THE LIFE OF BRET HARTE

The Gale Library of Lives and Letters
American Writers Series

THE LIFE OF
BRET HARTE

WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE
CALIFORNIA PIONEERS

BY

HENRY CHILDS MERWIN

WITH PORTRAITS
AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1911

REPUBLISHED BY GALE RESEARCH COMPANY, BOOK TOWER, DETROIT, 1967

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY HENRY CHILDS MERWIN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published September 1911

Library of Congress Card Number: 67-23887

TO
Anne Amory Merwin
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

PREFACE

It is a pleasure for the Author of this book to record his indebtedness to others in preparing it. Mrs. T. Edgar Pemberton, and Messrs. C. Arthur Pearson, Limited, the publishers of Pemberton’s Life of Bret Harte, have kindly consented to the quotation from that interesting book of several letters by Mr. Harte that throw much light upon his character. Similar permission was given by Mr. Howells and his publishers, the Messrs. Harper and Brothers, to make use of Mr. Howells’ account of Bret Harte’s visit to him at Cambridge; and of this permission the Author has availed himself with a freedom which the Reader at least will not regret.

Professor Raymond Weeks, President of the American Dialect Society, Professor C. Alphonso Smith, Mr. Albert Matthews, and others whose names are mentioned on page 326, have lent their aid in regard to the Pioneer language, and Ernest Knaufft, Bret Harte’s nephew, has not only furnished the Author with some information about his uncle’s early life, but he has also read the proofs, and has made more than one valuable suggestion which the Author was glad to adopt. It is only fair to add that Mr. Knaufft does not in all respects agree with the Author’s estimate of Bret Harte’s character. Another critic, Prescott Hartford Belknap, has put his fine literary taste at the service of the book, and has saved its writer from some mistakes which he now shudders to contemplate.

Most of all, however, the Author is indebted to his accomplished friend, Edwin Munroe Bacon, who, though much engaged with important literary work of his own, has read the book twice, once in MS. and once in print,—a signal, not to say painful proof of friendship which the Author acknowledges with gratitude, and almost with shame.

H. C. M.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LIFE OF BRET HARTE

BRET HARTE

CHAPTER I

BRET HARTE’S ANCESTRY

Francis Brett Harte was born at Albany in the State of New York, on August twenty-fifth, 1836. By his relatives and early friends he was called Frank; but soon after beginning his career as an author in San Francisco he signed his name as “Brett,” then as “Bret,” and finally as “Bret Harte.” “Bret Harte,” therefore, is in some degree a nom de guerre, and it was commonly supposed at first, both in the Eastern States and in England, to be wholly such. Our great New England novelist had a similar experience, for “Nathaniel Hawthorne” was long regarded by most of his readers as an assumed name, happily chosen to indicate the quaint and poetic character of the tales to which it was signed. Bret Harte’s father was Henry Hart;[1] but before we trace his ancestry, let us endeavor to see how he looked. Fanny Kemble met him at Lenox, in the year 1875, and was much impressed by his appearance. In a letter to a relative she wrote: “He reminded me a good deal of our old pirate and bandit friend, Trelawney, though the latter was an almost orientally dark-complexioned man, and Mr. Bret Harte was comparatively fair. They were both tall, well-made men of fine figure; both, too, were handsome, with a peculiar expression of face which suggested small sucsuccess to any one who might engage in personal conflict with them.”

In reality Bret Harte was not tall, though others beside Mrs. Kemble thought him to be so; his height was five feet, eight and a half inches. His face was smooth and regular, without much color; the chin firm and well rounded; the nose straight and rather large, “the nose of generosity and genius”; the under-lip having what Mr. Howells called a “fascinating, forward thrust.”

The following description dates from the time when he left California: “He was a handsome, distinguished-looking man, and although his oval face was slightly marred by scars of small-pox, and his abundant dark hair was already streaked with gray, he carried his slight, upright figure with a quiet elegance that would have made an impression, even when the refinement of face, voice and manner had not been recognized.”

Mr. Howells says of him at the same period: “He was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time could say to him, ‘Mr. Harte, aren’t you afraid to go about in the cars so recklessly when there is this scare about small-pox?’ ‘No! madam!’ he said, in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by pseudo-pathos, ‘I bear a charmèd life.’”

Almost every one who met Bret Harte was struck by his low, rich, well-modulated voice. Mr. Howells speaks of “the mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other.” His handwriting was small, firm and graceful.

Chance acquaintances made in England were sometimes surprised at Bret Harte’s appearance. They had formed, writes Mme. Van de Velde, “a vague, intangible idea of a wild, reckless Californian, impatient of social trammels, whose life among the Argonauts must have fashioned him after a type differing widely from the reality. These idealists were partly disappointed, partly relieved, when their American writer turned out to be a quiet, low-voiced, easy-mannered, polished gentleman, who smilingly confessed that precisely because he had roughed it a good deal in his youth he was inclined to enjoy the comforts and avail himself of the facilities of an older civilization, when placed within his reach.”

Bret Harte’s knowledge of these disappointed expectations may have suggested the plot of that amusing story Their Uncle from California, the hero of which presents a similar contrast to the barbaric ideal which had been formed by his Eastern relatives.

The photographs of Bret Harte, taken at various periods in his life, reveal great changes, apart from those of age. The first one, at seventeen, shows an intellectual youth, very mature for his age, with a fine forehead, the hair parted at one side, and something of a rustic appearance. In the next picture, taken at the age of thirty-five or thereabout, we see a determined-looking man, with slight side-whiskers, a drooping mustache, and clothes a little “loud.” Five years afterward there is another photograph in which the whiskers have disappeared, the hair seems longer and more curly, the clothes are unquestionably “loud,” and the picture, taken altogether, has a slight tinge of Bohemian-like vulgarity. In the later photographs the hair is shorter, and parted in the middle, the mustache subdued, the dress handsome and in perfect taste, and the whole appearance is that of a refined, sophisticated, aristocratic man of the world, dignified, and yet perfectly simple, unaffected and free from self-consciousness.

In a measure Bret Harte seems to have undergone that process of development which Mr. Henry James has described in “The American.” The Reader may remember how the American (far from a typical one, by the way) began with sky-blue neckties and large plaids, and ended with clothes and adornments of the most chastened, correct and elegant character. Actors are apt to go through a similar process. The first great exponent of the “suppressed emotion” school began, and in California too, as it happened, by splitting the ears of the groundlings and sawing the air with both arms.

Bret Harte had something of a Hebrew look, and not unnaturally so, for he came of mixed English, Dutch and Hebrew stock. To be exact, he was half English, one quarter Dutch, and one quarter Hebrew. The Hebrew strain also was derived from English soil, so that with the exception of a Dutch great-grandmother, all his ancestors emigrated from England, and not very remotely.

The Hebrew in the pedigree was his paternal grandfather, Bernard Hart. Mr. Hart was born in London, on Christmas Day, 1763 or 1764, but as a boy of thirteen he went out to Canada, where his relatives were numerous. These Canadian Harts were a marked family, energetic, forceful, strong-willed, prosperous, given to hospitality, warm-hearted, and pleasure-loving. One of Bernard Hart’s Canadian cousins left behind him at his death no less than fourteen families, all established in the world with a good degree of comfort, and with a sufficient degree of respectability. Now the impropriety, to say nothing about the extravagance, of maintaining fourteen separate families is so great that no Reader of this book (the author feels confident) need be warned against it; and yet it indicates a large, free-handed, lordly way of doing things. It was no ordinary man, and no ordinary strain of blood that could produce such a record.

