Why does the literature of mining attract so little scholarly attention? wonders Janet Floyd in the introduction to Claims and Speculations: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age. One reason may be that literary historians expect late nineteenth-century mining texts to conform to realist forms and conventions, while in fact the “lore, texts, and images” of mining are “not generally documentary in style or intention” (6). Floyd juxtaposes romances, poetry, and travelogue against folklore, humor, and naturalist fiction, and working-class against bourgeois voices, to demonstrate that the literature of mining in the Gilded Age exceeds the boundaries of literary movement or genre.

Alert to class differences and global patterns, Floyd argues that no single story can represent an industry that “involved both experienced and inexperienced actors as well as dramatically different types of activity above and below ground” (5). The title chapter, “Claims and Speculations,” introduces variation as a theme by contrasting the debased, virtually enslaved miners of Zola and Norris with folklore that dignified the work of men and ritualized their fears. Five additional chapters are organized primarily by topic, and secondarily by place. Chapters 2 and 3 explore satirists and humorists who “address the fragile surfaces and assumptions shaping mining worlds” (73). Sources for these chapters come chiefly from California and Nevada, with one excursion to South Africa. Chapter 4 addresses the way romance as a genre handled the “contradictions” of mining (75). The chapter with the widest geographic range, “Sex Work,” shows that mining was imagined as a backdrop for both conventional and liberatory discourses of sex and gender. The book ends with “the last rush westward in North America,” the Klondike, whose representation as a “poor man's rush” (110–11) Floyd calls into question.

Some limitations are necessary for a slender study so broad in its geographic, generic, and topical range. Claims and Speculations does not, for the most part, attempt new archival discoveries, but draws mostly from reprints and anthologies of mining texts and lore. This may explain why indigenous voices are virtually absent from a study that takes diversity as a central principle. Another choice is to subordinate individual authors to broader topics. So analyses of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Jack London, and others rest on a small selection of stories and excerpts.

Although Claims and Speculations does not set out to revise our understanding of individual authors, the process of reading mining texts in unusual combinations leads Floyd to some valuable new insights, especially about writers associated with sentiment, romance, and melodrama. Dismissing those who would call Bret Harte a “shallow” writer, she finds him instead a critic of shallow mining society, as valuable and valid an interpreter of the Gold Rush as Louise Clappe, with whom he is sometimes compared unfavorably (48–52). The Leadville romances of Mary Hallock Foote, Floyd argues in another chapter, are both true to the legal experience of westerners in mining communities and influenced by Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics – at once romantic and realistic. Besides those already mentioned, authors receiving at least brief attention in the volume include Ambrose Bierce, Hamlin Garland, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Service, Dan DeQuille, and others.

The book's commitment to juxtaposition and breadth does not serve every chapter argument equally well. I found the chapter on Nevada humor least satisfying because of the brevity with which it distinguishes between genres of humor and mining “news” (60) – genres by no means stable in Nevada journalism – and because of the difficulty in sorting material evidence from exaggeration and hoax. A contemporary accusation that Washoe journalists accepted bribes may have truth to it, Floyd acknowledges in a footnote, or it may not; nonetheless, she includes the accusation in a paragraph of evidence of “insider benefits” for mining journalists (58). The Nevada chapter is strong in its selection of humorous squibs and anecdotes that thematize hoaxes and lies, but whether Washoe journalists were “insiders” who wrote differentially about their knowledge in particular genres remains a matter of uncertainty.

Still, the book succeeds in its broadest arguments. Floyd acknowledges that the ground she traverses is “fraught with difficulties of definition and unclear relationships”; her choice is to privilege “different modes of expression” rather than to solve problems of definition and genre (7). As an enticement for more scholars to take seriously the variety of writing surrounding the late nineteenth-century global industry of mining, the book is abundantly successful. Its brisk, readable prose and compelling excerpts offer an engaging read from cover to cover. Most provocatively, Claims and Speculations also makes a case for dethroning realism and naturalism as the favored literary expressions of an industrializing, international economy in the late nineteenth century.