The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings

“Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scrib blers in this part of the country,” Mark Twain wrote his family from California in January 1866, “the place properly belongs to Bret Harte.” Twain later allowed that Harte, his mentor, editor, and occasional friend, had “trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor.”¹ To be sure, Harte was not the first California author to write about the Gold Rush—“Dame Shirley” (aka Louise A.K. Smith Clappe) published The Shirley Letters from the mines in 1854. Nor was he the first California humorist to win a national reputation—that honor belongs to “John Phoenix” (aka John H. Derby). But with the founding of the Overland Monthly under Harte’s editorial direction in 1868 and especially with the publication of his own stories and poems in the first five semiannual volumes of the magazine, western American literature began to come of age. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” was “the first resounding note” in the development of an indigenous western literature, as Kate Chopin remarked in 1900. “It reached across the continent and startled the Academists on the Atlantic Coast, that is to say, in Boston. They opened their eyes and ears at the sound and awoke to the fact that there might some day be a literary West.”² Harte figuratively blazed a trail into parlors and reading rooms in the East. As Carl Van Doren declared in 1926, his “discovery that California was full of fiction made almost as much a stir as Marshall’s discovery that the State was full of gold.”³ More than any other writer, Harte opened the pages of the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines to the contributions of such western writers as Twain, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, Prentice Mulford, and Charles Warren Stoddard.

Harte was also one of the first important professional writers in America, typifying what W.D. Howells later termed “the man of letters as a man of business.” He changed American literary history by challenging genteel assumptions about literary production, particularly that the best writers lived in the East and that with rare exceptions they wrote for artistic rather than for commercial reasons. Lured east by the promise of literary success and a lucrative salary, Harte was arguably both the best-known and the highest-paid writer in the country in 1871-1872. His professional life over the next few years consisted largely of negotiations with literary middlemen (editors, producers, and agents) whose interests rarely coincided with his own. Unfortunately, too, his career spiraled steadily downward after he left California and wore out his welcome in the East. His revival as a writer occurred only after he hired A.P. Watt, one of the first literary agents, in England in 1884 to negotiate with publishers in his stead, and he adjusted his method of writing to meet the increased demands of the market. Harte wrote plays, poems, and dozens of stories over the final twenty years of his career, a collection of them every year between 1883 and 1902. Though his modern reputation is based almost entirely on the stories and poems he contributed to the Overland Monthly from 1868-1870, he mined the same profitable vein his entire life, as this representative selection of his writings may suggest.

Francis Brett Harte (1836-1902) was born in Albany, New York, to an improvident schoolteacher and his wife Elizabeth, a descendant of old Knickerbocker families and Revolutionary War heroes. His paternal grandfather, Bernard Hart, was an Orthodox Jew and a founder of the New York Stock Exchange, a family secret Bret Harte (as he began to sign his work in 1860) never publicly acknowledged. Harte’s formal schooling ended when he was thirteen. Among his most formative influences were the novels of Charles Dickens: He was introduced to Dickens’s fiction at the age of seven, or so he claimed, and read Dombey and Son in monthly parts in 1846. Twain once averred that Harte’s “pathet ics” were “imitated from Dickens,”⁴ and one of his most popular poems, “Dickens in Camp,” was written on the occasion of Dickens’s death. “It was very hastily but very honestly written,” Harte remembered. In fact, Dickens read some of Harte’s early stories shortly before his death in 1870 and reportedly remarked that “Mr. Harte can do the best things.”⁵

In 1853 Harte’s widowed mother married an Oakland lawyer and moved to California, and Harte and his younger sister Maggie soon followed. In 1856, at the tender age of twenty, he became a schoolteacher like his father, though like Thoreau he seems never to have been a very good one. By the spring of 1857 he had surfaced in Tuolumne County, where he spent a few weeks placer mining “but met with indifferent success,” as he recalled in his semiautobiographical essay “How I Went to the Mines” (1899). He lived for nearly three years around Humboldt Bay, near his sister, where he first began to write for publication in the Humboldt Times, the Uniontown Northern Californian, and the San Francisco Golden Era. As the acting editor of the Northern Californian , he outraged the local citizenry by condemning a massacre of Indians in February 1860 and barely escaped with his life back to San Francisco. Forty years later, in “Bohemian Days in San Francisco” (1900) he reminisced about his first week in the city amid the gambling saloons, waterfront warehouses, and the Spanish Quarter.

