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Roughnecking It By Chilton Williamson Jr. Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $15.50 In 1861, after an unheroically brief stint as a Confederate irregular, the 26year-old Sam Clemens—on his way to becoming Mark Twain—left the Missouri frontier in an overland coach for Nevada. Ahead of him lay El Dorado of Hush-times Washoe, booming, violent, uniquely American, with a vitality incomprehensible to the East. Sam in the careless exuberance of his youngmanhood comprehended it, recalling in more measured years “the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings.” In the preface to Roughing It, that “record of several years of variegated vagabonding,” he wrote of “the rise, growth, and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada—a curious episode . . . that has occurred in the land and the only one, indeed, that is likely to occur in it.”

For over a century Mark Twain’s prediction held. Not until the oil shortage did such turbulent prospector days again come to the West. Then with lurid suddenness a new Oil Dorado emerged in the prehistoric Overthrust—that jagged ribbon of buckled earth-crust running from Alaska to South America, centering in Wyoming, and containing enough oil and natural-gas deposits to power the United States for five years. The rush was on. Anonymous little towns expanded like balloons and new ones sprang up almost overnight. “Most of the new men coming into Wyoming,” according to Chilton Williamson, wanderer in Mark Twain’s wagon tracks and perceptive historiographer of Oil Dorado, “were in search of high-paying jobs in the oil fields, the coal mines, the trona pits; many of them hoped to make a killing in the fantastic audacious boom towns around the state, while a few were drawn by the lure of rough untrammeled frontier life and the smell of violence.”

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Francis Russell

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Roughnecking It By Chilton Williamson Jr. Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $15.50 In 1861, after an unheroically brief stint as a Confederate irregular, the 26year-old Sam Clemens—on his way to becoming Mark Twain—left the Missouri frontier in an overland coach for Nevada. Ahead of him lay El Dorado of Hush-times Washoe, booming, violent, uniquely American, with a vitality incomprehensible to the East. Sam in the careless exuberance of his youngmanhood comprehended it, recalling in more measured years “the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings.” In the preface to Roughing It, that “record of several years of variegated vagabonding,” he wrote of “the rise, growth, and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada—a curious episode . . . that has occurred in the land and the only one, indeed, that is likely to occur in it.”

For over a century Mark Twain’s prediction held. Not until the oil shortage did such turbulent prospector days again come to the West. Then with lurid suddenness a new Oil Dorado emerged in the prehistoric Overthrust—that jagged ribbon of buckled earth-crust running from Alaska to South America, centering in Wyoming, and containing enough oil and natural-gas deposits to power the United States for five years. The rush was on. Anonymous little towns expanded like balloons and new ones sprang up almost overnight. “Most of the new men coming into Wyoming,” according to Chilton Williamson, wanderer in Mark Twain’s wagon tracks and perceptive historiographer of Oil Dorado, “were in search of high-paying jobs in the oil fields, the coal mines, the trona pits; many of them hoped to make a killing in the fantastic audacious boom towns around the state, while a few were drawn by the lure of rough untrammeled frontier life and the smell of violence.”