Bernard Hart remained but three years in Canada, and in 1780 moved to New York where, although scarcely more than a boy, he acted as the business representative of his Canadian kinsfolk. The Canadian Harts had many commercial and social relations with the metropolis, and there was much “cousining,” much going back and forth between the two places. Bernard Hart lived in New York for the rest of his life, and attained a high rank in the community. “Towering aloft among the magnates of the city of the last and present century,” writes a local historian, “is Bernard Hart.” He was successful in business, very active in social and charitable affairs, and prominent in the synagogue. In 1802 he formed a partnership with Leonard Lispenard, under the name of Lispenard and Hart. They were commission merchants and auctioneers, and did a large business. In 1803 the firm was dissolved, and Mr. Hart continued in trade by himself. In 1831 he became Secretary to the New York Stock Exchange Board, and held that office for twenty-two years, resigning at the age of eighty-nine. In 1795, the year of the yellow fever plague, Bernard Hart rendered heroic service, as is testified by a contemporary annalist. “Mr. Hart and Mr. Pell, who kept store at 108 Market Street, a few doors from Mr. Hart, were unceasing in their exertions. Night and day, hardly giving themselves time to sleep or eat, they were among the sick and dying, relieving their wants. They were angels of mercy in those awful days of the first great pestilence.”

Bernard Hart was also a military man, and in 1797 became quartermaster of a militia regiment, composed wholly of citizens of New York. That he was a “clubable” man, too, is very apparent. It was an era of clubs, and Bernard Hart founded the association known as “The Friary.” It met on the first and third Sundays of every month at 56 Pine Street. He was also President of The House of Lords, a merchants’ club, which met at Baker’s City Tavern every week-day night, at 7 o’clock, adjourning at 10 o’clock. Each member was allowed a limited quantity of liquor, business was discussed, contracts were made, and sociability was promoted. He was, too, a member of the St. George Society, and is said, also, to have been a Mason, belonging to Holland Lodge No. 8, of which John Jacob Astor was master in 1798. Bernard Hart was a devout Jew, and his name frequently appears in the records of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, known as the Congregation Shearith Israel, the first synagogue established in New York. He lived in various houses,—at 86 Water Street, at 24 Cedar Street, at 12 Lispenard Street, at 20 Varick Street, and finally at 23 White Street. A picture of him still hangs in the counting-room of Messrs. Arthur Lipper and Co., in Broad Street.

How came it that this orthodox Jew, this pillar of the synagogue, married a Christian woman? The romance, if there was one, is imperfectly preserved even in the family traditions. It is known only that in 1799 Bernard Hart married Catharine Brett, a woman of good family; that after living together for a year or less, they separated; that there was one son, Henry Hart, born February 1, 1800, who lived with his mother, and who became the father of Bret Harte.

A few years later, in 1806, Bernard Hart married Zipporah Seixas, one of the sixteen children, eight sons and eight daughters, born to Benjamin Mendez Seixas. These young women were noted for their beauty and amiability, and so strong was the impression which they produced that it lasted even until the succeeding generation. The marriage ceremony was performed by Gershom Mendez Seixas, a brother of the bride’s father, and rabbi of the synagogue already mentioned. From this marriage came numerous sons and daughters, whose careers were honorable. Emanuel B. Hart was a merchant and broker, an alderman, a member of Congress in 1851 and 1852, and Surveyor of the Port of New York from 1859 to 1861. Benjamin I. Hart was a broker in New York. David Hart, a teller in the Pacific Bank, fought gallantly at the battle of Bull Run and was badly wounded there. Theodore and Daniel Hart were merchants in New York.

BERNARD HART
Bret Harte’s Grandfather

One of Bernard Hart’s sons by the Hebrew wife was named Henry. He was born in 1817, and died of consumption in his father’s house in White Street on November 16, 1850. He was unmarried. Bernard Hart himself died in 1855, at the age of ninety-one. His wife was then living at the age of seventy-nine.

None of his descendants on the Hebrew side knew of his marriage to Catharine Brett or of the existence of his son, the first Henry Hart, until some years after Bret Harte’s death. It seems almost incredible that this Hebrew merchant, prominent as he was in business and social life, in clubs and societies, in the militia and the synagogue, should have been able to keep the fact of his first marriage so secret that it remained a secret for a hundred years; it seems very unlikely that a woman of good English birth and family should in that era have married a Jew; it is highly improbable that a father should give to a son by a second marriage the same name already given to his son by a former marriage. And yet all these things are indisputable facts. There are members of Bret Harte’s family still living who remember Bernard Hart, and his occasional visits to the family of Henry Hart, his son by Catharine Brett, whom he assisted with money and advice so long as he lived. Bret Harte himself remembered being taken to the New York Stock Exchange by his father, who there pointed out to him his grandfather, Bernard Hart. It may be added that between the descendants of Bernard Hart and Catharine Brett and those of Bernard Hart and Zipporah Seixas there is a marked resemblance.

How far was the venerable Jew from suspecting that the one fact in his life which he was so anxious to conceal was the very fact which would rescue his name from oblivion, and preserve it so long as English literature shall exist! Even if the marriage to Catharine Brett, a Christian woman, had been known it would not, according to Jewish law, have invalidated the second marriage, but it would doubtless have prevented that marriage. What rendered the long concealment possible was, of course, the deep gulf which then separated Jew from Gentile. Catharine Brett had been warned by her father that he would cast her off if she married the Jew; and this threat was fulfilled. Thenceforth, she lived a lonely and secluded life, supported, it is believed, by her husband, but having no other relation with him. The marriage was so improbable, so ill-assorted, so productive of unhappiness, and yet so splendid in its ultimate results, that it seems almost atheistic to ascribe it to chance. Is the world governed in that haphazard manner!

But who was this unfortunate Catharine Brett? She was a granddaughter of Roger Brett, an Englishman, and, it is supposed, a lieutenant in the British Navy, who first appears in New York, about the year 1700, as a friend of Lord Cornbury, then Governor of the Province. The coat of arms which Roger Brett brought over, and which is still preserved on a pewter placque, is identical with that borne by Judge, Sir Balliol Brett, before his elevation to the peerage as Viscount Esher. Roger Brett was a vestryman of Trinity Church from 1703 to 1706. In November, 1703, he married Catharyna Rombout, daughter of Francis Rombout, who was one of the early and successful merchants in the city of New York. Her mother, Helena Teller, daughter of William Teller, a captain in the Indian wars, was married three times, Francis Rombout being her third husband. Schuyler Colfax, once Vice-President of the United States, was descended from her. Francis Rombout was born at Hasselt in Belgium, and came to New Amsterdam while it still belonged to the Dutch. He was an elder in the Dutch Church, served as lieutenant in an expedition against the Swedes, was Schepen under the Dutch municipal government, alderman under the reorganized British government, and, in 1679, became the twelfth Mayor of New York.