He also began his literary career in earnest. He became a type-setter for the Golden Era, much as Twain and Walt Whitman, among others, learned their craft at the typestick. He often contributed to the pages of the paper, and he was paid a dollar per column in addition to his salary. As Harte later remembered, “I was very young when I first began to write for the press. I learned to combine the composition of the editorial with the setting of its type” and so “to save my fingers mechanical drudgery somewhat condensed my style.” His stories and sketches in the Golden Era soon caught the eye of Jessie Benton Frémont, wife of the Republican candidate for President in 1856, who became his patron and invited him to join her salon. “I had to insist this very shy young man should come to see me,” Frémont remembered, “but soon he settled into a regular visit on Sunday, his only time of leisure, and for more than a year dined with us that day, bringing his manuscripts.” Through her patronage, Harte soon met Thomas Starr King, the minister of the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco and a recent Boston émigré, best known today as the man who saved California for the Union. Through Frémont’s patronage, too, Harte was awarded a series of government jobs, first with the office of the U.S. Surveyor General, then with the U.S. Marshal in San Francisco, finally as Secretary to the Superintendent of the U.S. Mint. “If I were to be cast away on a desert island,” he later wrote Frémont, “I should expect a savage to come forward with a three-cornered note from you to tell me that, at your request, I had been appointed governor of the island at a salary of two thousand four hundred dollars.” As a result of these government sinecures, Harte was able to devote more of his time to writing.

Both King and Frémont were instrumental in first bringing Harte to the attention of James T. Fields, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. King sent a note to the editor in January 1862 recommending the manuscript of “The Legend of Monte del Diablo” by “Mr. F.B. Harte, a very bright young man who has been in literary ways for a few years” and “a particular friend of Mrs. Jessie Frémont. . . . I hope the editors will accept it if it is worthy, for I am sure there is a great deal in Harte, & an acceptance of his piece would inspirit him, & help literature on this coast where we raise bigger trees & squashes than literati & brains.” Frémont also praised the story in a letter to Fields. She presumed Harte would impress him “as he does Mr. King and myself. But of that there can be no doubt for his is a fresh mind filled with unworn pictures.” She hoped Fields would admire the story as much as she had, and indeed the editor accepted the tale for publication in the October 1863 issue of the Atlantic. It immediately preceded Thoreau’s essay “Life Without Principle.” The tale exhibits Harte’s interest in local history and his ambivalence over Spanish and Anglo colonialism in California. However, Fields eventually wrote Frémont to discourage her from sending him more submis sions from Harte’s pen. “Your young friend fails to interest,” he explained. “He is not piquant enough for the readers of the Atlantic .” Not until Harte had earned his spurs in the pages of the Overland would Fields repent his words.

Though his “Condensed Novels,” parodies of such novels as Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, attracted an eastern audience in the mid-1860s, Harte had reached an impasse in his literary career by early 1868. He earned a generous salary at the Mint—$270 a month—and directed a staff of twelve. In contrast, he earned a paltry $10 for each article he contributed to the Californian or the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. He had also begun to resent “these spoiled and pampered San Franciscans” and what he considered the subtle restraints on intellectual life in the West. “The curse of California,” he wrote a friend in February 1868, “has been its degrading, materialistic influences.” Neither of his options—stay the course at the Mint or quit his job, move back east, and risk failure—was very attractive. Then he struck gold, as it were: Anton Roman, a San Francisco publisher, decided to found a slick monthly magazine modeled on the Atlantic Monthly and he asked Harte to edit it.

Harte early acquired the habit of quarreling with his publishers, and his vexed relations with Roman and his successor John Car-many were no exception. Harte wanted the magazine to be a purely literary publication, while the publisher wanted it to hew the Chamber of Commerce line, to promote “the material development of this Coast.” In the end, Harte’s vision of the magazine prevailed. He contributed “The Luck of Roaring Camp” to the second issue of the magazine and the rest is literary history. As he remembered in his essay “The Rise of the ‘Short Story’ ” (1899), “The Luck” reached print, despite the objections of the printer and proofreader about its vulgarity, only after Harte insisted upon its publication as a matter of editorial prerogative. Local reviews of the tale were equivocal if not hostile—the Alta California judged it merely “a pleasant little sketch”—but the tide turned in Harte’s favor when it was hailed in the East as one of the best magazine stories of the year. In Boston, one of the sub-editors of the Atlantic passed it along to James Fields, who then wrote the anonymous author of “The Luck” to solicit “anything he chose to write, upon his own terms.”

