Alfred Doten Papers

The papers of Alfred Doten include manuscript materials dating from 1849-1903. The most important series in the collection consists of seventy-nine volumes of diaries kept by Doten from March 18, 1849, his first day at sea on the voyage to California, until November 11, 1903, the day before he died. Doten wrote daily entries with few omissions, noting events, people and places of interest. He frequently pasted in newspaper clippings or inserted memoranda, playbills, stock certificates, letters, etc. into the diaries, making them an incomparable source of information on the California gold rush, farming and ranching in California, mining and journalism in Nevada, and the early history of both the gold and silver states of California and Nevada.

These diaries, often nearly illegible because of their faded pencil entries, are supplemented by typed transcripts prepared by Mary Ann Jaffe under the supervision of Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Clark edited the diaries which were published in 1973 in three volumes by the University of Nevada Press under the title, The Journals of Alfred Doten.

Also part of the collection are notes written by Clark as he edited the diaries for publication. These notes appear in several locations in Series 2 on reproductions of Doten's writings, as notebooks, and as correspondence. There are also transcriptions of the diaries prepared by Aubrey Drury and notes collected by him toward a book on Doten which was not completed before Drury's death.

The collection contains many other writings by Doten in the forms of manuscript stories, poems, historical sketches, and correspondence. These date from 1835-1902 and are accompanied by transcriptions (probably by Jaffe).

Two boxes of the Doten papers contain newspaper clippings, many of them articles written by Doten, beginning with Doten's "California Letters" published in the Plymouth (Mass.) Rock in 1849. There are articles by Dan De Quille; clippings about James G. Fair and family and the Pacific Coast Pioneers; and miscellaneous clippings collected by Aubrey Drury. The titles of these articles, author's name, their source, and date published are listed in this guide.

Doten invested heavily in Nevada silver mines and went bankrupt in the late 1870s when the Nevada mining industry suffered a severe depression. Series 8 contains stock certificates for many of the companies in which Doten had an interest. Other materials in this series are statements, bills, letters, and receipts dating from 1863-1881, all related to Doten's mining businesses.

As mentioned previously, there are some 297 photographs in the collection which have been transferred to the photo archives sections of the Special Collections Department. These images are all original cartes de visite and stereopticon slides (also known as stereo cards) and are of mining scenes in Nevada and California (there is a particularly nice series showing hydraulic mining in California), views of Virginia City and Gold Hill, and portraits of family, friends and acquaintances. All but a small number were identified by Doten and all have been cataloged by the Special Collections Department staff. A list of images, their identification, and their photo call numbers is included in this guide.