It was gold,—in the quartz,
And it ran all alike;
And I reckon five oughts
Was the worth of that strike;
And that house with the coopilow's his'n,—which the same isn't bad for a Pike.
These poems with others were published in 1871 with the title East and West Poems. The Pike County pieces in the volume number altogether seven; John Hay's Pike County Ballads, which came out in book form at almost the same moment, numbered six—thirteen rather remarkable poems when one considers the furore that they created and the vast influence they exerted upon their times.
For a decade and more Pike County colored American literature. In 1871 J. G. Holland summed up the situation:
The "Pike" ... has produced a strange and startling sensation in recent literature.... With great celerity he has darted through the columns of our newspapers, the pages of our magazines, while quiet, well-behaved contributors have stood one side and let him have his own wild way. And it began to seem, at one time, as if the ordinary, decent virtues of civilized society could stand no chance in comparison with the picturesque heroism of this savage in dialect.[51]
Much of Harte's fiction deals with this type. Save for Yuba Bill, who was evidently a Northerner, the New Orleans gamblers like Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin, and the Spanish and Mexican natives, his characters were prevailingly Pikes. The dialect in all of his work is dominated by this Southwestern element. In The New Assistant at the Pine Clearing School, for instance, the leader of the strike discourses like this: "We ain't hankerin' much for grammar and dictionary hogwash, and we don't want no Boston parts o' speech rung in on us the first thing in the mo'nin'. We ain't Boston—We're Pike County—we are." Tennessee's Partner was a Pike, and Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy, and Kentuck and Sandy—glorified to be sure and transformed by California and the society of the mines, but none the less Pikes.
Following Harte and Hay came the outburst of local color fiction. The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Cape Cod Folks, Sam Lawson's Fireside Stories, Hoosier Mosaics, Deephaven, Old Creole Days, In the Tennessee Mountains were but the beginning. For two decades and more American fiction ran to the study of local types and peculiar dialect. The movement was not confined to prose. The Pike County balladry was continued by Sidney Lanier and Irwin Russell with their songs and ballads of the negro quarters, Will Carleton with his farm ballads, James Whitcomb Riley with his Hoosier studies, Drummond with his tales of the "Habitant" of the Canadian frontier, and by Eugene Field, Sam Walter Foss, Holman F. Day, and scores of others down to Robert W. Service, the depicter of the Yukon and the types of the later gold rush.
II
Whether the Pike County balladry began with Bret Harte or with John Hay, is a question at present unsettled. Mark Twain was positive that Hay was the pioneer. His statement is important:
"It was contemporaneously supposed," he wrote after Hay's death, "that the Pike County Ballads were inspired or provoked by the Pike County balladry of Bret Harte, and they were first accepted as imitations or parodies. They were not written later, they were written (and printed in newspapers) earlier. Mr. Hay told me this himself—in 1870 or '71, I should say. I believe—indeed, I am quite sure—that he added that the newspapers referred to were obscure western back-woods journals and that the ballads were not widely copied. Also he said this: That by and by, when Harte's ballads began to sweep the country, the noise woke his (Hay's) buried waifs and they rose and walked."[52]
To this testimony may be added Howells's belief that Hay's ballads were prior to Harte's and that "a comparative study will reveal their priority,"[53] and the statement of W. E. Norris, a schoolmate of the poet, that "the ballads appeared as fugitive pieces in the newspapers, as I remember, and the attention they attracted induced the author to compile them with others in book form."[54]