I'm
finding myself more and more fascinated with history the older I get.
Maybe part of the fascination has to do with the fact that events I
lived through, heard on the news, read in the newspaper or saw with
my own eyes, have since become history. Looking at what is now
history that was once part of my life gives my imagination a boost to
move further back, to see events before my time differently than I
saw them when I studied history in school. The context of living
extends perspective in a way that reading about events as an
inexperienced youngster never could.
Now,
if the histories had been written by Richard Wheeler it might have
been different. A masterful writer of historical fiction, Wheeler
creates an illusion for the reader to feel he or she is in fact
viewing events as they happened. The period in Sun Mountain
was the last third of the 19th
century during the silver/gold mining boom and bust of Virginia City,
Nevada.
The
novel unfolds as the memoir of a fictional character—Henry
Stoddard—but involves many actual people, including the young
Samuel Clemens and other newsmen at the Territorial
Enterprise. The
newspaper gave Stoddard, one of its reporters, an ideal platform to
observe the wild and fascinating milieu and personalities of the
mining community made famous worldwide as The Comstock Lode.
 |
| Richard S. Wheeler |
With
this highly personalized device Wheeler spoons out his vast knowledge
of the mining industry, the customs of the day and events great and
small, locally, regionally and beyond in such vivid detail he held me
spellbound throughout the story.
Had
Sun
Mountain
been part of a course when I was in high school or even college I
might have become a history buff much much sooner.