Francis Rombout left to his daughter, Roger Brett’s wife, an immense estate on the Hudson River, which included the Fishkills, and consisted chiefly of forest land. There, in 1709, the young couple built for their home a manor house, which is still standing and is occupied by a descendant of Roger Brett, to whom it has come down in direct line through the female branch. A few years later, at least before 1720, Roger Brett was drowned at the mouth of Fishkill Creek in the Hudson River. Catharyna, his widow, survived him for many years. She was a woman of marked character and ability, known through all that region as Madame Brett. She administered her large estate, leased and sold much land to settlers, controlled the Indians who were numerous, superintended a mill to which both Dutchess County and Orange County sent their grist, owned the sloops which were the only carriers between this outpost of the Colony and the city of New York, and was one of the founders of the Fishkill Dutch Church. In that church, a tablet to her memory was recently erected by the Rombout-Brett Association, formed a few years ago by her descendants. The tablet is inscribed as follows:—

In memory of Catharyna Brett, widow of Lieutenant Roger Brett, R.N., and daughter of Francis Rombout, a grantee of Rombout patent, born in the city of New York 1687, died in Rombout Precinct, Fishkill, 1764. To this church she was a liberal contributor, and underneath its pulpit her body is interred. This tablet was erected by her descendants and others interested in the Colonial history of Fishkill, A. D. 1904.

Roger Brett had four sons, of whom two died young and unmarried, and two, Francis and Robert, married, and left many children. Whether the Catharine Brett who married Bernard Hart was descended from Francis or from Robert is not certainly known. Francis Brett’s wife was a descendant of Cornelius Van Wyck, one of the earliest settlers on Long Island. Robert Brett’s wife was a Miss Dubois.

Such was the ancestry of Bret Harte’s paternal grandmother. Her son, Henry Hart,[2] lived with her until, on May 5, 1817, he entered Union College, Schenectady, as a member of the class of 1820. He remained in college until the end of his Senior year, and passed all his examinations for graduation, but failed to receive his degree because a college bill amounting to ninety dollars had not been paid. The previous bills were paid by his mother, “Catharine Hart.” Alas! the non-payment of this bill was an omen of the future. Henry Hart and his illustrious son were both the reverse of thrifty or economical. Money seemed to fly away from them; they had no capacity for keeping it, and no discretion in spending it. Unpaid bills were the bane of their existence. Henry Hart’s improvidence is ascribed, in part, by those who knew him, to the irregular manner in which his father supplied him with money, Bernard Hart being sometimes very lavish and sometimes very parsimonious with his son.

Henry Hart was a well-built, athletic-looking man, with rather large features, and dark hair and complexion. His height was five feet ten inches, and his weight one hundred and seventy pounds. He was an accomplished scholar, speaking French, Spanish and Italian, and being well versed in Greek and Latin. He passed his short life as school-teacher, tutor, lecturer and translator.

On May 16, 1830, he married Elizabeth Rebecca, daughter of Henry Philip Ostrander, an “upstate” surveyor and farmer, who belonged to a prominent Dutch family which settled at Kingston on the Hudson in 1659. It will be remembered that the hero of Bret Harte’s story, Two Americans, is Major Philip Ostrander. The mother of Elizabeth Ostrander, Henry Hart’s wife, was Abigail Truesdale, of English descent. Henry Hart was brought up by his mother in the Dutch Reformed faith, but soon after leaving college, owing to what influence is unknown, he became a Catholic, and remained such until his death. His wife was an Episcopalian, and his children were of that, if of any persuasion.

In 1833 we find Henry Hart at Albany, and there he remained until 1836, the year of Bret Harte’s birth. In 1833 and 1834, he was instructor in the Albany Female Academy, a girls’ school, famous in its day, where he taught reading and writing, rhetoric and mathematics. Early in 1835 he left the Academy, and for two years he conducted a private school of his own at 15 Columbia Street, but this appears not to have been successful, for he ceased to be a resident of the city in the latter part of 1836, or early in 1837. One event in Henry Hart’s life at Albany is significant. In December, 1833, a meeting was held in the Mayor’s Court Room to organize a Young Men’s Association, which proved to be a great success, and which has played an important part in the life of the city down to the present day. Henry Hart, though a comparative stranger in Albany, was chosen to explain the objects of the Association at this meeting, and at the next meeting he was elected one of the Managers. When Bret Harte came East from California, he went to Albany and addressed the Association, upon the invitation of its members.

After leaving Albany the family led an unsettled, uncomfortable life, going from place to place, with occasional returns to the home of an Ostrander relative in Hudson Street in the city of New York. The late Mr. A. V. S. Anthony, the well-known engraver, was a neighbor of Bret Harte in Hudson Street, and played and fought with him there, when they were both about seven or eight years old. Afterward they met in California, and again in London. From Albany the Henry Hart family went to Hudson, where Mr. Hart acted as principal of an academy; and subsequently they lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey; in Philadelphia; in Providence, Rhode Island; in Lowell, Massachusetts; in Boston and elsewhere.

A few years before her death Mrs. Hart read the life of Bronson Alcott, and when she laid down the book she remarked that the troubles and privations endured by the Alcott family bore a striking resemblance to those which she and her children had undergone. Some want of balance in Henry Hart’s character prevented him, notwithstanding his undoubted talents, his enthusiasm, and his accomplishments, from ever obtaining any material success in life, or even a home for his family and himself. But he was a man of warm impulses and deep feeling. When Henry Clay was nominated for the Presidency in 1844, Henry Hart espoused his cause almost with fury. He gave up all other employment to electioneer in behalf of the Whig candidate, and the defeat of his idol was a crushing blow from which he never recovered. It was the first time that a really great man, as Clay certainly was, had been outvoted in a contest for the Presidency by a commonplace man, like Polk; and Clay’s defeat was regarded by his adherents not only as a hideous injustice, but as a national calamity. It is not given to every one to take any impersonal matter so seriously as Henry Hart took the defeat of his political chieftain; and his death a year later, in 1845, may justly be regarded as a really noble ending to a troubled and unsuccessful life.

CHAPTER II

BRET HARTE’S BOYHOOD

After the death of Henry Hart, his widow remained with her children in New York and Brooklyn until 1853. They were supported in part by her family, the Ostranders, and in part by Bernard Hart. There were four children, two sons and two daughters. Eliza, the eldest, who is still living, and to whom the author is indebted for information about the family, was married in 1851 to Mr. F. F. Knaufft, and her life has been passed mainly in New York and New Jersey. Mr. Ernest Knaufft, editor of the “Art Student,” and well known as a critic and writer, is her son. Unfortunately, Mrs. Knaufft’s house was burned in 1868, and with it many letters and papers relating to her father and his parents, and also the MSS. of various lectures delivered by him.

The younger daughter, Margaret B., went to California with Bret Harte, and preceded him as a contributor of stories and sketches to the “Golden Era,” and other papers in San Francisco. She married Mr. B. H. Wyman, and is still a resident of California. Bret Harte’s sisters are women of distinguished appearance, and remarkable for force of character.

Bret Harte’s only brother, Henry, had a short but striking career, which displayed, even more perhaps than did the career of Bret Harte himself, that intensity which seems to have been their chief inheritance from the Hebrew strain. The following account of him is furnished by Mrs. Knaufft:

“My brother Henry was two years and six months older than his brother Francis Brett Harte. Henry began reading history when he was six years old, and from that time until he was twelve years of age, he read history, ancient and modern, daily, sometimes only one hour, at other times from two to three hours. What interested him was the wars; he would read for two or three hours, and then if a battle had been won by his favorite warriors, he would spring to his feet, shouting, ‘Victory is ours,’ repeatedly. He would read lying on the floor, and often we would say ridiculous and provoking things about him, and sometimes pull his hair, but he never paid the slightest attention to us, being perfectly oblivious of his surroundings. His memory was phenomenal. He read Froissart’s Chronicles when he was about ten years old, and could repeat page after page accurately. One evening an old professor was talking with my mother about some event in ancient history, and he mentioned the date of a decisive battle. Henry, who was listening intently, said, ‘I beg pardon, Professor, you are wrong. That battle was fought on such a date.’ The professor was astonished. ‘Where did you hear about that battle?’ he asked. ‘I read that history last year,’ replied Henry.

