Sun Mountain

"There had never been a place like the Comstock or a city like Virginia or a gathering of brilliant men such as those who assembled there." So writes Henry Stoddard in Richard Wheeler's unforgettable novel-as-memoir of Virginia City, the most spectacular boomtown ever seen in the West.

Drawn to fabled Virginia City and its Comstock Lode in the early 1860s, journalist Henry Stoddard brushed shoulders with mining titans, speculators, and bankers -the people who built fortunes from the amazing mines--as well as the men who went down into the bowels of the earth to wrest the riches from it, working in the hellish heat for $4 a week
Also among Stoddard's acquaintances was a young Missourian named Sam Clemens, who prospered in Virginia City as a reporter for the Enterprise and would later transform himself into Mark Twain

Henry Stoddard is fictional; the story, however, is true, perhaps the most astonishing true story of the American West.