Books: Vintage West

COMSTOCK COMMOTION: THE STORY OF THE TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE (129 pp.)—Lucius Beebe — Stanford University Press ($3.50).

Tombstone and Last Chance Gulch were sinful frontier towns, but Virginia City had nothing to be ashamed of—she could hold up her head with the worst. She had been christened with a bottle of whisky, and her intemperate citizens used to ventilate each other with six-shooters until the drafts became unbearable. At Virginia City, on Nevada’s silver-veined Comstock Lode, local mishaps and bonanzas were recorded by the Territorial Enterprise, as freewheeling and free-shooting a weekly as the U.S. has known.

In Comstock Commotion, Author Lucius Beebe tells the story of the Territorial Enterprise, which tells the story of the Comstock. Once an Improper Bostonian, Beebe has long been fascinated with the West. In 1951 he settled down in Virginia City, and soon became publisher of the Territorial Enterprise and a full-time Westerner. Now he writes of his new home town with the same purple pen he used to describe Eastern gin-mills for the New York Herald Tribune: “The saloons of Virginia City,” he rhapsodizes, “then and now the drinkingest community in all the wide, wonderful, boozy world—what profligate enchantments were not latent in the mere roll call of their names, perfumed with intimate association and Old Noble Treble Crown Whiskey! There were Pat Lynch’s Place, The Old Magnolia, The Smokery. Gentry & Crittenden’s, and the Howling Wilderness, a premises which never at any hour of the 24 betrayed the promise of commotional doings implicit in its name . . .

Yes, We Have No Bonanzas. The Territorial Enterprise was launched at Mormon Station in 1858, later settled in Virginia City, where more than 100 saloons and an annual per capita consumption of 22½ gallons of “strong waters,” one-third whisky, made it a newspaperman’s paradise. The Enterprise’s first big story was the war between Nevada’s settlers and the Piute Indians. Coverage of shootings, stabbings and embezzlements were always homey. Sample news story:

“Friday evening, about dark, a bullet entered the residence of Henry Potter, South H Street … It passed through a north window of the kitchen, showering bits of glass upon a paper which Mr. Potter was reading and into the hair of a child he was holding on his lap, then struck an iron pot standing on the stove at which Mrs. Potter was cooking, when it fell flattened into a pan in which a beefsteak was being cooked . . . Where the bullet came from was a mystery, and the Potter family hope that no one is angry at them.”

When Nevada became the Union’s 36th state, the bonanzas petered out and Virginia City became a ghost town. Its weekly’s noblest achievement probably came at news of the Union victory over the South. For three days the Enterprise published nothing, not even the victory news. Writes Author Beebe: “Its staff, from owner to the least apprentice, was dissolved in [a] universal sea of whisky …”

The Martini Oracle. Today Virginia City and the Territorial Enterprise are staging a comeback. The community (pop. 2,450) is up to 17 saloons. The newspaper is Nevada’s biggest weekly (circ. 4,900) and proudly bills itself as “Mark Twain’s Newspaper” in memory of the two years Twain spent on it as reporter, city editor and publisher. But Twain would hardly recognize his old sheet today with its florid ads for the Stork Club, Rolls-Royces, and Chicago’s Pump Room, despite the lavish use of type left over from the Gay Nineties.

Publisher Beebe and Editor Charles Clegg favor unrestricted gambling, frequent sessions with “the oracle of Martini,” and the hell with progress. And instead of “printed exhortations to THINK . . . the management of the Enterprise [strews] the editorial and business offices with cards advising the staff to

SMIRK, SNEER, CONSPIRE, PLOT, DECEIVE, GLOAT, CONNIVE, LEER and DEFAME.”

Does the paper carry a message? “When I have a message,” says Editor Clegg, quoting Humphrey Bogart, “I send for Western Union.”