced his true name. De Quille quickly became the most
prestigious reporter on the paper. He emerged as an authority on mining, and
fellow journalists admired his ability to cover the beat of local news.
In addition to journalism,
De Quille began a second career writing humorous sketches and works of
short fiction. He published some of these in the Golden Era while others became features in the Enterprise. Especially popular were the subtle and entertaining
hoaxes he called " quaints" and passed off as news stories in the paper. They
consisted of embellishments of impossible or absurd stories with plausible
detail until credulous readers fell for it. For example, he invented a story
about blind fish found in the scalding water at the deep levels of Comstock
mines that died of cold when brought to the surface and put in fresh
water.
A classic quaint describes how an
inventor devised "solar armor," a contraption like a diving suit with an air
conditioning unit attached that would enable a man to walk in comfort even in
the hottest and most oppressive climate. According to De Quille, the inventor
tested it by attempting to cross Death
Valley in the summer. When he did
not reach the other side, a search party found him frozen to death with an
icicle more than a foot long hanging from his nose. His machine had been too
successful, and he had been unable to turn it off.
Another noteworthy quaint was
"The Traveling Stones of Pahranagat," about some magnetic stones that,
when scattered, arranged themselves in a circle, the last one jumping into the
center. P. T. Barnum reputedly offered De Quille $10,000 if he would bring
the stones to him. This story was remarkable for having been developed in three
stages, in 1865 or 1866, 1872 and, finally, 1892. It was so convincing that even
when De Quille admitted publicly that it was a hoax, readers ignored him
and continued to believe in the account.
After Mark Twain was hired on at
the Enterprise in 1862, he and De Quille became close friends and roommates.
As such, they wrote spoofing news stories about each other, which delighted
Comstockers. In 1864, however, Twain left Virginia City
for California and started his rise to fame. De Quille remained on
the Comstock and was privately puzzled and hurt that Twain was being celebrated
while he remained largely unknown beyond the West Coast. Part of the reason for
this was that Twain actively promoted himself and published books, whereas
De Quille, almost diffidently, did not.
In 1875, influential financiers
pressured De Quille to write a book about the Big Bonanza, a recent,
spectacular mining strike. Unable to resist the pressure, De Quille
dropped plans to publish a collection of his writing and began the book, but
turned to alcohol for solace. He contacted Twain, who invited him to come to Hartford to do his writing. The friendship between the two men cooled
somewhat in Hartford. In 1876, De Quille finished the book, The Big Bonanza. It is a classic account
of the Comstock Lode, and has seldom been out of print, but its sales were
disappointing.
When De Quille returned to Virginia City,
his alcoholism incapacitated him until even his good friend, Joe Goodman, laid
him off from the Enterprise. The shock, paradoxically, was beneficial. He overcame his
alcoholism, undertook a weekly column for the Salt Lake City Daily Tribune, owned by his friend C. C. Goodwin,
and began writing short stories and freelancing them around the country, at
last achieving a national reputation. Many of these stories are of very high
quality, and especially sensitive to psychological and moral issues.
From 1893 to 1897 his health
declined and De Quille, as if sensing the end, turned to writing novellas,
composing them so quickly that he did not even take time to place them with a
publisher. Four of them have since been published: Dives and Lazarus (1988), "Pahnenit, Prince of the Land of Lakes" (1988), Gnomes of
the Dead Rivers (1990), and The Sorceress of Attu (1994). Toward the end
of 1897, crippled from arthritis, tired and "used up," he returned to West Liberty
at the home of a daughter. John Mackay, the "silver king" who was also De Quille's
good friend, gave him a pension. Several months later, he passed away.
In recent years, De Quille's work
has been rediscovered and reprinted in book form, a goal he failed to
accomplish in his lifetime. It is now apparent that he was one of the Old West's
most accomplished authors, ranking just behind Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Bret
Harte. |
Suggested Reading:Ronald M. James. The Roar and the Silence: A History of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998. William Wright (Dan De Quille). The Big Bonanza: An Authentic Account of the Discovery, History, and working of the World-Renowned Comstock lode of Nevada. Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1876. William (Dan DeQuille) Wright. The Big Bonanza. 1876. Reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. Richard A. Dwyer and Richard E. Lingenfelter. Dan De Quille the Washoe Giant: A Biography and Anthology. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1990. Lawrence I. Berkove. Dan De Quille. Boise State University Western Writers Series, No. 136. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1999. Lawrence Berkove
Ronald James Last Updated: 2007-02-01 19:11:10
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