FRANCIS BRET HARTE.
THE POET OF THE MINING CAMP AND THE WESTERN MOUNTAINS.
HE turbulent mining camps of California, with their vicious hangers-on, have been embalmed for future generations by the unerring genius of Bret Harte, who sought to reveal the remnants of honor in man, and loveliness in woman, despite the sins and vices of the mining towns of our Western frontier thirty or forty years ago. His writings have been regarded with disfavor by a religious class of readers because of the frequent occurrence of rough phrases and even profanity which he employs in his descriptions. It should be remembered, however, that a faithful portrait of the conditions and people which he described could hardly have been presented in more polite language than that employed.
Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, in 1839. His father was a scholar of ripe culture, and a teacher in the Albany Female Seminary. He died poor when Bret was quite young, consequently the education of his son was confined to the common schools of the city. When only seventeen years of age, young Harte, with his widowed mother, emigrated to California. Arriving in San Francisco he walked to the mines of Sonora and there opened a school which he taught for a short time. Thus began his self-education in the mining life which furnished the material for his early literature. After leaving his school he became a miner, and at odd times learned to set type in the office of one of the frontier papers. He wrote sketches of the strange life around him, set them up in type himself, and offered the proofs to the editor, believing that in this shape they would be more certain of acceptance. His aptitude with his pen secured him a position on the paper, and in the absence of the editor he once controlled the journal and incurred popular wrath for censuring a little massacre of Indians by the leading citizens of the locality, which came near bringing a mob upon him.
The young adventurer,—for he was little else at this time,—also served as mounted messenger of an express company and as express agent in several mountain towns, which gave him a full knowledge of the picturesque features of mining life. In 1857 he returned to San Francisco and secured a position as compositor on a weekly literary journal. Here again he repeated his former trick of setting up and submitting several spirited sketches of mining life in type. These were accepted and soon earned him an editorial position on the “Golden Era.” After this he made many contributions to the daily papers and his tales of Western life began to attract attention in the East. In 1858, he married, which put an end to his wanderings. He attempted to publish a newspaper of his own, “The Californian,” which was bright and worthy to live, but failed for want of proper business management.
In 1864 Mr. Harte was appointed Secretary of the United States Branch Mint at San Francisco, and during his six years of service in this position found leisure to write some of his popular poems, such as “John Burns, of Gettysburg,” “How Are You, Sanitary?” and others, which were generally printed in the daily newspapers. He also became editor of the “Overland Monthly” when it was founded in 1868, and soon made this magazine as great a favorite on the Atlantic as on the Pacific Coast, by his contribution to its columns of a series of sketches of California life which have won a permanent place in literature. Among these sketches are “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” telling how a baby came to rule the hearts of a rough, dissolute gang of miners. It is said that this masterpiece, however, narrowly escaped the waste-basket at the hands of the proofreader, a woman, who, without noticing its origin, regarded it as utter trash. “The Outcast of Poker Flat,” “Miggles,” “Tennessee’s Partner,” “An Idyl of Red Gulch,” and many other stories which revealed the spark of humanity remaining in brutalized men and women, followed in rapid succession.
Bret Harte was a man of the most humane nature, and sympathized deeply with the Indian and the Chinaman in the rough treatment they received at the hands of the early settlers, and his literature, no doubt, did much to soften and mollify the actions of those who read them—and it may be safely said that almost every one did, as he was about the only author at that time on the Pacific Slope and very popular. His poem, “The Heathen Chinee,” generally called “Plain Language from Truthful James,” was a masterly satire against the hue and cry that the Chinese were shiftless and weak-minded settlers. This poem appeared in 1870 and was wonderfully popular.
In the spring of 1871 the professorship of recent literature in the University of California was offered to Mr. Harte, on his resignation of the editorship of the “Overland Monthly,” but he declined the proffer to try his literary fortunes in the more cultured East. He endeavored to found a magazine in Chicago, but his efforts failed, and he went to Boston to accept a position on the “Atlantic Monthly,” since which time his pen has been constantly employed by an increasing demand from various magazines and literary journals. Mr. Harte has issued many volumes of prose and poetry, and it is difficult to say in which field he has won greater distinction. Both as a prose writer and as a poet he has treated similar subjects with equal facility. His reputation was made, and his claim to fame rests upon his intuitive insight into the heart of our common humanity. A number of his sketches have been translated into French and German, and of late years he has lived much abroad, where he is, if any difference, more lionized than he was in his native country.