Harte was vindicated, not only among local critics who had panned his story, but by the editor who had spurned his contributions five years before. “I’ll try to find time to send you something,” he replied to Fields. “The Overland is still an experiment,” and “should it fail . . . why I dare say I may be able to do more.” In fact, the experiment was a resounding success. By the end of its first year, the magazine enjoyed total sales of about 3,000 copies per number. It sold as many copies in the eastern U.S. as in the states of California, Nevada, and Oregon combined.

The popularity of “The Luck of Roaring Camp” persuaded Harte “to follow it with other stories of a like character.” All the tales he published in the Overland over the next two and half years were designed to appeal to eastern readers intrigued by the romance of the Gold Rush. Or as he asserted in the introduction to his collection of early tales, he wished to collect “the materials for the Iliad that is yet to be sung” about the ’49ers. His next Overland story, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” both evokes the pathos of the Donner Pass tragedy in the winter of 1846-47 and burlesques the myth of the hardy pioneers. Trapped by an early winter blizzard, the outcasts suffer their deaths honorably, though Harte offers no moral to their story. In his stock character of John Oakhurst, too, Harte introduced the rougish but charming gambler typified by Bret Maverick in the 1950s television series.

Briefly put, Harte’s humor challenged social norms and conventional values. His gamblers may be libertines, but they are also chivalrous; his miners may be coarse, but they share their grub-stakes with the poor and friendless; and his fallen women may have “easy virtue,” but in their breasts beat proverbial hearts of gold. Read according to the conventions of western humor—that is, as a hoax that traps the unwary reader—“Tennessee’s Partner” is a model or “paradigm text” for the way to read Harte. Though it has been vilified for its apparent sentimentality, for example, “Tennessee’s Partner” is less a tale of two miners’ undying affection than it is a subtle story of deceit and revenge. As William F. Conner remarks, the author “tricks his readers all the while he seems to be trying to satisfy their pious presuppositions.”⁶

In fact, though he disclaimed any didactic purpose in his fiction, several of Harte’s early stories parody biblical text in order to challenge narrow, parochial belief. While these stories defy overtly didactic readings, they also subvert religious orthodoxy and ridicule sham and hypocrisy. Put another way, Harte wrote such tales as “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” “Miggles,” and “Mr. Thompson’s Prodigal” from a Unitarian or liberal Christian perspective. Though the first of these stories may seem at first blush to be a modern retelling of the Nativity with the Christ child renamed “the Luck” and the dissolute mining camp a “city of refuge” redeemed through his influence, I believe it evokes the Gospel account of the birth of Christ to make a very different point. Harte cautions the reader in the opening paragraph to beware of appearances: The “greatest scamp” in the camp “had a Raphael face.” As a “dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable” prostitute, a “very sinful woman,” Cherokee Sal is an ironic Madonna. Little Tommy Luck’s father is unknown, but not because he is born of a virgin. The miners are ironic Magi whose gifts to the child include stolen silverware, a tobacco box, and a revolver. They chris ten the child in a “ludicrous” ceremony that is a “burlesque of the church service.” Rather than an incarnation of Christ on the frontier, Tommy Luck is a false Messiah. His first name recalls the Doubting Apostle and an apocryphal gospel, and his surname evokes blind Chance. To be sure, that “golden summer” the mines “yield enormously” and in these “flush times” the “Luck was with them.” The town soon launches a program of civic improvement, but to what effect? Merely that the saloon is refurbished and the men begin to bathe. The narrator concedes that tales of Tommy Luck’s ability to talk with animals “rest upon the statements of prejudiced friends.” Such statements are as spurious and unreliable as similar reports about Jesus recorded in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. In the final paragraphs, Roaring Camp washes away in a flood of biblical proportions, as though by a judgment of God. In the last sentence of the story, Kentuck clings to the “frail” body of the child who “drift[s] away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown seas.” These adjectives hardly suggest his martyrdom or vicarious sacrifice; on the contrary, they indicate his death is relatively insignificant. The luck of Roaring Camp is, in the end, all bad. In all, the story is a subtle parody, a nineteenth-century version of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian that suggests the consequences of worshipping Mammon or a false god.

