There had been a vacancy for some time, resulting from reduction in the pay from $3000 in gold to $500 in greenbacks, together with commissions, which were few. My father thought it would be good experience for me and advised my acceptance. And so at twenty-two I became a Federal officeholder. The commission from President Lincoln is the most treasured feature of the incident. I learned some valuable lessons. The honor was great and the position was responsible, but I soon felt constrained to resign, to accept a place as quartermaster's clerk, where I had more pay with more work. I was stationed at Fort Humboldt, where Grant spent a few uncomfortable months in 1854. It was an experience very different from any I had ever had. Army accounting is wholly unlike civilian, books being dispensed with and accounts of all kinds being made in quadruplicate. I shed quantities of red ink and made my monthly papers appear well. I had no responsibility and obeyed orders, but I could not be wholly comfortable when I covered in all the grain that every mule was entitled to when I had judicial knowledge that he had been turned out to grass. Nor could I believe that the full amount of cordwood allowed officers was consumed when fires were infrequent. I was only sure that it was paid for. Aside from these ethical informalities the life was socially agreeable, and there is glamour in the military. My period of service was not very long. My father had settled in San Francisco and the family had joined him. I was lonely, and when my friend, the new Superintendent of Indian Affairs, offered me employment I forsook Fort Humboldt and took up my residence in the city by the Golden Gate.
CHAPTER IV
THE REAL BRET HARTE
Before taking up the events related to my residence in San Francisco I wish to give my testimony concerning Bret Harte, perhaps the most interesting character associated with my sojourn in Humboldt. It was before he was known to fame that I knew him; but I am able to correct some errors that have been made and I believe can contribute to a more just estimate of him as a literary artist and a man.
He has been misjudged as to character. He was a remarkable personality, who interpreted an era of unusual interest, vital and picturesque, with a result unparalleled in literary annals. When he died in England in 1902 the English papers paid him very high tribute. The London Spectator said of him: "No writer of the present day has struck so powerful and original a note as he has sounded." This is a very unusual acknowledgment from a source not given to the superlative, and fills us with wonder as to what manner of man and what sort of training had led to it.
Causes are not easily determined, but they exist and function. Accidents rarely if ever happen. Heredity and experience very largely account for results. What is their testimony in this particular case?
Francis Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, February 25, 1836. His father was a highly educated instructor in Greek, of English-Jewish descent. His mother was an Ostrander, a cultivated and fine character of Dutch descent. His grandmother on his father's side was Catherine Brett. He had an elder brother and two younger sisters. The boys were voracious readers and began Shakespeare when six, adding Dickens at seven. Frank developed an early sense of humor, burlesquing the baldness of his primer and mimicking the recitations of some of his fellow pupils when he entered school. He was studious and very soon began to write. At eleven he sent a poem to a weekly paper and was a little proud when he showed it to the family in print. When they heartlessly pointed out its flaws he was less hilarious.
His father died when he was very young and he owed his training to his mother. He left school at thirteen and was first a lawyer's clerk and later found work in a counting-room. He was self-supporting at sixteen. In 1853 his mother married Colonel Andrew Williams, an early mayor of Oakland, and removed to California. The following year Bret and his younger sister, Margaret, followed her, arriving in Oakland in March, 1854.
He found the new home pleasant. The relations with his cultivated stepfather were congenial and cordial, but he suffered the fate of most untrained boys. He was fairly well educated, but he had no trade or profession. He was bright and quick, but remunerative employment was not readily found, and he did not relish a clerkship. For a time he was given a place in a drugstore. Some of his early experiences are embalmed in "How Reuben Allen Saw Life" and in "Bohemian Days." In the latter he says: "I had been there a week,—an idle week, spent in listless outlook for employment, a full week, in my eager absorption of the strange life around me and a photographic sensitiveness to certain scenes and incidents of those days, which stand out in my memory today as freshly as on the day they impressed me."