The Life of Bret Harte, with Some Account of the California Pioneers

by Henry Childs Merwin

CHAPTER V

THE PIONEER MEN AND WOMEN

When Bret Harte first became famous he was accused of misrepresenting Pioneer society. A California writer of great ability—no less a person than Professor Royce, the eminent philosopher—once spoke of the “perverse romanticism” of his tales; and after Mr. Harte’s death these accusations, if they may be called such, were renewed in San Francisco with some bitterness. It is strange that Californians themselves should have been so anxious to strip from their State the distinction which Bret Harte conferred upon it,—so anxious to prove that its heroic age never existed, that life in California has always been just as commonplace, respectable and uninteresting as it is anywhere else in the world.

But, be this as it may, the diaries, letters and narratives written by Pioneers themselves, and, most important of all, the daily newspapers published in San Francisco and elsewhere from 1849 to 1855, fully corroborate Bret Harte’s assertion that he described only what actually occurred. “The author has frequently been asked,” he wrote, “if such and such incidents were real,—if he had ever met such and such characters. To this he must return the one answer, that in only a single instance was he conscious of drawing purely from his imagination and fancy for a character and a logical succession of incidents drawn therefrom. A few weeks after his story was published, he received a letter, authentically signed, correcting some of the minor details of his facts, and inclosing as corroborative evidence a slip from an old newspaper, wherein the main incident of his supposed fanciful creation was recorded with a largeness of statement that far transcended his powers of imagination.” Even that bizarre character, the old Frenchman in A Ship of ’49, was taken absolutely from the life, except that the real man was of English birth. His peculiarities, mental and physical, his dress, his wig, his residence in the old ship were all just as they are described by Bret Harte.[13]

This is not to say that everybody in California was a romantic person, or that life there was simply a succession of startling incidents. Ordinary people were doing ordinary things on the Pacific Slope, just as they did during the worst horrors of the French Revolution. But the exceptional persons that Bret Harte described really existed; and, moreover, they existed in such proportion as to give character and tone to the whole community.

The fact is that Bret Harte only skimmed the cream from the surface. To use his own words again, “The faith, courage, vigor, youth, and capacity for adventure necessary to this emigration produced a body of men as strongly distinctive as were the companions of Jason.”

They were picked men placed in extraordinary circumstances, and how could that combination fail to result in extraordinary characters, deeds, events, and situations! The Forty-Niners,[14] and those who came in the early Fifties, were such men as enlist in the first years of a war. They were young men. Never, since Mediæval days when men began life at twenty and commonly ended it long before sixty, was there so youthful a society. A man of fifty with a gray beard was pointed out in the streets of San Francisco as a curiosity. In the convention to organize the State which met at Monterey, in September, 1849, there were forty-eight delegates, of whom only four were fifty years or more; fifteen were under thirty years of age; twenty-three were between thirty and forty. These were the venerable men of the community, selected to make the laws of the new commonwealth. A company of California emigrants that left Virginia in 1852 consisted wholly of boys under twenty.[15]

The Pioneers were far above the average in vigor and enterprise, and in education as well. One ship, the “Edward Everett,” sailed from Boston in January, 1849, with one hundred and fifty young men on board who owned both ship and cargo; and the distinguished gentleman for whom they had named their ship gave them a case full of books to beguile the tedium of the voyage around Cape Horn. William Grey, who wrote an interesting account of California life,[16] sailed from New York with a ship-load of emigrants. He describes them as a “fine-looking and well-educated body of men,—all young”; and he gives a similar description of the passengers on three other ships that came into the port of Rio Janeiro while he was there. He adds that on his ship there were only three bad characters, a butcher from Washington Market and his two sons. They all perished within a year of their arrival in California. The father died while drunk, one of the sons was hanged, and the other was killed in a street row.

The Pioneers were handsome men.[17] They were tall men. Of the two hundred grown men in the town of Suisun, twenty-one stood over six feet high. Many of the Pioneers were persons for whom a career is not easily found in a conservative, sophisticated society; who, in such a society, fail to be successful as much because of their virtues as of their defects; men who lack that combination of cunning and ferocity which leads most directly to the acquisition of wealth; magnanimous, free-handed, and brave, but unthrifty and incapable of monotonous toil; archaic men, not quite broken in to the modern ideal of drudging at one task for six days in the week and fifty weeks in the year. Who does not know the type! The hero of novels, the idol of mothers, the alternate hope and despair of fathers, the truest of friends, the most ideal and romantic, but perhaps not the most constant of lovers.