Similarly, “Mr. Thompson’s Prodigal” inverts or reverses the parable of the prodigal son. Whereas in the parable the son repents his rebellion and returns home, the elder Thompson in Harte’s story comes to the West—represented as a far country that corrupts the young and innocent—to seek his son. Whereas the father in Christ’s parable rejoices in their reunion, Mr. Thompson is a religious hypocrite, fond of quoting Scripture. He finds his son (or so he thinks) but he “did not seem to be happy,” mostly because “he had little love for the son he had regained.” The tale ends on a pathetic note, with the true prodigal son still steeped in iniquity, and Thompson estranged “forever” from the man he had thought his son.

Harte’s tale “Miggles” also takes off from a biblical source: the character of Mary Magdalene. The narrator of this story, in company with several others aboard a stagecoach, is forced by inclement weather to spend a night in the cabin where Miggles lives with an “imbecile paralytic” named Jim or James, according to legend the name of Jesus’s brother, and her pet bear. (Harte also evokes the memory of the actress Lola Montez, who had performed in San Francisco in 1853 and retired to Grass Valley with her third husband and a pet bear.) Formerly the proprietor of the Polka Saloon in Marysville—that is, a brothel—Miggles sold her business when Jim fell ill and bought a ranch where she could nurse him until he died. She has atoned for her sins by a life of selfless devotion. The next morning, the narrator awakens to see the light of a full moon “baptize with a shining flood the lowly head of the woman whose hair, as in the sweet old story, bathed the feet of him she loved.” Harte here makes explicit the association of Miggles with Mary Magdalene. The tale ends as the passengers, arrived at their destination, raise a toast to her: “Here’s to Miggles—GOD BLESS HER!” “Perhaps he had,” concludes the narrator. “Who knows?”

Several of Harte’s other Overland tales are written according to the same formula. “Brown of Calaveras” revises Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan. In “The Idyl of Red Gulch” Harte compares the dissolute miner Sandy Morton to Samson and the schoolmarm Miss Mary to Delilah, though in this version Samson remains untamed and Delilah flees the vulgar and uncouth West for the genteel society of Boston. Not only does this tale foreshadow Harte’s own departure for the East a few months later, but in Miss Mary he invented the stock character of the eastern schoolmarm epitomized by Molly Stark Wood in Owen Wister’s The Virginian and Amy Kane, played by Grace Kelly, in the movie High Noon.

To be sure, the satirical formula Harte followed in his fiction was not universally acclaimed. It was, in fact, condemned in such religious journals as Zion’s Herald, a Methodist weekly published in Boston, which complained that Harte “gilded vice” and “abolished moral distinctions.” At the close of “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” for example, “nobody can tell” which of the women “is pure and which corrupt” and so “they are buried in the same grave,” which is of course Harte’s point. Moreover, the reviewer complained, Harte’s “heaven is free love and good humor. Gamblers, harlots, thieves, murderers . . . are sent by him to heaven.” He apparently subscribed to “Universalism and free religion.” Ironically, this was precisely the brand of dogma Harte satirized in these stories. His fiction was occasionally denigrated in such prudish terms well into the next century.

Harte’s poem “Plain Language from Truthful James,” published in the September 1870 issue of the Overland, was arguably his greatest literary triumph. By any objective measure—the frequency with which it was reprinted, the number of parodies it inspired, the times it was set to music—“The Heathen Chinee,” as the poem was commonly called, was one of the most popular poems ever published. Mark Twain later remembered that Harte had “written [it] for his own amusement” and “threw it aside, but being one day suddenly called upon for copy he sent that very piece in. It put a trademark on him at once.”⁷ Ambrose Bierce recalled that Harte had offered the poem to him for publication in the San Francisco News-Letter, but that he persuaded Harte it belonged in the more upscale Overland. In any event, the verse struck a nerve. It was an overnight sensation and made Harte a household name in the East. Twain allowed in March 1871 that he was “the most celebrated man in America to-day,” “the man whose name is on every single tongue from one end of the continent to the other,” and this poem “did it for him.” While it was undeniably popular, however, there was (and is) no critical consensus about exactly what it means.