From 1878 to 1885 Mr. Harte was United States Consul successively to Crefield and Glasgow. Ferdinand Freiligraph, one of his German translators, and himself a poet, pays this tribute to his peculiar excellence:
“Nevertheless he remains what he is—the Californian and the gold-digger. But the gold for which he has dug, and which he found, is not the gold in the bed of rivers—not the gold in veins of mountains; it is the gold of love, of goodness, of fidelity, of humanity, which even in rude and wild hearts—even under the rubbish of vices and sins—remains forever uneradicated from the human heart. That he there searched for this gold, that he found it there and triumphantly exhibited it to the world—that is his greatness and his merit.”
His works as published from 1867 to 1890 include “Condensed Novels,” “Poems,” “The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches,” “East and West Poems,” “Poetical Works,” “Mrs. Skaggs’ Husbands,” “Echoes of the Foothills,” “Tales of the Argonauts,” “Gabriel Conroy,” “Two Men of Sandy Bar,” “Thankful Blossom,” “Story of a Mine,” “Drift from Two Shores,” “The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories,” “In the Carquinez Woods,” “On the Frontier,” “By Shore and Ledge,” “Snowbound at Eagles,” “The Crusade of the Excelsior,” “A Phyllis of the Sierras.” One of Mr. Harte’s most popular late novels, entitled “Three Partners; or, The Big Strike on Heavy Tree Hill,” was published as a serial in 1897. Though written while the author was in Europe, the vividness of the description and the accurate delineations of the miner character are as strikingly real as if it had been produced by the author while residing in the mining country of his former Western home.
SOCIETY UPON THE STANISLAUS.
reside at Table Mountain, and my name is Truthful James;
I am not up to small deceit or any sinful games;
And I’ll tell in simple language what I know about the row
That broke up our Society upon the Stanislow.
But first, I would remark, that it is not a proper plan
For any scientific gent to whale his fellow-man,
And, if a member don’t agree with his peculiar whim,
To lay for that same member for to “put a head” on him.
Now nothing could be finer or more beautiful to see
Than the first six months’ proceedings of that same Society,
Till Brown of Calaveras brought a lot of fossil bones
That he found within a tunnel near the tenement of Jones.
Then Brown, he read a paper, and he reconstructed there,
From those same bones, an animal that was extremely rare;
And Jones then asked the Chair for a suspension of the rules,
Till he could prove that those same bones was one of his lost mules.
Then Brown he smiled a bitter smile, an’ said he was at fault,
It seems he had been trespassing on Jones’s family vault;
He was a most sarcastic man, this quiet Mr. Brown,
And on several occasions he had cleaned out the town.
Now, I hold it is not decent for a scientific gent
To say another is an ass,—at least, to all intent;
Nor should the individual who happens to be meant
Reply by heaving rocks at him, to any great extent.
Then Abner Dean, of Angel’s, raised a point of order, when
A chunk of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen;
And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled up on the floor,
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more;
For, in less time than I write it, every member did engage
In a warfare with the remnants of the palæozoic age;
And the way they heaved those fossils, in their anger, was a sin,
’Till the skull of an old mammoth caved the head of Thompson in.
And this is all I have to say of these improper games,
For I live at Table Mountain, and my name is Truthful James;
And I’ve told in simple language what I knew about the row
That broke up our society upon the Stanislow.
DICKENS IN CAMP.
BOVE the pines the moon was slowly drifting,
The river sang below;
The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting
Their minarets of snow.
The roaring camp-fire, with rude humor, painted
The ruddy tints of health
On haggard face and form, that drooped and fainted
In the fierce race for wealth
’Till one arose, and from his pack’s scant treasure
A hoarded volume drew,
And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure
To hear the tale anew.
And then, while shadows ’round them gathered faster,
And as the firelight fell,
He read aloud the book wherein the Master
Had writ of “Little Nell.”
Perhaps ’twas boyish fancy,—for the reader
Was the youngest of them all,—
But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar
A silence seemed to fall.
The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp with “Nell” on English meadows
Wandered and lost their way.
And so, in mountain solitudes, o’ertaken
As by some spell divine,
Their cares drop from them like the needles shaken
From out the gusty pine.
Lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire,
And he who wrought that spell;
Ah! towering pine and stately Kentish spire,
Ye have one tale to tell!
Lost is that camp! but let its fragrant story
Blend with the breath that thrills
With hop-vines’ incense, all the pensive glory
That thrills the Kentish hills;
And on that grave, where English oak and holly,
And laurel-wreaths entwine,
Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,
This spray of Western pine!
