The Saga of the Comstock Lode
THE MAN of the MONTH
[Scribners, $3.50]
THE fascination of the Virginia City boom is that it concentrates in one place and in a short period so many American universals, and, concentrating them, makes them at once clearer and more vivid. It was, to begin with, the sublimate of all Western mining rushes: on Sun Mountain the crescendo was roared out at full orchestra, a tutti passage of incredible riches, incredible hysteria, incredible shifts and agonies of fortune. Again, the city that within seven years rose, flourished, and declined on that sagebrush slope was the precipitate of all frontier towns: in those seven years most of the incredible West exists — spectacle, hardness, wildness, intense labor, intense enjoyment, tragedy, humor, cruelty, frustration, triumph, life at white heat, the violence and beauty of the frontier effort realizing itself.
But Virginia City offers more than merely a summary of the West — it is also a spectrum of America’s mid-nineteenth-century expansion. The story of the Comstock’s development concentrates the industrial process to which the nation abandoned itself after the Civil War. If Washoe was the frontier incandescent, it was also the earliest appearance of the American Empire; and in fact the Washoe millionaire, set down in New York and Europe, first created the symbol whose usefulness has never lapsed. The story of that incredible warfare, incredible stock-jobbery and market-rigging, incredible bribery and court-buying, incredible manipulation of state and national government, incredible intrigue and alliance and betrayal, is the story in miniature of the empire that was coming to be.
The paragraphs above exhibit a compulsive use of the adjective ‘incredible.’ Well, now that the first good modern treatment of the Comstock has appeared, it is wise to notify its readers that Dr. Lyman is giving them history, not romance. The saga of the Comstock lode is incredible; it is also true. Page after page of Dr. Lyman’s book reads like a collaboration between Ned Buntline and Jules Verne. And yet it is sober, scholarly summary of plain facts. The Comstock — life, manners, and events — was that way.
It makes grand reading. Dr. Lyman was born in Virginia City and be obviously loves the country and its tradition. He has shown a lover’s care in searching out its ultimate details, and both history and literature owe him a sizable debt. In particular his sifting of Virginia newspapers, especially the immortal Enterprise, significantly enriches our knowledge of Mark Twain, Joe Goodman, a number of the millionaires, and Adah Menken. The story of the Menken, another incredibility, appeals to him and he has told it rather better than it has been told before. The inconceivable politicians also fascinate him; here at last is Bill Stewart done with gusto and conviction, a splendid portrait, of a Titan whose portrait badly needed redrawing. But his greatest care rightly goes to ‘the boys,’ the hard-rock men, Bill Stewart’s ‘poor miner,’ the boys who made the city, made the era, made the color that belongs to both. Dr. Lyman does them exact justice; they live in his pages, coarse and bewildering and thick-skinned, no doubt, but endlessly vital, endlessly real.
A fine book, the best one about Washoe since Roughing It, the only one of recent years that is worth much consideration. Dr. Lyman, to be sure, is not a literary man. His style is sometimes awkward, he sets a new high in the use of exclamation points, he has the quotation habit, he even has a habit of picking up a phrase where he finds it. That does n’t matter. Writing about the Comstock must put a strain on anyone’s self-restraint, and, whatever his style, his book has the music and color of its era. It will probably give further anguish to the frail sodality of critics, politico-economicoliterary, who regard the American frontier with abhorrence because it appears to have been neither Athens nor Utopia nor a Marxian commonwealth. Let them ache. History may have eras or areas accommodated to people with impaired nervous systems, but, if it has, the American frontier is not ope of them.
BERNARD DEVOTO