The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West Nicolas S. Witschi The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West. Ed. Lawrence I. Berkove. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2006. xiv + 394 pp. Cloth, $39.95 ; paper, $19.95. Beginning in the 1860s and lasting for roughly four decades, an unexpected but highly influential literary movement arose along the far-flung edge of Nevada's Great Basin desert where it meets the Sierra Nevada. Or so the story goes. Loosely defined by the inventive, often satirical writings of a motley group of journalists, memoirists, and fiction writers, this so-called Sagebrush School (first labeled as such in the 1890s) is most frequently invoked whenever the antecedents of and early influences on Samuel Clemens come under discussion. And yet relatively little is known about the actual writings of those who worked in Virginia City and its environs. Lawrence I. Berkove's new anthology admirably redresses this shortcoming, presenting for the first time in half a century an up-to-date, well-researched, and engaging collection that surveys the literary production of the place that first saw the name of Mark Twain in print. Familiar gems such as Twain's "A Bloody Massacre Near Carson" and Dan De Quille's "Solar Armor" are included. Also present are lesser-known but equally compelling pieces such as Sam Davis' "Typographical Howitzer," which imagines Twain and De Quille's launching of racks of typeset prose and poetry from a cannon to repel a group of "unlettered" marauders; Rollin M. Daggett's moving recollection in "My French Friend" of the emotional costs of the mining life; Joseph T. Goodman's charmingly evasive "That Affair at Pollard's"; and the latter author's measured and partially sympathetic telling of the tale of Conrad Wiegand, the scandal-ruined and ultimately suicidal assayer whom Twain had mercilessly skewered in appendix C of Roughing It. In an introduction that is sure to renew discussion about how one might define literary regionalism, Berkove offers a taxonomy of sagebrush literature's defining characteristics: it "tends to favor personal narrative"; it is "thoughtfully moral," even philosophical at times, and "manifests a fierce love of the Nevada experience"; and it reflects its contributors' complete mastery "of both formal and informal style," of both classical literary techniques and the more vernacular style of an emerging regionalist movement. Above all, "the Sagebrush authors did not invent the literary hoax, but they [End Page 87] did nurture it into a high art." Thus, the anthology opens with a section on "Humor and Hoaxes," which, given the familiar but hardly isolated examples of Twain and De Quille, certainly represents a central defining characteristic of late-nineteenth-century Nevada literature. This longest and most entertaining section is followed by "Short Fiction," "Memoirs," "Nonfiction," a handful of letters, and "Poetry," each with a separate introduction in which Berkove further glosses the distinguishing features of Sagebrush writing. As a whole the anthology favors a broadly introductory or survey model and thereby avoids making a more explicit entry into recent debates about literary regionalism's ideological functions and transnational contexts. Nevertheless, at the core of this book lies an assumption about the necessity of identifying the formal and thematic terms by which readers might discern and describe the literature of a specific region, an idea that is still very much worth debating. Moreover, Berkove's selection of texts affords readers the opportunity to assess the cultural impact of one of America's earliest instances of massively mechanized and dehumanizing modernization. Despite being subtitled "Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West," it could just as easily be described as a collection of literature from the new industrial blast furnace. The inclusion in the "Nonfiction" section of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's "The Pah-Utes," published in the Californian in 1882 and the anthology's only woman-authored piece, raises a question too important to ignore: are there other women writers from this place and period whose works have thus far been overlooked or are still awaiting discovery? The California Gold Rush era had legions of women contributors to local periodicals and women authors...