We at once stand face to face with the characters of that mining camp. "The assemblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless." We shall remember "Kentuck" and Oakhurst and "Stumpy," christening the baby:—
"'I proclaim you Thomas Luck, according to the laws of the United States and the State of California, so help me God.' It was the first time that the name of the Deity had been otherwise uttered than profanely in the camp."
There are two sentences describing the situation of Roaring Camp:—
"The camp lay in a triangular valley between two hills and a river. The only outlet was a steep trail over the summit of a hill that faced the cabin, now illuminated by the rising moon."
Poe would have approved of the introduction of this bit of description, for it heightens the pathetic effect and focuses attention upon the mother. Even that "steep trail" is so artistically introduced that she
"… might have seen it from the rude bunk whereon she lay,—seen it winding like a silver thread until it was lost in the stars above…. Within an hour she had climbed, as it were, that rugged road that led to the stars, and so passed out of Roaring Camp, its sin and shame, forever."
Bret Harte in a few words relates how these miners reared the child, how they were unconsciously influenced by it, and how one day an expressman rushed into an adjacent village saying:—
"They've a street up there in 'Roaring,' that would lay over any street in Red Dog. They've got vines and flowers round their houses, and they wash themselves twice a day."
He had, as we have seen, something of the remarkable technique of which Poe was a master. The influence of Dickens, especially his sentimentalism, is often apparent in Harte's work. Some have accused him of caricature or exaggeration, but these terms, when applied to his best work, signify little except the use of emphasis and selection, of which Homer and Shakespeare freely availed themselves. The author of The Luck of Roaring Camp, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, and Tennessee's Partner seemed to know almost instinctively what he must emphasize or neglect in order to give his readers a vivid impression of the California argonauts. He mingles humor and pathos, realism and idealism, in a masterly way. No other author has had the necessary dramatic touch to endow those times with such a powerful romantic appeal to our imagination. No one else has rescued them from the oblivion which usually overtakes all transitory stages of human development.
Bret Harte's pages afford us the rare privilege of again communing with genuine primitive feeling, with eternal human qualities, not deflected or warped by convention. He gives us the literature of democracy. In self-forgetfulness, sympathy, love for his kind, Tennessee's partner in his unkempt dress is the peer of any wearer of the broadcloth.