Alonzo Delano, affectionately known as “Old Block,” possessed that wonderful ability to record what he saw with pathos, laughter, irony, and realism. Delano was the miner’s spokesman, their champion. Consequently, everyone loved this long-nosed wit. His biographer, G. Ezra Dane, wrote that Delano “was the first truly Californian man of letters, and no one has described or interpreted the human elements of the Gold Rush so sympathetically as he.” Dane characterized his literary style as “a bit rustic, but flowing, chuckling and lucid as a Sierra stream.” This word painter of California life, along with George Horatio Derby (a.k.a. John Phoenix), established a unique brand of Western humor based on the strange and wonderful scenes they saw.
          A native of Auburn, New York, Delano resided in Ottawa, Illinois, at the time of the gold discovery. He left for the diggings on April 5, 1849, and entered California via the Lassen Trail. He then made it to the Feather River on September 9 with $4 in his pocket. In 1854, the New York firm of Miller, Orton & Mulligan published his journal, Life on the Plains and among the Diggings, providing what has become one of the great classics of the Overland Trail. In California, Delano engaged in a variety of pursuits including mining, selling squash and cabbage at San Francisco’s Long Wharf, and becoming the agent for Wells Fargo in Grass Valley and then a private banker. Observing with a keen eye the lives and conditions of those struggling to survive in this tumultuous environment, Delano emerged as a prolific writer, sending in scores of sketches to local periodicals including the California Daily Courier, Pacific News, Sacramento Union, Hutchings’ California Magazine, Golden Era, and Hesperian. Many of his best efforts were reproduced in Pen-Knife Sketches, a publication that sold sixteen thousand copies before going into a second printing. Delano followed this up with a delightful satire, The Miner’s Progress; or, Scenes in the Life of a Miner. The Sacramento Daily Union published both titles in 1853.
          Old Block’s Sketch-Book serves as a worthy companion to the popular Pen-Knife Sketches. Also published at the office of the Sacramento Union, this latest effort, as related in his introduction, consisted of a look back over the past six years. He loved his miners and wrote with deep feeling about the lives they endured. Perhaps longing for their companionship, a pensive Delano wrote, “I thought of my old comrades who shared my exposures; I thought of the miner in his cabin, or as he toiled on from day to day; and I thought, too, of his heroic courage in battling on and maintaining his good nature under crushing discouragements; and I felt proud that I had shared his toil and feelings alike.” In these sketches he recalled his miner’s cabin, his amigos like “Old Swamp” and Bogue, Sunday in the mines, his first day in Sacramento, the burning of Grass Valley, and a mountain storm. Waxing nostalgic, Delano concluded with the following celebration of his new home: “There is probably no country in the world whose early settlement abounds in more thrilling incident, more daring adventures, or more hardy and chivalrous deeds, than that of our beloved California.”
          Delano had the good fortune of having Charles Christian Nahl, “the Cruikshank of California” and arguably the finest artist of the Gold Rush, provide the illustrations for his publication. In Old Block’s Sketch-Book, the fifteen full-page Thomas Armstrong engravings of Nahl’s sketches superbly support Delano’s text. In particular, the action-packed illustrated wrapper cover and the last engraving of Old Block holding onto a cat’s tail for dear life present amusing portraits of this California comic. In addition, the views of Old Block’s cabin, a fight in the diggings, and emigrants crossing the plains are memorable, true-to-life images. Leslie E. Bliss in Zamorano 80 correctly states: “Both author and illustrator are characteristically Californian, and few volumes have a truer flavor of the Mother Lode than this result of their combined efforts.”
          Thomas E. Williams’s Fine Arts Press of Santa Ana reprinted the book in 1947 in an edition of 1,000 copies. It included a foreword by Marguerite Eyer Wilbur.

——Gary F. Kurutz

Additional sources consulted: G. Ezra Dane, Foreword to Alonzo Delano’s Pen-Knife Sketches (San Francisco: The Grabhorn Press, 1934); Irving McKee, introduction to Alonzo Delano’s California Correspondence (Sacramento: Sacramento Book Collectors Club, 1952).