SOURCE: “The Literature of the Mining Camps,” in Updating the Literary West, Texas Christian University Press, 1997, pp. 99-116.

In the following excerpt, Berkove and Kowalewski survey the work of writers John Rollin Ridge, Alonzo Delano, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, and George Horatio Derby, maintaining that these individuals were the first to introduce the California gold rush to the American public and that they paved the way for later literary talents including Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Bret Harte.

For the world as well as America, the thrilling news that gold and silver were to be had for the taking in the West fired the imagination. The West's already mythic aura brightened anew. The demand for writing about the West grew more insistent, and the literature of the mining camps was an on-the-ground response to this market. Men and women with impressive and varied verbal talents were among...