Born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Alfred Doten (1829-1903) sailed to California in 1849 to make his fortune in placer gold mining. Unsuccessful, he moved to Nevada in 1863 to participate in the silver boom but gravitated instead to journalism. He worked as a reporter on the Nevada newspapers: the Como Sentinel, the Virginia Daily Union, the […]
writing
Fred Hart
Fred H. Hart is an excellent but lesser-known practitioner of the western journalistic tradition of the humorous literary hoax perfected by Dan De Quille and Mark Twain. He was a miner in Austin who went east in 1868 to pursue the rich mining strikes around Hamilton. There he became a correspondent for the local newspaper, […]
Rollin Mallory Daggett
Born in New York in 1832, Rollin Daggett moved to Ohio when he was five and eventually worked there as a printer. At seventeen, Daggett became a ’49er following the dream of California gold. Failing to become rich, he joined J. Macdonough Foard in 1852 to found The Golden Era. The famed San Francisco literary […]