The question is not one of authorial intention. Harte clearly intended the poem to satirize anti-Chinese prejudices common among Irish day-laborers with whom Chinese immigrants competed for jobs. To the end of his life, Harte insisted he wrote it “with a satirical political purpose.” Of course, what Harte intended has nothing to do with how readers actually read the poem. Like the poem of Mr. Milton Chubbuck in Harte’s story “The Poet of Sierra Flat,” “Some unhappy ambiguities of expression gave rise to many new readings, notes, and commentaries, which, I regret to state, were more often marked by ingenuity than delicacy of thought or expression.” In fact, to many xenophobic readers, “Plain Language from Truthful James” seemed to lampoon not the Irish cardsharks but the “yellow peril.” Only when read ironically does it subvert the racial stereotype. Opponents of Chinese immigration publicly recited the poem, at least once on the floor of Congress. Put another way, “The Heathen Chinee” became a culture-text that was appropriated for a variety of purposes, few of them intended by the poet.

By the close of 1870, Harte was at the height of his popularity. He was offered the editorship of Putnam’s Magazine and the Lakeside Monthly in Chicago, and the editors of the New York Tribune, the Galaxy, Scribner’s, Harper’s Weekly, and the Atlantic Monthly all solicited contributions from him. He left San Francisco with his family in tow on February 2, 1871, never to return. Howells later compared his trip across the continent to “the progress of a prince” in the attention it attracted from the press, and Twain also remembered that Harte “crossed the continent through such a prodigious blaze of national interest and excitement that one might have supposed he was the Viceroy of India.” The Hartes finally arrived in Boston on February 24, and after a memorable week among the literary gentry he contracted with the firm of James R. Osgood & Co. to contribute exclusively to their family of magazines for a year for a salary of $10,000, an unprecedented sum at the time. Harte wrote Ambrose Bierce that “of the commercial value of my own stuff I really had no conception whatever.”

Though according to literary legend Harte’s contract with Osgood & Co. led to his ruination, in fact he probably should be credited with saving the Atlantic. Subscriptions to the magazine had plummeted the year before, in the wake of the controversy over Harriet Beecher Stowe’s essay “Lady Byron Vindicated” in the September 1869 issue. Harte was the marquee name the publisher needed to shore up subscriptions and raise advertising revenue. And, for the record, Harte fulfilled the terms of the contract by contributing more than the twelve articles it required during the year, though to be sure, these poems and stories were mostly undistinguished. For example, Henry James thought the Christmas story “How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar,” published three months late in the March 1872 Atlantic, “better than anything” in Harte’s “second manner—though not quite as good as his first.” This tale still proved popular among polite readers—the young hero of W.D. Howells’ novel The Minister’s Charge reads it aloud to an elderly Boston Brahmin. But to no one’s surprise, except perhaps Harte’s, his contract with Osgood & Co. was not renewed in the spring of 1872. Between July 1872 and June 1873, when he should have been in the prime of his career, he published exactly one story and four poems. The joke made the rounds that Harte’s career had reversed the path of the sun, rising brightly in the west and setting in darkness in the east.

Barely a year after his departure from San Francisco at the height of his fame, Harte tried to salvage his fortunes by capitalizing on his celebrity and trading on his name. He was still bankable, even if he was no longer a rising literary star. He earned most of his income between 1872 and 1874 by delivering his lecture “The Argonauts of ’49” by his own estimate some 150 times, from Boston and New York to Omaha in the west, Toronto in the north, and Macon, Montgomery, and Atlanta in the south. The lecture was crafted to exploit his reputation as a historian of the Gold Rush, though he often disappointed his audiences. “What the people expected in me I do not know, possibly a six-foot mountaineer, with a voice and lecture in proportion,” he later admitted. “Whenever I walked out before a strange audience there was a general sense of disappointment, a gasp of astonishment that I could feel, and it always took at least fifteen minutes before they recovered from their surprise sufficiently to listen to what I had to say.” Harte eventually published the lecture in German translation under the title “Aus Kaliforniens frühen Tagen” in Deutsche Rundschau in 1880 and as the introduction to the British edition of his collected works in 1882.

