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

by Henry Childs Merwin

This process required the services of four or five men, and in pursuing it the miner ceased to be a vagrant. He acquired a habitation, more or less permanent, and entered into various relationships with his fellows, which finally included the lynching of a small portion of them. This is the life described by Bret Harte in The Luck of Roaring Camp, Left Out on Lone Star Mountain, and many other stories.

The rocker period lasted only about a year, and was succeeded by that of the sluice, a sort of magnified rocker, fifty or even a hundred feet long. The necessary stream of water was diverted from some river, or was supplied by an artificial reservoir. It was the bursting of such a reservoir, as the Reader may remember, that precipitated the romance in the life of the Youngest Miss Piper.

But the evolution of the industry was not yet complete. The next step was to explore the bed of a river by laboriously turning the stream aside. This was accomplished by constructing a dam across the river, and directing the water into a canal or flume prepared for it, thus leaving the bed of the river bare, perhaps for miles. These operations required the labor of many hands, and were extremely arduous and difficult. The dam could be built, of course, only in the dry season, and the first autumnal rains would be sure to send the stream back to its old channel. The coming of the rainy season in California is extremely uncertain, and river-bed mining was correspondingly precarious. Sometimes, great perseverance in these attempts was rewarded by great success. In November, 1849, the Swett’s Bar Company, composed of seventy miners, succeeded in damming and diverting the Sonora River after fifteen days of extreme exertion. Five hours later the dam was swept away by a flood. The following summer the same company, reduced to sixty members, constructed a second and larger dam, which required sixty-nine days’ labor. This also was swept away on the very day of its completion. But the miners did not give up. The next morning they began anew, the directors leading the way into the now ice-cold water, and the rest of the company following, some fairly shrieking with the contact. The dam was rebuilt as quickly as possible,—and, again, the river brushed it aside. The third year, a remnant of the company, some twenty-seven stubborn souls, for the fourth time completed a dam. This time it stood fast, and before the rains set in the persevering miners had obtained gold enough to make them all rich.

Men who had struggled, side by side, through such difficulties and disappointments were bound by no common tie,—and the tie was a still closer one when, as in the first idyllic days, the partnership consisted of two members only.

Bret Harte has devoted to friendship four of his best stories, namely, Tennessee’s Partner, Captain Jim’s Friend, In the Tules, Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy. The subject is touched upon also in the story called Under the Eaves.

Unquestionably the best of these stories is the first one, and if we should also set this down as the best of all Bret Harte’s stories, we could not go far wrong. The author himself is said to have preferred it. It is a complete tale and a dramatic one, and yet it has the simplicity of an incident. There is not, one makes bold to say, a superfluous word in it, and perhaps only one word which an exacting reader could wish to change. The background of scenery that the story requires is touched in with that deep but restrained feeling for nature, with that realization of its awful beauty, when contrasted with the life of man, which is a peculiar trait of modern literature. The Reader will remember that rough, mean, kerosene-lighted, upper room in which the trial took place. “And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter, passionless stars.”

The pathos of Tennessee’s Partner consists chiefly in the fact that Tennessee, so far as we can judge him, was unworthy of his partner’s devotion. He was courageous and good-humored, to be sure, but he was a robber, something of a drunkard, and inconsiderate enough to have run off with his partner’s wife. Had Tennessee been a model of all the virtues, his partner’s affection for him would have been a bestowal only of what was due. It would not have been, as it was in fact, the spontaneous outpouring of a generous and affectionate character. Whether we consider that the partner saw in Tennessee something which was really there, some divine spark or quality, known only to the God who created and to the friend who loved him, or that in Tennessee he beheld an ideal of his own creation, something different from the real man,—in either case his affection is equally disinterested and noble.

Those who do not give the first place to Tennessee’s Partner would probably assign it either to The Luck of Roaring Camp or The Outcasts of Poker Flat; but in both of those stories the element of accident is utilized, though not improbably. It was more or less an accident that the Luck was swept away by a flood; it was an accident that the Outcasts were banished on the eve of a storm. But in Tennessee’s Partner, there is no accident. Given the characters, all the rest followed inevitably.

An acute, if somewhat degenerate critic, Mr. James Douglas, writing in the “Bookman,”[69] presents the case against the Luck and the Outcasts in its most extreme form: “There is no doubt that we have outgrown the art which relies on picturesque lay figures grouped against a romantic background.... In Bret Harte’s best stories the presence of the scene painter, the stage carpenter and the stage manager jars on our consciousness.... Bret Harte takes Cherokee Sal, an Indian prostitute, puts her in a degraded mining settlement, and sanctifies her by motherhood. That is good art. He lets her die, while her child survives. That is not so good. It is the pathos of accident. He sends the miners in to see the child. That is good art. He makes the presence of the child work a revolution in the camp. Strong men wash their faces and wear clean shirts in order to be worthy of the child. That is not good art.”

But here let us interrupt Mr. Douglas for a moment. It should be remembered that the clean faces and clean shirts were not spontaneous improvements. “Stumpy imposed a kind of quarantine upon those who aspired to the honor and privilege of holding the Luck.” Moreover, the miners of Roaring Camp, like the miners generally in California, were no strangers to clean shirts or clean faces. With few exceptions, they had been brought up to observe the decencies of life, and if, in the wild freedom of the mining camp, some of those decencies had been cast off, it was not difficult to reclaim them.