[It is rumored that the proprietors of a well-known museum in this city have made arrangements with Dr. X—— to exhibit to the public the singular cast which Mr. Escott deposited with him. So extraordinary a history cannot fail to attract universal attention.]
FRANCIS BRET HARTE
1839–1902
Bret Harte will always be associated with the California of the “forty-niners.” Gold digger, teacher, express messenger by turns, he was setting up his own sketches among the compositors of the San Francisco Golden Era while still in his ’teens. The sketches brought him into the editorial room, and then to his own chair of the Weekly Californian, where he vindicated his title by the clever Condensed Novels. A secretaryship in the United States Branch Mint gave him leisure to gain wide popularity in verse. On this he mounted to his height. The year 1868 is cardinal in his life and in the history of American literature; for in that year was founded The Overland Monthly; and the young man of the hour was made its editor. Its second number (August, 1868) contained the most widely known, perhaps, of all American short stories, The Luck of Roaring Camp. The three years of his editorship include his most popular work, and perhaps his most enduring. He made the whole country laugh and weep by his verse, he established a magazine of solid merit, and he gave new life to the short story.
To this growth his removal to the East in 1871 put a period. Continuing his production pretty steadily on the Atlantic seaboard, in his consulships at Crefeld (1878) and at Glasgow (1880), and finally during seventeen years in London (1885–1902), he hardly advanced in art. That his art survived the transplanting is sufficiently proved by the long list of his books; but it did not thrive. His constant recurrence to the old themes suggests that he missed the strong western soil.
The familiar tale reprinted here is typical of Bret Harte’s field, geographical and artistic. His local color no longer keeps the separate value attached to it alike by many of his admirers and by himself. The California of his stories, sometimes drawn to the life, as in Johnson’s Old Woman, is often that California, made of stock desperadoes, stage-drivers, and gulches, which is the delight of melodrama. Melodramatic Harte is incorrigibly. Mrs. Skaggs is the Dumas adventuress; and the people of her story can hardly be seen off the boards. The Iliad of Sandy Bar shows that cheap shifting from farce humor to false pathos which catches the throats of the gallery. Though in fact he had the knowledge of actual contact, he saw California as his master Dickens saw London, through a haze of romance. The stories of both are woven from the suggestions of actual places; but in the weaving the actuality has faded.
Rather Bret Harte’s best stories prevail by something not extraneous, by focusing the primary emotions on a single imaginative situation. Poker Flat is almost allegory—the gambler, the thief, the harlot, the innocents, not so artificially grouped as in Hawthorne’s Seven Vagabonds, but quite as artfully. It is convincing, not as a transcript of pioneer society, but as a unified conception of unhindered human emotions. The same is true of the famous Luck of Roaring Camp, of Tennessee’s Partner, and of his best work in general. For all its scientific aloofness and worship of fact, is La maison Tellier ultimately as human as The Outcasts of Poker Flat?
THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT
[From “The Overland Monthly,” January, 1869; copyright, 1871, by Fields, Osgood & Co.; 1899, by Bret Harte; reprinted here by special arrangement with Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., authorized publishers of all Bret Harte’s works]
As Mr. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker Flat on the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850, he was conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. Two or three men, conversing earnestly together, ceased as he approached, and exchanged significant glances. There was a Sabbath lull in the air, which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous.
Mr. Oakhurst’s calm, handsome face betrayed small concern of these indications. Whether he was conscious of any predisposing cause, was another question. “I reckon they’re after somebody,” he reflected; “likely it’s me.” He returned to his pocket the handkerchief with which he had been whipping away the red dust of Poker Flat from his neat boots, and quietly discharged his mind of any further conjecture.