To his credit, Harte continued to protest racial discrimination in several of his writings over the years. He drew the premise for “Wan Lee, the Pagan” from personal experience. In the late 1860s he had deplored the “late riots and outrages on the Chinese,” how “the youth” of San Francisco threw stones at the Chinese in the streets, and he returned to the issue in this story. Unlike “Plain Language from Truthful James,” “Wan Lee” was unambiguous in its condemnation of violence and race hatred. Similarly, in his topical poem “That Ebrew Jew,” Harte alluded to a recent, blatant act of anti-Semitism: In June 1877, the New York banker Joseph Seligman (1819-1880) and his family were refused accommodations at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, by Judge Henry Hilton, who distinguished in the press between respectable “Hebrews” and rapacious “Jews.” Seligman belonged, Hilton asserted, “to a class not of Hebrews, but Jews” in the “trade sense of the word.”⁸ Harte, who had occasionally stayed at the Grand Union, realized that were his Jewish heritage known he would have been liable to the same discriminatory treatment. As the poet asks: “Now, how shall we know? Prophet, tell us, pray do, / Where the line of the Hebrew fades into the Jew?” Harte did not afterwards collect this poem, it was so topical; but like “Wan Lee” it exhibits his sympathy for the victims of racial prejudice.

As the result of his profligate ways, Harte was broke and, with his family, living hand-to-mouth during the winter of 1877-78. Ah Sin, a play on which he collaborated with Mark Twain, had been a critical and financial disaster and led to the end of their friendship. Desperately Harte sold a jingle, a parody of Longfellow’s “Excelsior,” to the Sapolio soap company for fifty dollars. The New York World noted at the time that “it is an open question as to what improvement in Mr. Harte’s style would be wrought by his reduction to a state of abject penury; but the experiment of ruining him is worth trying.” He begged William Waldorf Astor for a job to no avail. To the end of his life he remembered that hardscrabble winter. “I could not, and would not under any circumstances, again go through what I did in New York the last two years and particularly the last winter I passed there,” he later wrote. Finally, in April 1878, he was appointed U.S. Consul to the small commercial town of Crefeld, Germany. After a free fall of many months, he at last landed on his feet. On June 27, from his hotel room in Heidelberg, Twain fumed in a letter to Howells that “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler. . . . To send this nasty creature to puke upon the American name in a foreign land is too much.” The same day Harte sailed for Europe, never to return to the U.S.

The next several years were a fallow period in Harte’s literary career. He remained in Crefeld for two years before the State Department transferred him to Glasgow, where he served as U.S. Consul until 1885. He sent his family $200 to $250 a month, his consular salary, and largely lived on the income from a few western potboilers and German and French translation rights to his earlier works. As his popularity in the U.S. waned, in fact, his sales in Europe steadily grew, and Harte, ever attuned to the nuances of the market, adjusted his style accordingly. Whereas in 1879 he admitted that “I grind out the old tunes on the old organ and gather up the coppers,” over the years he revised his formula by pandering to European readers’ ideas about “the Wild West” and experimenting with more sensational plots punctuated by violence and more transgressive sexuality. The strategy worked. In 1884, the year Harte hired the pioneering literary agent, A.P. Watt, to market his writings, the British publisher Andrew Chatto ranked him fourth, after Ouida, Charles Reade, and Mark Twain, among the most popular writers in his stable; and the next year Lewis Rosen thal reported in the Critic that Harte “is of all living Americans the best known and most read” in Germany. As late as 1914 his books had appeared in more German editions than had Twain’s.⁹ By the early 1890s, moreover, he annually earned from all sources more than the $10,000 he had been paid by Osgood & Co. in 1871-72—as much as $16,000 per year by one contemporary estimate. ¹⁰ He also increased his literary productivity so that by 1889-90, for example, he published twelve stories totaling some 230,000 words.

