Princes of the Fourth Estate
Anyone who read the Territorial Enterprise of the early 1860s could have told you which of its two local reporters would go on to face and fortune. Mark Twain? No, Dan De Quille.
The long lost Territorial Enterprise was one of the great newspapers on the frontier West. So brilliant was its history that books have been written about it, and in one of them, Comstock Commotion, Lucius Beebe writes: “The story of the Enterprise in its early years is a story of perfect timing. Almost at the very moment that Goodman and McCarthy assumed complete ownership, it became established that the Comstock’s surface diggings and ores were actually the merest superficial traces of incalculable bonanzas which would be available for deep mining.”
The timing, of course was perfect but what made the Enterprise a great paper was its staff, and the roster of names reads like a Murderer’s Row of frontier Western journalists.
Editor Joe Goodman had been the founder of the Golden Era, a popular monthly published in San Francisco during the tumultuous years of the California gold rush. he was a practical printer, a poet of high reputation, and an accomplished duelist as he demonstrated in 1863 by shooting Tom Fitch in the knee. Fitch was the editor of the Virginia City Union.
Goodman’s partner, Denis McCarthy, ran the mechanical side of the paper and later published the Virginia Evening Chronicle for many years.
Rollin Daggett, later Congressman, and after that United States Minister to King Kalakaua of Hawaii, was Goodman’s associate editor and himself a celebrated writer. “The pen, in his hand, is like a mighty trip-hammer, which is so nicely adjusted he can, at will, strike a blow which seems like a caress, and the next moment hurl hundred-ton bows, one after another, with the quickness of lightning, and filling all the air around with fire.” That was the assessment of Judge C.C. Goodwin, himself an Enterprise editor in the 1870s who later edited the Salt Lake City Tribune for more than 20 years.
And as local reporters, Mark Twain and Dan De Quille – born William Wright in Iowa in 1829-had come west in 1857, leaving his wife and daughter behind in West Liberty, Iowa, as he tried his luck in the California gold fields. While working as a miner, he also wrote articles and sketches for magazines including the Golden Era. he came to the Comstock in 1860, settling in Silver City as a prospector, and when Joe Goodman and Denis McCarthy took over the Enterprise in 1861 he began sending them correspondence. He was hired as a local reporter that year, and by the time Sam Clemens joined the staff in the spring of 1862, Dan De Quille was already acquiring a reputation for his graceful and elaborate hoaxes, like the “Traveling Stones of Pahranagat Valley,” which inspired offers from P.T. Barnum and scholarly inquiries from Europe, and for his detailed and coign reporting on the mines.
“In those early days there were in the town many desperate characters,” De Quille later wrote, “and bloody affrays were of frequent occurrence. Sometimes while a reporter was engaged in gleaning the particulars in regard to some shooting scrape another would start (growing out of something said in regard to the first), and the news gatherer suddenly found himself in the midst of flying bullets, and had before him a battle, the particulars in regard to which he need not take at second hand.”
De Quille also recalled that in those early days “the arrival of an emigrant train was still a big event. The ‘captain’ and other leading men of the train were concerned and encouraged to relate all of interest that had happened during the journey across the plains. The train often remained encamped in the suburbs of town several days before proceeding to California, and before they left, all hands were pretty thoroughly ‘pumped.'”
When Mark Twain joined the growing Enterprise staff he was a careless, abrasive Missourian who took a reporter’s job because he preferred using a pencil to a shovel. Until February 1863, he signed himself Josh and send in correspondence from Aurora before being offered the $25-a-week job.
“I can never forget my first day’s experience as a reporter,” he wrote 10 years later in Roughing It. Among other hilarious and dumbfounding experiences he recalled that he had found some emigrant wagons going in to camp and had learned “that they had lately come through hostile Indian country and had fared rather roughly. I made the best of the item that the circumstances permitted, and felt that if I were not confined within the rigid limits by the presence of the reporters of the other papers I could add particulars that would make the article that much more interesting. However, I found one wagon that was going to California, and made some judicious inquiries of the proprietor. When I learned, through his short and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly going on and would not be int eh city the next day to make trouble, I got ahead of the other papers, for I took down his list of names and added his party to the killed and wounded. Having more scope here, I put this wagon through an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history.
“My two columns were filled. Which I read them over in the morning I felt that I had found my legitimate vocation at last. I reasoned with myself that news, and stirring news too, was what a paper needed, and I felt I was particularly endowed with the ability to furnish it. Mr. Goodman said that I was as good a reporter as Dan. I desired no higher commendation. With encouragement like that, I felt I could take my pen and murder all the emigrants on the plains if need be and the interests of the paper demanded it.”
Those two quick glimpses of the wagon trail are enough to hint at the characteristic differences in viewpoint of the reporters: De Quille’s clear, straightforward description versus Twain’s distorted and exaggerated vision.
It is easy to picture them as they sat on a winter’s night at a table in the press room, stabbing their steel-nibbed pens into a shared ink bottle, scribbling madly and bantering back and forth: 27-year-old Mark Twain, stocky and rumpled, with a bushy auburn mustache and the eyes of a wolf. Dan De Quille, 33, tall, slender, and dark, a dingy black beard and an amiable nature. As it is competed, each story is handed to the printers, whose hands fly over the type cases like trained birds, and the reporters drink beer while they wait for the proofs, each reading the other’s copy. Twain remarks that it is cold out, and DeQuille launches into an animated description of the former Enterprise building on A Street, with its simultaneous extremes of hot and cold when the stove was stoked up until it glowed cherry red i the freezing building. Everyone pulled their writing tables and type cases as close tot eh stove as they could get, and the pressmen worked with their feet wrapped in burlap gags against the biting cold.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was when the weather warmed up a little and all the snow and ice began to melt and trickle throughout he holes in the roof. He pantomimed for the grinning Twain how they had tacked strings to the ceiling at the worst of leaks to lead the dripping water over to the side of the structure away from the furniture and machinery. Sometimes there were so many, he said, that the upper part of the building looked as if it were festooned with cobwebs, the gleaming wet webs of some hideous huge spider.