“When the boy was twelve years old, he came home from school one day, and rushing into his mother’s room, shouted, ‘War is declared! War is declared!’ ‘What in the name of common sense has that got to do with you?’ asked my mother. ‘Mother,’ said Henry, ‘I am going to fight for my country; that is what I was created for.’

“After some four or five months of constant anxiety, caused by Henry’s offering himself to every captain whose ship was going to or near Mexico, a friend of my mother’s told Lieutenant Benjamin Dove of the Navy about Henry, and he became greatly interested, and finally, through his efforts, Henry was taken on his ship. Henry was so small that his uniform had to be made for him. The ship went ashore on the Island of Eleuthera, to the great delight of my brother, who wrote his mother a startling account of the shipwreck. I cannot remember whether the ship was able to go on her voyage, or whether the men were all transferred to Commander Tatnall’s ship the ‘Spitfire.’ I know that Henry was on Commander Tatnall’s ship at the Bombardment of Vera Cruz, and was in the fort or forts at Tuxpan, where the Commander and Henry were both wounded. Commander Tatnall wrote my mother that when Henry was wounded, he exclaimed, ‘Thank God, I am shot in the face,’ and that when he inquired for Henry, he was told that he was hiding because he did not want his wound dressed. When the Commander found Henry, he asked him why he did not want his wound dressed. With tears in his eyes Henry said, ‘Because I’m afraid it won’t show any scar if the surgeon dresses it.’

“When my brother returned from Mexico, he became very restless. The sea had cast its spell about him, and finally a friend, captain of a ship, took Henry on a very long voyage, going around Cape Horn to California. When they arrived at San Francisco, my brother, who was then just sixteen, was taken in charge by a relative. I never heard of his doing anything remarkable during his short life. As the irony of fate would have it, he died suddenly from pneumonia, just before the Civil War.”

Bret Harte was equally precocious, and he was precocious even in respect to the sense of humor, which commonly requires some little experience for its development. It is a family tradition that he burlesqued the rather bald language of his primer at the age of five; and his sisters distinctly remember that, a year later, he came home from a school exhibition, and made them scream with laughter by mimicking the boy who spoke “My name is Norval.” He was naturally a very quiet, studious child; and this tendency was increased by ill health. From his sixth to his tenth year, he was unable to lead an active life. At the age of six he was reading Shakspere and Froissart, and at seven he took up “Dombey and Son,” and so began his acquaintance with that author who was to influence him far more than any other. From Dickens he proceeded to Fielding, Goldsmith, Smollett, Cervantes, and Washington Irving. During an illness of two months, when he was fourteen years old, he learned to read Greek sufficiently well to astonish his mother.

If the Hart family resembled the Alcott family in the matter of misfortunes and privations, so it did, also, in its intellectual atmosphere. Mrs. Hart shared her husband’s passion for literature; and she had a keen, critical faculty, to which, the family think, Bret Harte was much indebted for the perfection of his style. Henry Hart had accumulated a library surprisingly large for a man of his small means, and the whole household was given to the reading not simply of books, but of the best books, and to talking about them. It was a household in which the literary second-rate was unerringly, and somewhat scornfully, discriminated from the first-rate.

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:—

“I was watching roulette one evening, intensely absorbed in the mere movement of the players. Either they were so preoccupied with the game, or I was really older looking than my actual years, but a bystander laid his hand familiarly on my shoulder, and said, as to an ordinary habitué, ‘Ef you’re not chippin’ in yourself, pardner, s’pose you give me a show.’ Now, I honestly believe that up to that moment I had no intention, nor even a desire, to try my own fortune. But in the embarrassment of the sudden address I put my hand in my pocket, drew out a coin and laid it, with an attempt at carelessness, but a vivid consciousness that I was blushing, upon a vacant number. To my horror I saw that I had put down a large coin—the bulk of my possessions! I did not flinch, however; I think any boy who reads this will understand my feeling; it was not only my coin but my manhood at stake.... I even affected to be listening to the music. The wheel spun again; the game was declared, the rake was busy, but I did not move. At last the man I had displaced touched me on the arm and whispered, ‘Better make a straddle and divide your stake this time.’ I did not understand him, but as I saw he was looking at the board, I was obliged to look, too. I drew back dazed and bewildered! Where my coin had lain a moment before was a glittering heap of gold.

“... ‘Make your game, gentlemen,’ said the croupier monotonously. I thought he looked at me—indeed, everybody seemed to be looking at me—and my companion repeated his warning. But here I must again appeal to the boyish reader in defence of my idiotic obstinacy. To have taken advice would have shown my youth. I shook my head—I could not trust my voice. I smiled, but with a sinking heart, and let my stake remain. The ball again sped round the wheel, and stopped. There was a pause. The croupier indolently advanced his rake and swept my whole pile with others into the bank! I had lost it all. Perhaps it may be difficult for me to explain why I actually felt relieved, and even to some extent triumphant, but I seemed to have asserted my grown-up independence—possibly at the cost of reducing the number of my meals for days; but what of that!... The man who had spoken to me, I think, suddenly realized, at the moment of my disastrous coup, the fact of my extreme youth. He moved toward the banker, and leaning over him whispered a few words. The banker looked up, half impatiently, half kindly,—his hand straying tentatively toward the pile of coin. I instinctively knew what he meant, and, summoning my determination, met his eyes with all the indifference I could assume, and walked away.”

In 1856, being then twenty years old, young Harte left Colonel Williams’s house, and thenceforth shifted for himself. His first engagement was as tutor in a private family at Alamo in the San Ramon Valley. There were several sons in the family, and one or two of them were older than their tutor. The next year he went to Humboldt Bay in Humboldt County, on the upper coast of California, about two hundred and fifty miles north of San Francisco. Thence he made numerous trips as express messenger on stages running eastward to Trinity County, and northward to Del Norte, which, as the name implies, is the extreme upper county in the State. The experience was a valuable one, and it was concerning this period of Bret Harte’s career that his friend, Charles Warren Stoddard, wrote: “He bore a charmed life. Probably his youth was his salvation, for he ran a thousand risks, yet seemed only to gain in health and spirits.”

The post of express messenger was especially dangerous. Bret Harte’s predecessor was shot through the arm by a highwayman; his successor was killed. The safe containing the treasure carried by Wells, Fargo and Company, who did practically all the express business in California, was always heavily chained to the box of the coach, and sometimes, when a particularly large amount of gold had to be conveyed, armed guards were carried inside of the coach. For the stage to be “held up” by highwaymen was a common occurrence, and the danger from breakdowns and floods was not small. In the course of a few months between the towns of Visalia and Kern River the overland stage broke the legs of three several drivers. It was a frequent thing for the stage to cross a stream, suddenly become a river, with the horses swimming, a strong current running through the coach itself, and the passengers perched on the seats to escape being swept away.[4]

With these dangers of flood and field to encounter, with precipices to skirt, with six half-broken horses to control, and with the ever-present possibility of serving as a target for “road-agents,” it may be imagined that the California stage-driver was no common man, and the type is preserved in the character of Yuba Bill. He can be compared only with Colonel Starbottle and Jack Hamlin, and Jack Hamlin was one of the few men whom Yuba Bill condescended to treat as an equal. Their meeting in Gabriel Convoy is historic: “‘Barkeep—hist that pizen over to Jack. Here’s to ye agin, ole man. But I’m glad to see ye!’ The crowd hung breathless over the two men—awestruck and respectful. It was a meeting of the gods. None dared speak.”