Though he has often been hailed as one of the first American literary realists, Harte always depicted the West through a soft lens and in muted light. His ideal tale, as he explains in “The Rise of the ‘Short Story,’ ” was “concise and condensed, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant—or a miracle of understatement. It voiced not only the dialect, but the habits of a people or locality. It gave a new interest to slang” and it “was often irreverent.” Over time, his skill at rendering western local color ebbed; after all, he was a writer who normally set his stories in the American West but who had left the region in 1871 and never returned. That is, his fiction became increasingly less realistic toward the end of his career. Like Buffalo Bill Cody, he reinforced a popular if sensational mythology about the American West. To compensate for his fading memories, Harte constructed a fictional California with a romantic past that appealed to his middlebrow European audience. Little wonder that Wallace Stegner once joked that his popularity “was always greatest in direct proportion to the reader’s distance from and ignorance of the mines.”

As his friend Henry Adams noted in his Education, moreover, Harte insisted on the “power of sex” in his late stories “as far as the magazines would let him venture.” While such early tales as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “Miggles” skirted all direct mention of sexuality, “The Pupil of Chestnut Ridge” eroticizes the figure of an eleven-year-old mestiza named Concepcion or “Concha.” (The Spanish nickname suggests the sexually symbolic conch shell.) Her teacher broods upon “the precocious maturity of the mixed races” and recalls having seen “brides of twelve and mothers of fourteen among the native villagers.” Though Harte ostensibly satirized anti-Hispanic prejudices, he compromised the satire, even referring twice to Concha’s “languid indifference” to study, which is a trait allegedly specific “to her race.” The teacher’s worst fears are realized one day when he spies Concha in the woods at the center of a circle of children as she dances “that most extravagant feat of the fandango—the audacious sembicuaca” with its seductive moves. The tale ends abruptly when Concha elopes with a vaquero. Her white adoptive mother explains that she “was a grown woman—accordin’ to these folks’ ways and ages.” Rather than offer a solution to the prejudice against mixed-bloods, Harte surrenders to pessimism and to the belief that heredity is destiny. If the children in Harte’s Overland stories, such as little Tommy Luck, seem impressionable to the imprint of Nature, the girls in his late fiction, like Concha, seem fated to become “fallen women.” Whereas he wrote his early fiction in the “Dickensian mode,” his later fiction betrays the influence of Émile Zola and Thomas Hardy and anticipates the naturalism of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. Little wonder that such editors as Robert Underwood Johnson and Richard Watson Gilder of Century repeatedly cautioned Harte to consider “very carefully the limitations under which a writer [must labor] who contributes to a family magazine” and to omit whatever would “too greatly ‘shock the properties.’ ”

Harte sometimes still injected a political subtext into his writing. For example, in his poem “Free Silver at Angel’s,” narrated by Truthful James and again featuring Ah Sin, he ridiculed the advocates of bimetallism and the silver plank in the 1896 Democratic Party platform. He forcefully denounced the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the policy of racial extermination in the overtly anti-imperialist satire “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad,” written in oblique response to the Spanish-American and Boer Wars. Set in a fictional settlement whose name Harte apparently selected for its Caribbean associations, the story illustrates how the presumption of racial superiority and race hatred preached by the xenophobic town father Parkin Skinner abetted American and British imperialism at the close of the turn of the last century. Though the citizens of Trinidad little “dream of Expansion and Empire,” Skinner (whose surname suggests his racist ideology) declares that “this is a white man’s country” and the “nigger of every description . . . hez to clar off of God’s footstool when the Anglo-Saxon get started! . . . It’s our manifest destiny to clar them out.” Infected by this virulent strain of racism, his young son becomes a “little white tyrant” who brutalizes his Chinese and Indian playmates. Ironically, Harte expressed surprise in 1901 that Mark Twain had shifted or drifted into political commentary. “He’s a very nervous man—a man of strong prejudices—but he is sincere.”¹¹ It was his final public comment about Twain. Ironically, the two old antagonists shared similar doubts about imperialist policies.

