An Editor on the Comstock Lode

New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936. First Edition. Hardcover. Near fine/very good. A very near fine first edition, with Rinehart colophon present, in a very good dust jacket. Navy blue boards with bright gilt title stamping on cover and spine. Binding is sturdy and square. pages and pastedown show mild toning, otherwise fine. Loss at crown of dust jacket and edgewear. 343 pp., including index. Octavo. Wells Drury, pioneer newspaperman and member of the Nevada House of Representatives, was born September 16, 1851 in New Boston, Illinois. Orphaned while crossing the Oregon Trail in 1852, he was adopted and brought up in Oregon on a Indian reservation on Puget Sound. Drury arrived in San Francisco in 1873. Successful investments in mining concerns in the Comstock in Nevada convinced him to move to Virginia City, where he became one of the editors of the Virginia City Chronicle, the Territorial Enterprise, the Gold Hill News, and the Bodie Daily Miner. As a reporter in the Comstock, Drury knew Mark Twain and Bret Harte and later, in San Francisco, met Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1882 Drury became deputy secretary of the state of Nevada and in 1887 became a member and speaker pro tem of the Nevada House of Representatives.Drury returned to California in 1888. He was at different times managing editor of the San Francisco Call, city editor of the San Francisco Examiner, a news editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, news editor of the Sacramento Union, managing editor of the Los Angeles Record, and on the staff of the Oakland Tribune. In addition, Drury was one of the first presidents of the San Francisco Press Club. Beginning in 1908, he was for fifteen years managing director, and later president, of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce. When Drury died in 1931, he was known as a politician, newspaperman, and publicist." - Online Archive of California