“Yuba Bill,” writes Mr. Chesterton, “is not convivial; it might almost be said that he is too great even to be sociable. A circle of quiescence and solitude, such as that which might ring a saint or a hermit, rings this majestic and profound humorist. His jokes do not flow from him, like those of Mr. Weller, sparkling and continual like the play of a fountain in a pleasure garden; they fall suddenly and capriciously, like a crash of avalanche from a great mountain. Tony Weller has the noisy humor of London. Yuba Bill has the silent humor of the earth.” Then the critic quotes Yuba Bill’s rebuke to the passenger who has expressed a too-confident opinion as to the absence of the expected highwaymen: “‘You ain’t puttin’ any price on that opinion, air ye?’ inquired Bill politely.

“‘No.’

“‘Cos thar’s a comic paper in ’Frisco pays for them things, and I’ve seen worse things in it.’”

Even better, perhaps, is Yuba Bill’s reply to Judge Beeswinger, who rashly betrayed some over-consciousness of his importance as a member of the State Assembly. “‘Any political news from below, Bill?’ he asked, as the latter slowly descended from his lofty perch, without, however, any perceptible coming down of mien or manner. ‘Not much,’ said Bill, with deliberate gravity. ‘The President o’ the United States hezn’t bin hisself sens you refoosed that seat in the Cabinet. The gin’ral feelin’ in perlitical circles is one o’ regret.’”

“To be rebuked thus,” Mr. Chesterton continues, “is like being rebuked by the pyramids or by the starry heavens. There is about Yuba Bill this air of a pugnacious calm, a stepping back to get his distance for a shattering blow, which is like that of Dr. Johnson at his best. And the effect is inexpressibly increased by the background and the whole picture which Bret Harte paints so powerfully,—the stormy skies, the sombre gorge, the rocking and spinning coach, and high above the feverish passengers the huge, dark form of Yuba Bill, a silent mountain of humor.”

After his service as expressman, Bret Harte went to a town called Union, about three hundred miles north of San Francisco, where he learned the printer’s trade in the office of the “Humboldt Times.” He also taught school again in Union, and for the second time acted as clerk in a drug store. Speaking of his experience in this capacity, Mr. Pemberton, his English biographer, gravely says, “I have heard English physicians express wonder at his grasp of the subject.” One wonders, in turn, if Bret Harte did not do a little hoaxing in this line. “To the end of his days,” writes Mr. Pemberton, “he could speak with authority as to the virtues and properties of medicines.” Young Harte had a wonderful faculty of picking up information, and no doubt his two short terms of service as a compounder of medicines were not thrown away upon him. But Bret Harte was the last person in the world to pose as an expert, and it seems probable that the extent of his knowledge was fairly described in the story How Reuben Allen Saw Life in San Francisco. That part of this story which deals with the drug clerk is so plainly autobiographical, and so characteristic of the author, that a quotation from it will not be out of place:—

“It was near midnight, the hour of closing, and the junior partner was alone in the shop. He felt drowsy; the mysterious incense of the shop, that combined essence of drugs, spice, scented soap, and orris root—which always reminded him of the Arabian nights—was affecting him. He yawned, and then, turning away, passed behind the counter, took down a jar labelled ‘Glycyrr. Glabra,’ selected a piece of Spanish licorice, and meditatively sucked it....

“He was just nineteen, he had early joined the emigration to California, and after one or two previous light-hearted essays at other occupations, for which he was singularly unfitted, he had saved enough to embark on his present venture, still less suited to his temperament.... A slight knowledge of Latin as a written language, an American schoolboy’s acquaintance with chemistry and natural philosophy, were deemed sufficient by his partner, a regular physician, for practical cooperation in the vending of drugs and putting up of prescriptions. He knew the difference between acids and alkalis and the peculiar results which attended their incautious combination. But he was excessively deliberate, painstaking and cautious. There was no danger of his poisoning anybody through haste or carelessness, but it was possible that an urgent ‘case’ might have succumbed to the disease while he was putting up the remedy.... In those days the ‘heroic’ practice of medicine was in keeping with the abnormal development of the country; there were ‘record’ doses of calomel and quinine, and he had once or twice incurred the fury of local practitioners by sending back their prescriptions with a modest query.”

SAN FRANCISCO, NOVEMBER, 1844
J. C. Ward, del.

It was doubtless Bret Harte’s experience in the drug store which suggested the story of Liberty Jones, whose discovery of an arsenical spring in the forest was the means of transforming that well-made, but bony and sallow Missouri girl into a beautiful woman, with well-rounded limbs, rosy cheeks, lustrous eyes and glossy hair.

It has been a matter of some discussion whether Bret Harte ever worked as a miner or not; and the evidence upon the point is not conclusive. But it is hard to believe that he did not try his luck at gold-seeking, when everybody else was trying, and his narrative How I Went to the Mines seems to have the ear-marks of an autobiographical sketch. It is regarded as such by his sisters; and the modest, deprecating manner in which the storyteller’s adventures are related, serves to confirm that impression.

Of all his experiences in California, those which gave him the most pleasure seem to have been his several short but fruitful terms of service as schoolmaster and tutor. His knowledge of children, being based upon sympathy, became both acute and profound. How many thousand million times have children gone to school of a morning and found the master awaiting them, and yet who but Bret Harte has ever described the exact manner of their approach!

“They came in their usual desultory fashion—the fashion of country school-children the world over—irregularly, spasmodically, and always as if accidentally; a few hand-in-hand, others driven ahead of or dragged behind their elders; some in straggling groups more or less coherent and at times only connected by far-off intermediate voices scattered over a space of half a mile, but never quite alone; always preoccupied by something else than the actual business in hand; appearing suddenly from ditches, behind trunks, and between fence-rails; cropping up in unexpected places along the road after vague and purposeless détours—seemingly going anywhere and everywhere but to school!”[5]

Bret Harte realized the essential truth that children are not little, immature men and women, but rather infantile barbarians, creatures of an archaic type, representing a period in the development of the human race which does not survive in adult life. Hence the reserve, the aloofness of children, their remoteness from grown people. There are certain things which the boy most deeply feels that he must not do, and certain other things that he must do; as, for example, to bear without telling any pains that may be inflicted upon him by his mates or by older boys. For a thousand years or more fathers and mothers have held a different code upon these points, but with how little effect upon their children! Johnny Filgee illustrated upon a truly Californian scale these boyish qualities of reticence and endurance. When he had accidentally been shot in the duel between the Master and Cressy’s father (the child being perched in a tree), he refrained from making the least sound, although a word or an outcry would have brought the men to his assistance. “A certain respect to himself and his brother kept him from uttering even a whimper of weakness.” Left alone in the dark woods, unable to move, Johnny became convinced that his end was near, and he pleased himself by thinking that “they would all feel exceedingly sorry and alarmed, and would regret having made him wash himself on Saturday night.” And so, having composed himself, “he turned on his side to die, as became the scion of an heroic race!”

Then follows a sentence in which the artist, with one bold sweep of his brush, paints in Nature herself as a witness of the scene; and yet her material immensity does not dwarf or belittle the spiritual superiority of the wounded youngster in the foreground: “The free woods, touched by an upspringing wind, waved their dark arms above him, and higher yet a few patient stars silently ranged themselves around his pillow.”

