When Bret Harte was only eleven years old he wrote a poem called Autumnal Musings which he sent surreptitiously to the “New York Sunday Atlas,” and the poem was published in the next issue. This was a wonderful feat for a boy of that age, and he was naturally elated by seeing his verses in print; but the family critics pointed out their defects with such unpleasant frankness that the conceit of the youthful poet was nipped in the bud. Many years afterward, Bret Harte said with a laugh, “I sometimes wonder that I ever wrote a line of poetry again.” But the discipline was wholesome, and as he grew older his mother took his literary ambitions more seriously. When he was about sixteen, he wrote a long poem called The Hudson River. It was never published, but Mrs. Hart made a careful study of it; and at her son’s request, wrote out her criticisms at length.
It will thus be seen that Bret Harte, as an author, far from being an academic, was strictly a home product. He left school at the age of thirteen and went immediately into a lawyer’s office where he remained about a year, and thence into the counting-room of a merchant. He was self-supporting before he reached the age of sixteen. In 1851, as has already been mentioned, his older sister was married; and in 1853 his mother went to California with a party of relatives and friends, in order to make her home there with her elder son, Henry. She had intended to take with her the other two children, Margaret and Francis Brett; but as the daughter was in school, she left the two behind for a few months, and they followed in February, 1854. They travelled by the Nicaragua route, and after a long, tiresome, but uneventful journey, landed safely in San Francisco.[3] No mention of their arrival was made in the newspapers; no guns were fired; no band played; but the youth of eighteen who thus slipped unnoticed into California was the one person, out of the many thousands arriving in those early years, whose coming was a fact of importance.
CHAPTER III
BRET HARTE’S WANDERINGS IN CALIFORNIA
Bret Harte and his sister arrived at San Francisco in March, 1854, stayed there one night, and went the next morning to Oakland, across the Bay, where their mother and her second husband, Colonel Andrew Williams, were living. In this house the boy remained about a year, teaching for a while, and afterward serving as clerk in an apothecary’s shop. During this year he began his career as a professional writer, contributing some stories and poems to Eastern magazines.
Bret Harte, like Thackeray, was fortunate in his stepfather, and if, according to the accepted story, Thackeray’s stepfather was the prototype of Colonel Newcome, the two men must have had much in common. Colonel Williams was born at Cherry Valley in the State of New York, and was graduated at Union College with the Class of 1819. Henry Hart’s class was that of 1820, but the two young men were friends in college. Colonel Williams had seen much of the world, having travelled extensively in Europe early in the century, and he was a cultivated, well-read man. But he was chiefly remarkable for his high standard of honor, and his amiable, chivalrous nature. He was a gentleman of the old school in the best sense, grave but sympathetic, courtly but kind. His generosity was unbounded. Such a man might appear to have been somewhat out of place in bustling California, but his qualities were appreciated there. He was the first Mayor of Oakland, in the year 1857, and was re-elected the following year. Colonel Williams built a comfortable house in Oakland, one of the first, if not the very first in that city in which laths and plaster were used; but land titles in California were extremely uncertain, and after a long and stubborn contest in the courts, Colonel Williams was dispossessed, and lost the house upon which he had expended much time and money. He then took up his residence in San Francisco, where he lived until his return to the East in the year 1871. His wife, Bret Harte’s mother, died at Morristown, New Jersey, April 4, 1875, and was buried in the family lot at Greenwood, New York. The following year he went back to California for a visit to Bret Harte’s sister, Mrs. Wyman, but soon after his arrival died of pneumonia at the age of seventy-six.
The San Francisco and Oakland papers spoke very highly of Colonel Williams after his death, and one of them closed an account of his life with the following words: “Colonel Williams had that indefinable sweetness of manner which indicates innate refinement and nobility of soul. There was a touch of the antique about him. He seemed a little out of time and place in this hurried age of ours. He belonged to and typified the calmer temper of a former generation. A gentler spirit never walked the earth. He personified all the sweet charities of life. His heart was great, warm and tender, and he died leaving no man in the world his enemy. Colonel Williams was the stepfather of Bret Harte, between whom and himself there existed the most affectionate relations.”
It was during his first year in California that Bret Harte had that gambling experience which he has related in his Bohemian Days in San Francisco, and which throws so much light on his character that it should be quoted here in part at least:—