Not that they ever reconciled. Their earliest dispute, which Harte dramatized in “The Iliad of Sandy Bar” in 1869, had ended amicably. This story recounts the bitter and “inexplicable” quarrel of two former partners, Matthew Scott (Harte) and Henry York (Twain). Even though their common claim seems played out and worthless, it becomes the bone of their contention. After York returns from a trip abroad, much as Twain returned from his tour of Europe and the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City in 1867, the two antagonists finally patch up their differences. The rupture in their relations in 1878, however, was permanent. Harte again touched on their feud in his late story “An Ingénue of the Sierras,” which alludes to an embarrassing episode in Twain’s career. In December 1870, soon after the publication of “Plain Language from Truthful James,” a dialect poem in transparent imitation of Harte’s style entitled “Three Aces” appeared in the Buffalo Express, co-owned at the time by Twain, over the signature “Carl Byng.” Twain denied its authorship, though it was widely attributed to him, and Harte believed the poet was Twain, too. Years later, in any event, he encoded the incident in “An Ingénue.” The highwayman Ramon Martinez (the surname contains six letters—Mar*t**in—in the same sequence that they appear in “Mark Twain”) poses as a bill collector named Charley (or Charles, the English equivalent of Carl) Byng. That is, Harte rips Twain in this tale as a thief and impostor whose reign of terror is “about played out.” Twain’s recent potboilers Merry Tales and The American Claimant were commercial failures and he was sliding into bankruptcy. Although Margaret Duckett contended that their feud was largely one-sided, with Twain heaping both private and public scorn on Harte, it seems Harte reciprocated Twain’s abuse, though he expressed it more subtly.

Harte continued to write literally to the end of his life. After his health began to fail in 1899, he tried desperately to provide a nest egg for his family. He published twenty-seven stories and earned about $17,000 during the two years preceding his death. As late as February 1902, he accepted a commission from a British newspaper syndicate for three stories of 5,000 words each. The next month a London physician diagnosed his throat cancer, too late to operate. On April 17, he began a new story, “A Friend of Colonel Starbottle’s,” one of the tales he had agreed to write in February. Three weeks later he died from a hemorrhage of the throat in the country home near London of Mme Van de Velde, his longtime companion. His estate was valued at about $1,800, less than he owed his creditors and less than half what he had spent for a summer rental in Newport in 1871.

The family fortunes were rebuilt early in the twentieth century by several successful theatrical and motion-picture adaptations of his stories. The play Salomy Jane, based on his story “Salomy Jane’s Kiss,” was a hit on Broadway in 1907. This horse opera was followed by no fewer than twenty-four feature films released between 1909 and 1955, including a silent version of “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1919) directed by John Ford, another version of “Outcasts” (1952) starring Dale Robertson and Anne Baxter, and a loose adaptation of “Tennessee’s Partner” (1955) starring Ronald Reagan and Rhonda Fleming.

Like wing tips and wide ties, the “Bret Harte” brand of western fiction falls in and out of fashion every few years. His standing in the canonical pecking order may be inferred from the comments about his writings in textbooks over the years. Julian Hawthorne and Leonard Lemmon in American Literature: An Elementary Text-book (1891) praised Harte as “a brilliant innovator” who spoke in “a new voice.” Fred Lewis Pattee echoed the point in his History of American Literature (1903): Harte’s Overland stories “were works of literary art worthy to be compared with the rarest product of American genius.” Brander Matthews asserted in 1907 that Harte “had a finer sense of form” than Dickens, and John Er skine argued in 1910 that Harte was one of six American writers of fiction whom “time has sifted . . . for special remembrance.” Howells reprinted “The Outcasts” in his edition of Best American Short Stories in 1920.

Harte was clearly at the height of his modern popularity during the second quarter of the century. The gold regions of central California became known as “Bret Harte country,” and with the construction of State Highway 108 in Tuolumne Country, the small town of Twain-Harte, near Sonora and Angels Camp, became a popular tourist destination with an annual Bret Harte Pageant. Travel writer Mildred Adams declared in 1930 that “Of all the Californias that men have invented for their delight or their profit, Bret Harte’s is the most charming.” As late as 1940, he was still considered a major American author whose work was routinely represented in all anthologies.

Ironically, Harte has been shuffled aside over the past generation during a canon debate that has served to rehabilitate dozens of other writers. The critical case against Harte, moreover, mirrors exactly the old argument for ignoring such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott. Bernard De Voto made this case, such as it was, as long ago as 1932: “The syrupy tales that he spun out . . . drifted opportunely before a public relieved of war and facing westward. They were prettily written, between laughter and kind tears. They informed readers enamored of sentiment that even in the Sierras the simpler virtues were imperishable and that humanity remained capable of sweetness on the Pacific slope.”¹² Neither the new Heath nor the recent Harper anthologies of American literature contains a single word Harte wrote.

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