The Sagebrush Anthology is a comprehensive and meticulously researched guide to the literature that blossomed largely as a consequence of the Nevada mining boom that began in the middle of the nineteenth century and was pretty much exhausted in its pretechnological form by the early years of the twentieth. Nevada – and its symbiotic relationship with the burgeoning financial centre of San Francisco – represented a microcosm of social and economic factors that characterized the West in this period: rugged individualism, massive financial speculation, tentative law enforcement, a profoundly ambivalent attitude to religion, a willingness to find humour in the darkest of circumstances, and an almost universal tendency to relegate all but the white male from centre stage.
Lawrence Berkove, whose light touch, careful selection of material and informative introductions to each chapter make this collection as much a pleasure for those with a casual interest in the “old West” as for those with research interests in this area, manages to reflect all this and more in his selections across the genres. Berkove's chapter headings offer an insight into the breadth of material: “Humor and Hoaxes,” “Short fiction,” “Memoirs,” “Nonfiction,” “Letters,” and “Poetry.”
Particularly fascinating are the large number of literary hoaxes perpetrated by an array of the principal authors featured in this collection. A splendid example is Dan De Quille's “Solar Armor,” in which De Quille claims that an inventor had created a suit so effective at cooling the body that its wearer had actually frozen to death in the noonday heat of Death Valley. The story reached as far as the Daily Telegraph in England, which was taken in to the extent that it confessed itself in need of more information before reporting the story as fact.
What is a little disappointing, however, is that there is very little analysis of why hoaxing, for example, was so prevalent in the Sagebrush School, or what lay beneath the ambivalent attitide to religion, or what created the prevailing economic and social conditions in which the school developed. Berkove notes on a number of occasions that harsh conditions bring out the best and worst in men, but the reader is left wishing for something a little more penetrating.
Berkove's principal purposes, however, are achieved here with great success: to demonstrate the influence of the Sagebrush School on Mark Twain, and to bring a neglected school to wider attention for its own sake. As Berkove argues, whilst the Sagebrush School did not scale the heights of the “American Renaissance” of a few generations earlier, there is material here that is well worthy of scrutiny in its own right.