That other Johnny, for whom Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar, Richelieu Sharpe in A Phyllis of the Sierras, John Milton Harcourt in the First Family of Tasajara, Leonidas Boone, the Mercury of the Foot-Hills, and John Bunyan Medliker, the Youngest Prospector in Calaveras,—all illustrate the same type, with many individual variations.

Another phase of the archaic nature of children is their extreme sensitiveness to impressions. Just as a squirrel hears more acutely than a man, and the dog’s sense of smell is keener, so a child, within the comparatively small range of his mental activity, is more open to subtle indications. Bret Harte often touches upon this quality of childhood, as in the following passage: “It was not strange, therefore, that the little people of the Indian Spring School knew perhaps more of the real relations of Cressy McKinstry to her admirers than the admirers themselves. Not that the knowledge was outspoken—for children rarely gossip in the grown-up sense, or even communicate by words intelligent to the matured intellect. A whisper, a laugh that often seemed vague and unmeaning, conveyed to each other a world of secret significance, and an apparently senseless burst of merriment in which the whole class joined—and that the adult critic set down to ‘animal spirits’—a quality much more rare with children than is generally supposed—was only a sympathetic expression of some discovery happily oblivious to older perceptions.”

This acuteness of perception, seen also in some men of a simple, archaic type, puts children in close relationship with the lower animals, unless, indeed, it is counteracted by that cruelty which is also a quality of childhood. When Richelieu Sharpe retired to rest, it was in company with a whole retinue of dependents. “On the pillow near him an indistinguishable mass of golden fur—the helpless bulk of a squirrel chained to the leg of his cot; at his feet a wall-eyed cat, who had followed his tyrannous caprices with the long-suffering devotion of her sex; on the shelf above him a loathsome collection of flies and tarantulas in dull green bottles, a slab of gingerbread for light nocturnal refreshment, and his sister’s pot of bear’s grease.... The sleeper stirred slightly and awoke. At the same moment, by some mysterious sympathy, a pair of beady bright eyes appeared in the bulk of fur near his curls, the cat stretched herself, and even a vague agitation was heard in the bottles on the shelf.”[6]

That last touch, intimating some community of feeling between Richelieu and his insects, is, as the Reader will grant, the touch of genius. Bridging the gulf impassable for an ordinary mind, it assumes a fact which, like the shape of Donatello’s ears, is true to the imagination, and not so manifestly impossible as to shock the reason.

It is sometimes said that California in the Fifties represented the American character in its most extreme form,—the quintessence, as it were, of energy and democracy. This statement would certainly apply to the California children, in whom the ordinary forwardness of the American child became a sort of elfish precocity. Such a boy was Richelieu Sharpe. His gallantries, his independence, his self-reliance, his adult ambitions,—these qualities, oddly assorted with the primeval, imaginative nature of the true child, made Richelieu such a youngster as was never seen outside of the United States, and perhaps never seen outside of California.

The English child of the upper classes, as Bret Harte knew him in after years, made a strange contrast to the Richelieu Sharpes and John Bunyan Medlikers that he had learned to love in California. In a letter to his wife written from the house of James Anthony Froude, in 1878, he said: “The eldest girl is not unlike a highly-educated Boston girl, and the conversation sometimes reminds me of Boston. The youngest daughter, only ten years old, told her sister, in reference to some conversation Froude and I had, that ‘she feared’ (this child) ‘that Mr. Bret Harte was inclined to be sceptical!’ Doesn’t this exceed any English story of the precocity of American children? The boy, scarcely fourteen, acts like a boy of eight (an American boy of eight) and talks like a man of thirty, so far as pure English and facility of expression go. His manners are perfect, yet he is perfectly simple and boy-like. The culture and breeding of some English children are really marvellous. But somehow—and here comes one of my ‘buts’—there’s always a suggestion of some repression, some discipline that I don’t like.”[7]

Bret Harte’s last employment during this wandering life was that of compositor, printer’s devil, and assistant editor of the “Northern California,” published at Eureka, a seacoast town in Humboldt County. Here he met Mr. Charles A. Murdock, who gives this interesting account of him: “He was fond of whist, genial, witty, but quiet and reserved, something of a ‘tease’” (the Reader will remember that Mr. Howells speaks of this trait) “and a practical joker; not especially popular, as he was thought to be fastidious, and to hold himself aloof from ‘the general’; but he was simply a self-respecting, gentlemanly fellow, with quiet tastes, and a keen insight into character. He was no roisterer, and his habits were clean. He was too independent and indifferent to curry favor, or to counterfeit a liking.”

During a temporary absence of the editor Bret Harte was entrusted with the conduct of the paper, and about that time a cowardly massacre of Indians was perpetrated by some Americans in the vicinity. This was no uncommon event, and the usual attitude of the Pioneers toward the Indians may be gathered from the following passage in a letter written to a newspaper in August, 1851, from Rogue River: “During this period we have been searching about in the mountains, disturbing villages, destroying all the males we could find, and capturing women and children. We have killed about thirty altogether, and have about twenty-eight now in camp.” At the Stanislaus Diggings, in 1851, a miner called to an Indian boy to help him catch a loose horse. The boy, not understanding English, and being frightened by the man’s gestures, ran away, whereupon the miner raised his gun and shot the boy dead.

Nobody hated injustice or cruelty more than Bret Harte, and in his editorial capacity he scathingly condemned the murder of Indians which occurred in the neighborhood of Eureka. The article excited the anger of the community, and a mob was collected for the avowed purpose of wrecking the newspaper office and hanging or otherwise maltreating the youthful writer. Bret Harte, armed with two pistols, awaited their coming during an evening which was probably the longest of his life. But the timely arrival of a few United States cavalrymen, sent for by some peace-lovers in the town, averted the danger; and the young journalist suffered no harm beyond an abrupt dismissal upon the hasty return of the editor.

This event ended his life as a wanderer, and he went back to San Francisco. There is not the slightest reason to think that during this period Bret Harte had any notion of describing California life in fiction or otherwise; and yet, if that had been his object, he could not have ordered his movements more wisely. He had lived on the seacoast and in the interior; he had seen cities, ranches, villages, and mines; he had been tutor, school-teacher, drug clerk, express messenger, printer, and editor. The period was less than two years, and yet he had accumulated a store of facts, impressions and images sufficient to last him a lifetime. He was of a most receptive nature; he was at a receptive age; the world was new to him, and he lived in it and observed it with all the zest of youth, of inexperience, of health and genius.

CHAPTER IV

BRET HARTE IN SAN FRANCISCO

Bret Harte returned to San Francisco in 1857, and his first occupation was that of setting type in the office of the “Golden Era.” To this paper his sister, Mrs. Wyman, had been a contributor for some time, and it was through her that Bret Harte obtained employment on it as a printer.

The “Golden Era” had been established by young men. “It was,” writes Mr. Stoddard, “the cradle and the grave of many a high hope. There was nothing to be compared with it on that side of the Mississippi; and though it could point with pride—it never failed to do so—to a somewhat notable list of contributors, it had always the fine air of the amateur, and was most complacently patronizing. The very pattern of paternal patronage was amiable Joe Lawrence, its Editor. He was an inveterate pipe-smoker, a pillar of cloud, as he sat in his editorial chair, an air of literary mystery enveloping him. He spoke as an oracle, and I remember his calling my attention to a certain anonymous contribution just received, and nodding his head prophetically, for he already had his eye on the fledgling author, a young compositor on the floor above. It was Bret Harte’s first appearance in the ‘Golden Era,’ and doubtless Lawrence encouraged him as he had encouraged me when, out of the mist about him, he handed me secretly, and with a glance of caution—for his business partner, the marble-hearted, sat at his ledger not far away—he handed me a folded paper on which he had written this startling legend! ‘Write some prose for the “Golden Era,” and I will give you a dollar a column.’”

