West Liberty History 1838-1938

Source: One Hundred Years of History
* Commemorating a Century of Progress in the West Liberty Community * WEST LIBERTY, IOWA
"DAN de QUILLE"

(Bio for William Wright)

Journalist, Author, Humorist

William Wright, contemporary of Mark Twain, better known by his pen name, Dan de Quille, was an early settler of West Liberty, coming here from Ohio in 1850. He was born in Knox county, Ohio in 1829. His father Paxson Wright was a Quaker and his mother Lucinda Markley Wright a Presbyterian. In 1850, with his widowed mother and her nine children, he came to Iowa and settled on the farm which his father had bought and which is now the farm owned by Ted Arp. He married Caroline Coleman of Lexington, Ohio in 1853 and they lived in a log cabin on a farm that is now part of the Fenstermaker farm but was then called "Elm Grove." Here were born four children " Alice, Mell, Lura, and Paxson.

In 1860, "Dan" went to Virginia City, Nevada, leaving his family in Iowa where the children would have better advantages than were possible in that rough mining town. The high tide struck the Comstock in the seventies. In 1870 stock in the Belcher mine went begging at one dollar a share, in 1872, it was worth $ 1525. Those were the days when stock quotations were posted every hour, and when the miners came up out of the shafts they rushed to the bulletin boards to see how much money they had made while under ground. In 1873 the greatest discovery of all was found in the Consolidated Virginia Mines at a point below the 1100 foot level. It was called the Big Bonanza. This body of ore was from 600 to 700 feet long, 350 feet wide and from 200 to 300 feet high and according to Dan de Quille "was of such extraordinary and astonishing richness that experts could hardly believe their eyes, or assayers their figures."

Dan was a good deal of a geologist and something of a minerologist, and studied the Comstock from the surface to below the 3000 level. He was always writing dissertations on the lode and its formations and when Mr. Goodman moved the Enterprise to Virginia City, Dan became a regular contributor, which culminated in a few months in his becoming one of the staff of the paper. Then for more than thirty years he was in full evidence in the columns of that Journal. Without him the paper would have been an automobile with a punctured tire.

He was down in the mine every day at first, and could the files of the Enterprise have been saved, his articles taken out and arranged with proper dates, would make a complete and fascinating history of the great lode from the first. Moreover what he wrote everyone believed implicitly. This or that expert might make a report and men would say, "He may have been mistaken," but everyone believed Dan.

His work was not confined to the mines. It covered everything; he was a mining reporter, local reporter and when late at night, his regular work was finished, he would write away until after daylight on some droll story or some scientific theme.

His "solar armor" story was one of his best. It was an invention intended to neutralize the excessive heat of the summer. It was called "a solar armor." It was a suit of India rubber that a man could put on, but within it was a compact air compressor attached to which was a pocket battery to run it. When the wearer found it was growing too warm he had to but touch a button to set the comprossor going and when sufficiently cooled he could touch another button and shut off the power.

At last, according to Dan, when the inventor got all ready, he put on the armor and started across Death Valley one afternoon when the thermometer marked 117 degrees in the shade and went out of sight in the sun. When he did not return the next morning, an exploring party started out to try and find traces of him. Out four or five miles in the desert, they found the man's body. He had started the apparatus evidently but could not stop it and it had frozen him to death. The machine was still running when the body was found and an icicle eighteen inches long was pendant from the nose of the dead man.

About a month after the story was published Dan received a London Times one morning containing a marked article that filled two or three columns of that ponderous publication. Some writer had read his story, accepted it as true, endorsed the principal and elaborated upon it; could the government see its way clear to supply the British soldiers in India and other hot countries with the armor. Dan read it through, and with a blue pencil drew a line around the article and connected the two ends with a pencil sketch of a hoodlum looking at some far away object, and the figure had his right thumb to his nose wiggling. He put the paper in a wrapper and directed it to the Scientific Writer, care of the Times, London, England. But all that day he wore such a look as Dr. Holmes must have worn after writing that poem in which he promised never more to " write as funny as I can."

He took one summer off and wrote his book. "The Great Bonanza," which is a true story of the Comstock up to 1875.

"He was one odf the most efficient and valuable men who ever wore out his life in a newspaper office. He was above both bribes or bluffs; no man could ever corrupt him; no man could ever scare him. He made no pretentions but every day he followed his duty as God gave him to see it."

---C. C. Goodwin---in "As I Remember Them".
Dan was at his desk one day when Samuel Clemens, later known as Mark Twain, applied for a position. Chiefly because Dan was planning to go back to Iowa to visit his family, Clemens was engaged. Dan took him around to his boarding house, they became roommates and thus began a close friendship which lasted through the years.

He returned to West Liberty in 1897, died the following year and is buried in Oakridge cemetery.

By Irma Morris

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