The Fighting Horse of the Stanislaus: Stories and Essays by Dan De Quille
ISBN: 9781587290138
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Iowa Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Western stories; West (U.S.) -- Sociallife and customs;

Tongue-Oil Timothy, as unflappable as he is unconscionable, swindles Wasatch Sam in a villainous poker game. Amazed prospectors discover a full-grown silver man deep in a mountain tunnel. Old Pizen, a horse so mean that he was almost poison to himself, is wagered by his own owner in the fight of his life. The travelling stones of Pahranagat, when scattered about the ground, immediately huddle together like eggs in a nest. Highly eccentric but shrewd, itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow raises the devil. A cheery voiced goblin frog points the way toward the great Comstack silver lode. These tongue-in-cheek creations join Bendix Biargo, the Seven Nimrods of the Sierras, a Female World-Ranger, and Dan De Quille's other unforgettable characters to make the pioneers and Comstockers come alive once more.


Dan De Quille (1829-1898), who lived in Virginia City, Nevada, for most of his forty-year career, was a nationally recognized author and journalist who along with his friend and colleague Mark Twain helped create a distinctively American brand of humor. The most talented Far West humorist of his time--he specialized in manufacturing scientific hoaxes--De Quille also superbly recorded the epic personalities and exploits of the first generation of western prospectors and settlers. In this defninitive anthology, Lawrence Berkove has carefully selected works that reveal anew De Quille's sympathetic yet biting talent, which captured western America in legends, folklore, and unique and enduring humor.
Lawrence Berkove is a professor of English and director of the American Studies Program at the University of Michigan- Dearborn. He has published widely on American authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, expecially Bierce, Twain and De Quille.
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