When they had corrected the proofs, they shouldered their way into heavy wool coats and thundered down the stairs to the wooden sidewalk of C Street, and hurried south through the frosty night to the International Bar, where they swept in almost to applause, minor princes of the fourth estate, to drink whiskey and eat oysters in the company of prosperous men.
From the International they pushed out intuit he frozen night again and climbed Union Street to their B Street boardinghouse. There Mark stealthily helped himself to a wedge of the mince pie left out to cool int the kitchen and to four or five sticks of firewood from Tom Fitch’s wood box to heat the room he shared with Dan. Some nights they didn’t go home at all but trooped up and down the streets until dawn, sometimes with an excursion to the D Street line. Other nights they stayed on at the office, writing until breakfast, through the clatter of the thrashing presses and the chattering of the newsboys coming in at six. Mark Twain and Dan DeQuille partnered for more than a year as reporters on the Enterprise, and years later Joe Goodman remarked that if anyone had asked him at the time which of the two would emerge as a leading American literary figure, he would have answered without hesitation: Dan De Quille.
Well, we all know how that worked out. Twenty years later Mark Twain was spending his mornings in bed, propped up on silken pillows and smoking cigars the size of dynamite sticks, writing his immensely popular books, making huge investment blunders, and vacationing in Bermuda. Dan De Quille was still pondering the board sidewalks of Virginia City, drawing his $50 a week and gathering news for the Enterprise.
Until the late 1880s he was a familiar sight limping along the shabby streets of the played out city in his antiquated black cloaks and his sparse chin whiskers, an eccentric old mandarin.
Alf Doten, himself a daily reporter for the Union and later for the Enterprise before becoming editor and publisher of the Gold Hill News, kept a daily journal all his life. Dan De Quille’s name appears in it often during the 1860s, most frequently in connection with the late nights and drinking sprees. On Christmas Eve 1869, Doten noted in his journal, “Ran the News till we got it to press, then walked to Virginia and this evening ran the Enterprise, as Dan is discharged again for drunkenness.”
De Quille was rehired, and served the Enterprise more or less faithfully until 1885, when he was let go. he was employed again in 1887, and Doten’s journals again mentioned his former colleague of earlier years. April 14, 1887: “Dan De Quille got drunk again today for the first time since he has been back in his old position as local of the Enterprise.” June 23, 1887: “About 7 pm met Taggart on the street and he got me to fix up the local department of the Enterprise, Dan being too drunk- he has been drinking heavily for the last few days & other parties have had to do his work occasionally.” June 27: “Was about to getting items, but Dan was sober enough to work tonight, so I was not needed.”
June 29, 1888: “Dan on deck again.” Eventually Dan’s career evaporated, and he got on by small pension paid by a mining magnate John Mackay.
On July 14, 1897, after nearly 40 years on the Comstock, Dan De Quille went east to die. The following entry is in Alf Doten’s journal for that date. “On board the passenger train this afternoon I found Dan De Quille (William Wright), wife and daughter Lou- I had a talk with Dan during the ten minute stop – Going to West Liberty, Iowa, their old home… He never expects to come back, for he is so terribly broken down with rheumatism and used up generally that he cannot live long anyway – Is racked with it from shoulders to knees, back humped up double and is merely animated skin and bone, almost helpless – can only walk about the house a little, grasping cane with both hands – has not been able to walk down from his residence on A St., Virginia to C St. and back for nearly or quite two years – looks to be 90 years old, yet was 68 on 9th of May last – 2 months and 10 days older than I am – Promised to write me when he gets home – Poor old dear boy Dan – my most genial companion in our early Comstock reportorial days, good-bye, and i think forever personally on this earth…”
Dan De Quille died March 16th, 1898, and comparisons with his old partner and irresistible: spectacular Twain the grand success and quiet De Quille the seedy failure.
But that is not the way they ere remembered in Virginia City. Joe Farnsworth, the former state printer, now deceased, gave his youth to the Enterprise back shop in the 1890s and learned about Twain from the old timers who had known him in the early days. “From them I gathered the impression that Clemens was regarded as the prime s.o.b. of Virginia City while he was here.” Farnsworth heard Twain damned as a foul-minded, dirty talking four flusher.
“One old fellow used a phrase I remember: ‘Mark Twain had no earmuffs on when somebody was buying. He could hear a live one order a round three doors from where he was standing. But he was deaf as a post when it was his turn to shout.’
“I never heard admiration expressed for him personally by men who knew him personally,” Farnsworth said. “Everybody on staff hated Mark Twain and everybody really loved Dan De Quille. I think he was the most wonderful old man I ever knew. He couldn’t say three words to you before you were friends for life and wanted to put your arms around him.
“At the time I speak of he was poor as a church mouse. I don’t know what de did with his money, but in his old age I knew he didn’t drink at all … He was the grand old man of Virginia City and everyone in Nevada knew him by sight. I never knew a man more loved and respected.”
Judge C.C. Goodwin wrote the obituary of Dan that took more than a column on the front page of the Enterprise. In it he coined the phrase that ought to be carved on Dan’s tombstone: “He was the mot efficient and valuable man that ever wore out his life in a newspaper office.”