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A young writer mentored by Dan De Quille was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who became famous under the pen name Mark Twain.
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An illustration of a mining accident from A History of the Big Bonanza, published in 1877.
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Virginia City was a boom town thanks to the Comstock Lode, a rich vein of silver being mined in the Virginia Range of mountains in western Nevada.
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The Territorial Enterprise was one of the most important newspapers in the west. Dan De Quille served as editor from 1862 to 1893. This vintage post card image shows the newspaper’s composing room.
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Dan De Quille’s greatest claim to fame was as author of A History of the Big Bonanza, which chronicled the story of the Comstock Lode silver rush. After the silver boom crashed, William Wright gave up writing and returned to his family in Iowa, where he died in 1898.
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Knox Count native William Wright became famous in the west as Dan De Quille, the editor of the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada.
Mark Twain’s connection to Knox County