BRET HARTE IN 1861

It was not long before Bret Harte was promoted from the compositor’s stand to the editorial room of the paper, and thus began his literary career. Among the sketches which he wrote a few years later, and which have been preserved in the complete edition of his works, are In a Balcony, A Boy’s Dog, and Sidewalkings. Except for a slight restraint and stiffness of style, as if the author had not quite attained the full use of his wings, they show no indications of youth or crudity. M’liss also appeared in the “Golden Era,” illustrated by a specially designed woodcut; and some persons think that this, the first, is also the best of Bret Harte’s stories. At all events, the early M’liss is far superior to the author’s lengthened and rewritten M’liss which was included in the collected edition of his works.

When it is added that the Condensed Novels, or at least the first of them, were also published in the “Golden Era,” it will be seen with what astonishing quickness his literary style matured. He wrote at first anonymously; afterward, gaining a little self-confidence, he signed his stories “B,” and then “Bret.”

It was while engaged in writing for the “Golden Era,” namely, on August 11, 1862, that Bret Harte was married to Miss Anna Griswold, daughter of Daniel S. and Mary Dunham Griswold of the city of New York. The marriage took place at San Raphael.

In 1864 he was appointed Secretary of the California Mint, an office which he held for six years and until he left California. For this position he was indebted to Mr. R. B. Swain, Superintendent of the Mint, a friend and parishioner of the Reverend Mr. King, who in that way became a friend of Bret Harte. Mr. Swain had a great liking for the young author, and made the official path easy for him. In fact, the position seems to have been one of those sinecures—or nearly that—which are the traditional reward of men of letters, but which a reforming and materialistic age has diverted to less noble uses.

In San Francisco, both before and after his marriage, Bret Harte lived a quiet, studious life, going very little into society. Of the time during which he was Secretary of the Mint, Mr. Stoddard writes: “He was now a man with a family; the resources derived from literature were uncertain and unsatisfactory. His influential friends paid him cheering visits in the gloomy office at the Mint where he leavened his daily loaves; and at his desk, between the exacting pages of the too literal ledger, many a couplet cropped out, and the outlines of now famous sketches were faintly limned. His friends were few, but notable. Society he ignored in those days. He used to accuse me of wasting my substance in riotous visitations, and thought me a spendthrift of time. He had the precious companionship of books, and the lives of those about him were as an open volume wherein he read ‘curiously and to his profit.’”

Of the notable friends alluded to by Mr. Stoddard, the most important were the Reverend Thomas Starr King, and Mrs. Jessie Benton Frémont, daughter of Senator Benton, and wife of that Captain, afterward General Frémont, who became the first United States Senator from California, and Republican candidate for the Presidency in 1856, but who is best known as The Pathfinder. His adventures and narratives form an important part of California history.

Mrs. Frémont was an extremely clever, kind-hearted woman, who assisted Bret Harte greatly by her advice and criticism, still more by her sympathy and encouragement. Bret Harte was always inclined to underrate his own powers, and to be despondent as to his literary future. On one occasion when, as not seldom happened, he was cast down by his troubles and anxieties, and almost in despair as to his prospects, Mrs. Frémont sent him some cheering news, and he wrote to her: “I shall no longer disquiet myself about changes in residence or anything else, for I believe that if I were cast upon a desolate island, a savage would come to me next morning and hand me a three-cornered note to say that I had been appointed Governor at Mrs. Frémont’s request, at a salary of $2400 a year.”

How much twenty-four hundred a year seemed to him then, and how little a few years later! A Pioneer who knew them both writes: “Mrs. Frémont helped Bret Harte in many ways. In turn he marvelled at her worldly wisdom,—being able to tell one how to make a living. He named her daughter’s pony ‘Chiquita,’ after the equine heroine of his poem.” It was by Mrs. Frémont’s intervention that Bret Harte first appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly,” for, some years before he achieved fame, namely in 1863, The Legend of Monte del Diablo was published in that magazine. The story was gracefully, even beautifully written, but both in style and treatment it was a reflection of Washington Irving, who at that time rivalled Dickens as a popular author.

Many interesting letters were received by Mrs. Frémont from Bret Harte,—letters, her daughter thinks, almost as entertaining as his published writings; but unfortunately these treasures were destroyed by a fire in the city of New York.

Starr King, Bret Harte’s other friend, was by far the most notable of the Protestant ministers in California. The son of a Universalist minister, he was born in the city of New York, but was brought up mainly in Charlestown, now a part of Boston. Upon leaving school he became first a clerk, then a school-teacher, and finally a Unitarian minister, preaching first at his father’s old church in Charlestown, and afterward at the Hollis Street Unitarian Church in Boston. He obtained a wide reputation as preacher and lecturer, and as author of “The White Hills,” still the best book upon the mountains of New England. In 1860, at the very time when his services were needed there, he became the pastor of a church in San Francisco, and to him is largely ascribed the credit of saving California to the Union. He was a man of deep moral convictions, and his addresses stirred the heart and moved the conscience of California.

The Southern element was very strong on the Pacific Slope, and it made itself felt in politics especially. Nearly one third of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, held in September, 1849, were Southern men, and they acted as a unit under the leadership of W. M. Gwinn, afterward a member of the United States Senate. The ultimate design of the Southern delegates was the division of California into two States, the more southern of which should be a slave State. Slavery in California was openly advocated. But the Southern party was a minority, and the State Constitution declared that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crime, shall ever be tolerated in this State.” The Constitution did, however, exclude the testimony of colored persons from the courts; and when, in 1852, the negroes in San Francisco presented a petition to the House of Representatives asking for this right or privilege, the House refused to receive the petition, a majority of the members taking it as an insult. One member seriously proposed that it should be thrown out of the window.

In May, 1852, the “San Francisco Daily Herald” declared that the delay in admitting California as a State was due to Northern Abolitionists, of whom it said, with characteristic mildness: “Take the vile crowd of Abolitionists from the Canadian frontier to the banks of the Delaware, and you cannot find one in ten thousand of them who from philanthropy cares the amount of a dollar what becomes of the colored race. What they want is office.” It does not seem to have occurred to the writer that in espousing the smallest and most hated political party in the whole country, the Abolitionists had not taken a very promising step in the direction of office-holding.

There was even talk of turning California into a “Pacific Republic,” in the event of a dissolution of the Union. And that event was longed for by at least one California paper on the ground that “it would shut down on the immigration of these vermin,” i. e. the Chinese. How far Southern effrontery went may be gathered from the fact that even the sacred institution of Thanksgiving Day was ridiculed by another California paper as an absurd Yankee notion.

From 1851 until the period of the Civil War the Democratic Party ruled the State of California under the leadership of Gwinn. Northern men constituted a majority of the party, but they submitted to the dictation of the Southerners, just as the Democratic Party in the North submitted to the dictation of the Southern leaders. The only California politician who could cope with Gwinn was Broderick,—a typical Irishman, trained by Tammany Hall.

