Sun Mountain, A Comstock Memoir

''There had never been a place like the Comstock or a city like Virginia or a gathering of brilliant men such as those who assembled there.'' So writes Henry Stoddard in Richard Wheeler's novel-as-memoir of Virginia City, the fabled Golconda of Nevada, the most spectacular boomtown ever seen in the American West.

Drawn to the fabled town and its Comstock Lode as a youth in the early 1860s, Henry Stoddard witnessed its two-decade rise and fall as a writer for the town's daily newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise. As such, he came to know everyone who made the town--as well as those who were made by it. Among his acquaintances were Sam Clemens, who prospered in Virginia City as a reporter for the Enterprise and transformed himself into Mark Twain; a Quaker named William Wright who wrote comic sketches under the name of Dan De Quille; mining titans such as John Mackay and James Fair; and bankers such as Darius Ogden Mills, William Ralston, and William Sharon.

In addition to these glittering figures, Stoddard introduces us to the men who went down into the bowels of the earth to wrest the riches from it--the Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and Chinese miners working in the hellish heat for four dollars a week; the soiled doves and saloon habitues, the orators, politicians, actors, and other luminaries who came to the town and added an indelible dimension to it.

Henry Stoddard is fictitious. The story, however, is true--perhaps the most astonishing true story of the American West.