After his service as expressman, Bret Harte went to a town called Union, about three hundred miles north of San Francisco, where he learned the printer’s trade in the office of the “Humboldt Times.” He also taught school again in Union, and for the second time acted as clerk in a drug store. Speaking of his experience in this capacity, Mr. Pemberton, his English biographer, gravely says, “I have heard English physicians express wonder at his grasp of the subject.” One wonders, in turn, if Bret Harte did not do a little hoaxing in this line. “To the end of his days,” writes Mr. Pemberton, “he could speak with authority as to the virtues and properties of medicines.” Young Harte had a wonderful faculty of picking up information, and no doubt his two short terms of service as a compounder of medicines were not thrown away upon him. But Bret Harte was the last person in the world to pose as an expert, and it seems probable that the extent of his knowledge was fairly described in the story How Reuben Allen Saw Life in San Francisco. That part of this story which deals with the drug clerk is so plainly autobiographical, and so characteristic of the author, that a quotation from it will not be out of place:—
“It was near midnight, the hour of closing, and the junior partner was alone in the shop. He felt drowsy; the mysterious incense of the shop, that combined essence of drugs, spice, scented soap, and orris root—which always reminded him of the Arabian nights—was affecting him. He yawned, and then, turning away, passed behind the counter, took down a jar labelled ‘Glycyrr. Glabra,’ selected a piece of Spanish licorice, and meditatively sucked it....
“He was just nineteen, he had early joined the emigration to California, and after one or two previous light-hearted essays at other occupations, for which he was singularly unfitted, he had saved enough to embark on his present venture, still less suited to his temperament.... A slight knowledge of Latin as a written language, an American schoolboy’s acquaintance with chemistry and natural philosophy, were deemed sufficient by his partner, a regular physician, for practical cooperation in the vending of drugs and putting up of prescriptions. He knew the difference between acids and alkalis and the peculiar results which attended their incautious combination. But he was excessively deliberate, painstaking and cautious. There was no danger of his poisoning anybody through haste or carelessness, but it was possible that an urgent ‘case’ might have succumbed to the disease while he was putting up the remedy.... In those days the ‘heroic’ practice of medicine was in keeping with the abnormal development of the country; there were ‘record’ doses of calomel and quinine, and he had once or twice incurred the fury of local practitioners by sending back their prescriptions with a modest query.”
SAN FRANCISCO, NOVEMBER, 1844
J. C. Ward, del.
It was doubtless Bret Harte’s experience in the drug store which suggested the story of Liberty Jones, whose discovery of an arsenical spring in the forest was the means of transforming that well-made, but bony and sallow Missouri girl into a beautiful woman, with well-rounded limbs, rosy cheeks, lustrous eyes and glossy hair.
It has been a matter of some discussion whether Bret Harte ever worked as a miner or not; and the evidence upon the point is not conclusive. But it is hard to believe that he did not try his luck at gold-seeking, when everybody else was trying, and his narrative How I Went to the Mines seems to have the ear-marks of an autobiographical sketch. It is regarded as such by his sisters; and the modest, deprecating manner in which the storyteller’s adventures are related, serves to confirm that impression.
Of all his experiences in California, those which gave him the most pleasure seem to have been his several short but fruitful terms of service as schoolmaster and tutor. His knowledge of children, being based upon sympathy, became both acute and profound. How many thousand million times have children gone to school of a morning and found the master awaiting them, and yet who but Bret Harte has ever described the exact manner of their approach!
“They came in their usual desultory fashion—the fashion of country school-children the world over—irregularly, spasmodically, and always as if accidentally; a few hand-in-hand, others driven ahead of or dragged behind their elders; some in straggling groups more or less coherent and at times only connected by far-off intermediate voices scattered over a space of half a mile, but never quite alone; always preoccupied by something else than the actual business in hand; appearing suddenly from ditches, behind trunks, and between fence-rails; cropping up in unexpected places along the road after vague and purposeless détours—seemingly going anywhere and everywhere but to school!”[5]
Bret Harte realized the essential truth that children are not little, immature men and women, but rather infantile barbarians, creatures of an archaic type, representing a period in the development of the human race which does not survive in adult life. Hence the reserve, the aloofness of children, their remoteness from grown people. There are certain things which the boy most deeply feels that he must not do, and certain other things that he must do; as, for example, to bear without telling any pains that may be inflicted upon him by his mates or by older boys. For a thousand years or more fathers and mothers have held a different code upon these points, but with how little effect upon their children! Johnny Filgee illustrated upon a truly Californian scale these boyish qualities of reticence and endurance. When he had accidentally been shot in the duel between the Master and Cressy’s father (the child being perched in a tree), he refrained from making the least sound, although a word or an outcry would have brought the men to his assistance. “A certain respect to himself and his brother kept him from uttering even a whimper of weakness.” Left alone in the dark woods, unable to move, Johnny became convinced that his end was near, and he pleased himself by thinking that “they would all feel exceedingly sorry and alarmed, and would regret having made him wash himself on Saturday night.” And so, having composed himself, “he turned on his side to die, as became the scion of an heroic race!”