Virginia City ― To Dance With the Devil

Where else but in Virginia City could a penniless Irish miner in a few short years amass a fortune greater than any of America’s robber barons, simply by dint of hard work and intuition, and remain a humble, caring human being? Here as well Mark Twain discovered and honed his comic voice, and notorious badman Sam Brown was lined with lead, with a coroner’s jury concluding, “It served him right.” Here also Julia Bulette, a kindly harlot beloved of the city’s firemen, was the toast of a rowdy Fourth of July parade. In Virginia City mines, men plunged into the scalding, hazardous heart of the earth, tantamount to partnering with hell’s dread demon, so that they could enjoy five Shakespeare companies performing at once, food rivaling Delmonico’s in New York, and frocks ordered directly from Paris that could be worn in this barren, windswept middle of nowhere. Virginia City’s twenty turbulent bonanza years—what a time it was!

Documentary filmmaker and award-winning author Nicholas Clapp has explored, filmed, and written about the deserts of the world. In Arabia, he led an expedition that discovered and unearthed the lost city of Ubar, celebrated in both the Bible and the Arabian Nights. Closer to home, he has written about and roamed the deserts of the American West, with particular interest in the history of mining camps. His grandfather Daniel was a miner and when Nick was 12, he tagged along on a shift working at the 800-foot level in the same mine where his grandfather later died in an underground accident. His great uncle George was the proprietor of a minstrel show touring mining camps, and Hannah Clapp was an 1850s Nevada schoolmarm. It was only natural then, that Nick, along with his wife Bonnie, was drawn to Virginia City and a quest to recount and graphically illustrate the day-in, day-out story—and excitement—of a ramshackle desert settlement destined to become the richest place on earth during its boom years.