In the sketch entitled My First Book, printed in volume ten of his works, Bret Harte has given some amusing reminiscences concerning the volume of California poems edited by him, and published in 1866. His selection as Editor, he says, “was chiefly owing to the circumstance that I had from the outset, with precocious foresight, confided to the publisher my intention of not putting any of my own verses in the volume. Publishers are appreciative; and a self-abnegation so sublime, to say nothing of its security, was not without its effect.” After narrating his extreme difficulty in reducing the number of his selections from the numerous poets of California, he goes on to describe the reception of the volume. It sold well, the purchasers apparently being amateur poets who were anxious to discover whether they were represented in the book. “People would lounge into the shop, turn over the leaves of other volumes, say carelessly ‘Got a new book of California poetry out, haven’t you?’ purchase it, and quietly depart.”
“There were as yet,” the Editor continues, “no notices from the press; the big dailies were silent; there was something ominous in this calm. Out of it the bolt fell;” and he quotes the following notice from a country paper: “‘The Hogwash and “purp” stuff ladled out from the slop-bucket of Messrs. —— and Co., of ’Frisco, by some lop-eared Eastern apprentice, and called “A Compilation of Californian Verse,” might be passed over, so far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of Red Dog, and a steamboat ticket to the Bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all-sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture “Californian,” it is an insult to the State that has produced the gifted “Yellowhammer,” whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the “Jay Hawk.” That this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the docks and thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make no allusion to California’s greatest bard is rather a confession of his idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.’”
Other criticisms, inspired by like omissions, followed, each one rivalling its predecessor in severity. “The big dailies collected the criticisms and published them in their own columns with the grim irony of exaggerated head-lines. The book sold tremendously on account of this abuse, but I am afraid that the public was disappointed. The fun and interest lay in the criticisms, and not in any pointedly ludicrous quality in the rather commonplace collection ... and I have long since been convinced that my most remorseless critics were not in earnest, but were obeying some sudden impulse, started by the first attacking journal.... It was a large, contagious joke, passed from journal to journal in a peculiar cyclonic Western fashion.”
A year later, not, as Bret Harte himself states, in 1865, but in 1867, the first collection of his own poems was published. The volume was a thin twelvemo, bound in green cloth, with a gilt design of a sail on the cover, the title-page reading as follows: “The Lost Galleon and Other Tales. By Fr. Bret Harte, San Francisco. Tame and Bacon, Printers, 1867.” Most of these poems are contained in the standard edition of his works.
In the same year were published the Condensed Novels and the Bohemian Papers, reprinted from “The Bulletin” and “The Californian,” and making, as the author himself said, “a single, not very plethoric volume, the writer’s first book of prose.” He adds that “during this period,” i. e. from 1862 to 1867, he produced “The Society upon the Stanislaus, and The Story of M’liss,—the first a dialectical poem, the second a Californian romance,—his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility,—a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages of the ‘Overland Monthly,’ he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of The Luck of Roaring Camp, and the poem of the Heathen Chinee.”
The “Overland Monthly” was founded in July, 1868, by Anton Roman, a bookseller on Montgomery Street, and later on Clay Street. Mr. Roman was possessed of that enthusiasm which every new enterprise demands. “He had thought and talked about the Magazine,” he declared, “until it was in his bones.” Bret Harte became the first Editor, and it was he who selected the name. The “Overland” was well printed, on good paper, and the cover was adorned by that historic grizzly bear who, standing on the ties of the newly-laid railroad track, with half-turned body and lowered head, seems prepared to dispute the right of way with the locomotive which might shortly be expected to come screaming down the track.
There was originally no railroad track in the picture, simply the bear; and how the deficiency was supplied is thus explained by Mark Twain in a letter to Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot through Harte’s brain? It was this: When they were trying to decide upon a vignette for the cover of the ‘Overland,’ a grizzly bear (of the arms of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him and the page was printed, with him in it, looking thus:
“As a bear, he was a success—he was a good bear.—But then, it was objected, that he was an objectless bear—a bear that meant nothing in particular, signified nothing,—simply stood there snarling over his shoulder at nothing—and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that—none were satisfied. They hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no point to him. But presently Harte took a pencil and drew these two simple lines under his feet and behold he was a magnificent success!—the ancient symbol of Californian savagery snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive Civilization, the first Overland locomotive!
