Some expressions which might be regarded as original with Bret Harte were really Pioneer terms of Western or Southern use. “Johnson’s Old Woman,” for “Johnson’s wife” was the ordinary phrase in Missouri, Indiana, Alabama, and doubtless all over the West and South. Thus a Missouri farmer is quoted as saying: “My old woman is nineteen years old to-day.” “You know fust-rate she’s dead” is another quaint expression used by Bret Harte, but not invented by him, for this use of “fust-rate” in the sense of very well was not uncommon in the West. In the poem called Jim, there are two or three words which the casual reader might suppose to be inventions of the poet.
What makes you star’,
You over thar?
Can’t a man drop
’S glass in yer shop
But you must r’ar?
This use of r’ar or rear, meaning to become angry, to rave, was frequent in Arkansas and Indiana, if not elsewhere.
The next stanza runs:—
Dead!
Poor—little—Jim!
Why, thar was me,
Jones, and Bob Lee,
Harry and Ben,—
No-account men:
Then to take him!
“No-account” in this sense was a common Western term; and so was “ornery,” from ordinary, meaning inferior, which occurs in the next and final stanza.
When Richelieu Sharpe excused himself for wearing his best “pants” on the ground that his old ones had “fetched away in the laig,” he was amply justified by the dialect of his place and time. So when little Johnny Medliker complained of the parson that “he hez been nigh onter pullin’ off my arm,” he used the current Illinois equivalent for “nearly.” Mr. Hays’ direction to his daughter, “Ye kin put some things in my carpet-bag agin the time when the sled comes round,” was also strictly in the vernacular.
No verbal error is more common than that of using superfluous prepositions. “To feed up the horses,” for instance, may still be heard almost anywhere in rural New England. On the same principle, Mr. Saunders, in The Transformation of Buckeye Camp, ruefully admits that he and his companion were thrown out of the saloon, “with two shots into us, like hounds ez we were.” This substitution of into for in, though common in the West, is probably now extinct in the Eastern States; but a purist, writing in the year 1814, quoted the following use as current at that time in New York: “I have the rheumatism into my knees.”
A few words were taken by the Pioneers from the Spanish. “Savey,” a corruption of sabe, was one of these, and Bret Harte employed it. “Hedn’t no savey, hed Briggs.”
The wealth of dialect in Bret Harte’s stories is not strange, considering that it was culled from Pioneers who represented every part of the country. But, it may be asked, how could there be such a thing as a California dialect:—all the Pioneers could not have learned to talk alike, coming as they did from every State in the Union! The answer is, first, that, in the main, the dialect of the different States was the same, being derived chiefly from the same source, that is, from England, directly or indirectly; and, secondly, the dialect of what we now call the Middle West—of Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois—tended to predominate on the Pacific Slope, because the Pioneers from that part of the country were in the majority. It is almost impossible to find a dialect word used in one Western State, and not in another.