UCLA historian and journalist Jon Christensen has turned a powerful moment in the history of the American West into a libretto for “The Big Bonanza,” a new opera about the Comstock Lode era, when the discovery of silver ore drove fortune-seeking miners westward.

Christensen is an adjunct assistant professor in the department of history, the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the Center for Digital Humanities.

“The Big Bonanza” explores the life of 1860s Virginia City, Nevada — then a booming mining town. The opera will have its world premiere April 8-10 by the Nevada Chamber Opera at the Nightingale Concert Hall on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno.

“I was drawn to this story because it is a window into a moment when a truly American form of storytelling was born,” Christensen said, noting that among the fortune-seekers was Samuel Clemens, who took a job at Virginia City’s daily newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise, when his attempt at prospecting failed. There he met William Wright, who used the pen name Dan De Quille and became Clemens’ friend and mentor.

“The rest is history,” Christensen said. “Sam Clemens became Mark Twain at the Territorial Enterprise and found a voice that shaped American literature and journalism.”

It was a moment in time that has shaped his own life and work, said Christenten, who is the editor of “Boom: A Journal of California,” published quarterly by University of California Press.

Christiansen’s libretto for the opera is based in part on the writings of De Quille, who at the time was more famous than Twain

“There is also a powerful, dark undertow to this story,” Christensen said. “The boom on the Comstock Lode went bust, as all booms do eventually. It's the story of the American West and a cautionary tale. Mark Twain left Virginia City. He moved on. Dan De Quille stayed put. He died in poverty and obscurity, believing the Comstock Lode would boom again. It never did.

Christensen researched and wrote the libretto in the shadow of the dot-com boom and bust and the recent Great Recession.

“The parallels were all too painfully obvious,” he said. “In one of the many quotations apocryphally attributed to him, Mark Twain is said to have remarked: ‘History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.’ It's a saying that I often think about and share with my students. And it has resonated particularly powerfully during my work on this opera.”

Christensen has been an environmental journalist and science writer for more than 30 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Nature, the theNewYorker.com, High Country News, the San Francisco Chronicle and many other newspapers, magazines, journals, and radio and television shows. He was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2002-2003 and a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University in 2003-2004, before returning to Stanford to work on a Ph.D. in environmental history and the history of science. He was a founder of the Spatial History Project and executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, an interdisciplinary center for research, teaching, new media, and journalism at Stanford before coming to UCLA in 2012.

His current research focuses on digital, environmental, and urban humanities and sciences, and environmental communications. He is currently finishing a book entitled “Critical Habitat: A History of Thinking with Things in Nature."