This event ended his life as a wanderer, and he went back to San Francisco. There is not the slightest reason to think that during this period Bret Harte had any notion of describing California life in fiction or otherwise; and yet, if that had been his object, he could not have ordered his movements more wisely. He had lived on the seacoast and in the interior; he had seen cities, ranches, villages, and mines; he had been tutor, school-teacher, drug clerk, express messenger, printer, and editor. The period was less than two years, and yet he had accumulated a store of facts, impressions and images sufficient to last him a lifetime. He was of a most receptive nature; he was at a receptive age; the world was new to him, and he lived in it and observed it with all the zest of youth, of inexperience, of health and genius.
CHAPTER IV
BRET HARTE IN SAN FRANCISCO
Bret Harte returned to San Francisco in 1857, and his first occupation was that of setting type in the office of the “Golden Era.” To this paper his sister, Mrs. Wyman, had been a contributor for some time, and it was through her that Bret Harte obtained employment on it as a printer.
The “Golden Era” had been established by young men. “It was,” writes Mr. Stoddard, “the cradle and the grave of many a high hope. There was nothing to be compared with it on that side of the Mississippi; and though it could point with pride—it never failed to do so—to a somewhat notable list of contributors, it had always the fine air of the amateur, and was most complacently patronizing. The very pattern of paternal patronage was amiable Joe Lawrence, its Editor. He was an inveterate pipe-smoker, a pillar of cloud, as he sat in his editorial chair, an air of literary mystery enveloping him. He spoke as an oracle, and I remember his calling my attention to a certain anonymous contribution just received, and nodding his head prophetically, for he already had his eye on the fledgling author, a young compositor on the floor above. It was Bret Harte’s first appearance in the ‘Golden Era,’ and doubtless Lawrence encouraged him as he had encouraged me when, out of the mist about him, he handed me secretly, and with a glance of caution—for his business partner, the marble-hearted, sat at his ledger not far away—he handed me a folded paper on which he had written this startling legend! ‘Write some prose for the “Golden Era,” and I will give you a dollar a column.’”
BRET HARTE IN 1861
