Silver Saga

CITY OF ILLUSION--Vardis Fisher--Harper ($2.50).

Around the time of the Civil War, Nevada's Virginia City, site of the fabulous Comstock Lode, was the wildest, hell-roaringest mining town in the world. Men who arrived haggard, filthy and penniless soon made thousands of dollars a week from the blue-black silver ore, gorged themselves on oysters, caviar, champagne. The streets thundered all night with brawling, boozing, wenching. Sam Brown, one of the first "bad men" of the old West, literally carved a man to pieces with his bowie knife, went to sleep on a table while his awed companions collected and removed the fragments. In the opera house, fights between bulldogs and wildcats alternated with Eastern stage celebrities, including famed, dark-haired Adah Isaacs Menken, strapped half-clad to the back of a horse.

There was loud-mouthed Henry Comstock, called "Old Pancake" because he practically lived on flapjacks. There were Eilley and Lemuel Sanford ("Sandy") Bowers, she a boardinghouse keeper, he an illiterate mule skinner. They had a 20-ft. claim on the richest part of the lode, and at one time were taking $18,000 a week out of it. They built a mansion with solid silver doorknobs, made a trip to Europe to get furniture, tried to get an interview with Queen Victoria.

For Author Vardis Fisher, long somberly enraptured (in Children of God, etc.) with the whole sprawling, patternless vigor of U.S. westward expansion, Virginia City and its characters are tasty raw meat. But City of Illusion is written as a novel, and in it Author Fisher has recaptured the vitality of U.S. legend as well as U.S. history.

Central figures are Eilley and Sandy Bowers. Regional history says they were admirable people, but in City of Illusion they are more like monsters--she a driving shrew, he a small, henpecked caricature of pathos. Eilley knows she is going to get rich, and when she is rich she enjoys it. But Sandy is miserable in his fine clothes and fine house, goes off to live in a shack. After Sandy dies of tuberculosis, Eilley loses both her mine and her mansion, ekes out a living taking fees as a "clairvoyant." But adversity alters her iron soul not a whit.

"What would you do," a friend asked, "if you had two hundred and fifty million dollars?"

"I'd spend it," said Eilley.

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