As a young miner in the California gold rush, Rollin M. Daggett settled in San Francisco and in 1852 was cofounder of the Golden Era, a literary journal that for half a century was a powerful force on the West Coast. In San Francisco's Literary Frontier (1969), Franklin Walker called the Golden Era "the most important journal ever published on the Pacific Coast." The Golden Era helped launch such writers as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Orpheus C. Kerr, and Ada Clare. Later Daggett moved to Virginia City, Nevada, where he joined former friends from the Golden Era as an editor of the West's most famous newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.

Born in 1831 in Defiance, Ohio, Rollin Mallory Daggett was orphaned at age eleven and was reared by a sister. He worked as a printer's devil on the Defiance Democrat until 1849, when he was...