Not without difficulty was California saved to the Union; in fact, until the rebels fired upon Fort Sumter, the real sentiment of the State was unknown. Bret Harte has touched upon this episode. In Mrs. Bunker’s Conspiracy, the attempt of the extreme Southern element to seize and fortify a bluff commanding the city of San Francisco is foiled by a Northern woman; and in Clarence we have a glimpse of the city as it appeared after news came of the first act of open rebellion: “From every public building and hotel, from the roofs of private houses and even the windows of lonely dwellings, flapped and waved the striped and starry banner. The steady breath of the sea carried it out from masts and yards of ships at their wharves, from the battlements of the forts, Alcatraz and Yerba Buena.... Clarence looked down upon it with haggard, bewildered eyes, and then a strange gasp and fulness of the throat. For afar a solitary bugle had blown the reveille at Fort Alcatraz.”

At this critical time, a mass meeting was held in San Francisco, and, at the suggestion of Starr King, Bret Harte wrote a poem to be read at the meeting. The poem was called The Reveille, but is better known as The Drum. The first and last stanzas are as follows:—

Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands,
And of armèd men the hum;
Lo! a nation’s hosts have gathered
Round the quick alarming drum,—
Saying, “Come,
Freemen, Come!
Ere your heritage be wasted,” said the quick alarming drum.
········
Thus they answered,—hoping, fearing,
Some in faith, and doubting some,
Till a trumpet-voice, proclaiming,
Said, “My chosen people, come!”
Then the drum
Lo! was dumb,
For the great heart of the nation, throbbing, answered, “Lord, we come!”

As these last words were read, the great audience rose to its feet, and with a mighty shout proclaimed the loyalty of California. Emerson, as Mr. John Jay Chapman has finely said, sent a thousand sons to the war; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that Bret Harte’s noble poem fired many a manly heart in San Francisco.

When the war began, Starr King was active in establishing the California branch of the Sanitary Commission. He died of diphtheria in March, 1864, just as the tide of battle was turning in favor of the North. It will thus be seen that his career in California exactly covered, and only just covered, that short period in the history of the State when the services of such a man were, humanly speaking, indispensable.

The Reveille was followed by other patriotic poems, and after Mr. King’s death Bret Harte wrote in memory of him the poem called Relieving Guard, which indicates, one may safely say, the high-water mark of the author’s poetic talent. In the year following Mr. King’s death Bret Harte’s second son was born, and received the name of Francis King.

On May 25, 1864, the first number of “The Californian” appeared. This was the famous weekly edited and published by the late Charles Henry Webb, and written mainly by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Webb himself, Prentice Mulford, and Mr. Stoddard. It was of “The Californian” that Mr. Howells wittily said: “These ingenuous young men, with the fatuity of gifted people, had established a literary newspaper in San Francisco, and they brilliantly coöperated to its early extinction.”

It is an interesting coincidence that Bret Harte and Mark Twain both began their literary careers in San Francisco, and at almost the same time. Bret Harte was engaged upon “The Californian,” and Mark Twain was a reporter for the “Morning Call,” when they were introduced to each other by a common friend, Mr. George Barnes. Bret Harte thus describes his first impression of the new acquaintance:—

“His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and even the aquiline eye—an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me—of an unusual and dominant nature. His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, and his general manner one of supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances. Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number of newspaper articles contributed under the signature of ‘Mark Twain.’ We talked on different topics, and about a month afterward Clemens dropped in upon me again. He had been away in the mining districts on some newspaper assignment in the mean time. In the course of conversation he remarked that the unearthly laziness that prevailed in the town he had been visiting was beyond anything in his previous experience. He said the men did nothing all day long but sit around the bar-room stove, spit, and ‘swop lies.’ He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came in, and then asked him to write it out for ‘The Californian.’ He did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was ‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras.’ It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to any one in print as it was to me, told for the first time by the unknown Twain himself on that morning in the San Francisco Mint.”

The first article that appeared in “The Californian” was Bret Harte’s Neighborhoods I have Moved From, and next his Ballad of the Emeu, but neither was signed. Both of these are in the collected edition of his works. The Condensed Novels were continued in “The Californian,” and Bret Harte also contributed to it many poems, sketches, essays, editorial articles and book reviews. Some of these were unsigned; some were signed “B” or “Bret,” and occasionally the signature was his full name.

STORESHIP APOLLO
Old Ship used as a Saloon
Copyright, Century Co.

No reader who appreciates the finished workmanship of Bret Harte will be surprised to learn that he was a slow and intensely self-critical writer. There is much interesting testimony on this point. Mr. Howells says: “His talent was not a facile gift; he owned that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a line.... When it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey and Sterne and Steele, in his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner world, he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens.”

Noah Brooks wrote as follows: “Scores of writers have become known to me in the course of a long life, but I have never known another so fastidious and so laborious as Bret Harte. His writing materials, the light and heat, and even the adjustment of the furniture of the writing-room, must be as he desired; otherwise he could not go on with his work. Even when his environment was all that he could wish, there were times when the divine afflatus would not come and the day’s work must be abandoned. My editorial rooms in San Francisco were not far from his secluded den, and often, if he opened my door late in the afternoon, with a peculiar cloud on his face, I knew that he had come to wait for me to go to dinner with him, having given up the impossible task of writing when the mood was not on him. ‘It’s no use, Brooks,’ he would say. ‘Everything goes wrong; I cannot write a line. Let’s have an early dinner at Martini’s.’ As soon as I was ready we would go merrily off to dine together, and, having recovered his equanimity, he would stick to his desk through the later hours of the night, slowly forging those masterpieces which cost him so dearly.

“Harte was reticent concerning his work while it was in progress. He never let the air in upon his story or his verses. Once, indeed, he asked me to help him in a calculation to ascertain how long a half-sack of flour and six pounds of side-meat[8] would last a given number of persons. This was the amount of provision he had allowed his outcasts of Poker Flat, and he wanted to know just how long the snow-bound scapegoats could live on that supply. I used to save for him the Eastern and English newspaper notices of his work, and once, when he had looked through a goodly lot of these laudatory notes, he said: ‘These fellows see a heap of things in my stories that I never put there.’”

Mr. Stoddard recalls this incident: “One day I found him pacing the floor of his office in the United States Mint; he was knitting his brows and staring at vacancy,—I wondered why. He was watching and waiting for a word, the right word, the one word of all others to fit into a line of recently written prose. I suggested one; it would not answer; it must be a word of two syllables, or the natural rhythm of the sentence would suffer. Thus he perfected his prose.”

In the sketch entitled My First Book, printed in volume ten of his works, Bret Harte has given some amusing reminiscences concerning the volume of California poems edited by him, and published in 1866. His selection as Editor, he says, “was chiefly owing to the circumstance that I had from the outset, with precocious foresight, confided to the publisher my intention of not putting any of my own verses in the volume. Publishers are appreciative; and a self-abnegation so sublime, to say nothing of its security, was not without its effect.” After narrating his extreme difficulty in reducing the number of his selections from the numerous poets of California, he goes on to describe the reception of the volume. It sold well, the purchasers apparently being amateur poets who were anxious to discover whether they were represented in the book. “People would lounge into the shop, turn over the leaves of other volumes, say carelessly ‘Got a new book of California poetry out, haven’t you?’ purchase it, and quietly depart.”

“There were as yet,” the Editor continues, “no notices from the press; the big dailies were silent; there was something ominous in this calm. Out of it the bolt fell;” and he quotes the following notice from a country paper: “‘The Hogwash and “purp” stuff ladled out from the slop-bucket of Messrs. —— and Co., of ’Frisco, by some lop-eared Eastern apprentice, and called “A Compilation of Californian Verse,” might be passed over, so far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of Red Dog, and a steamboat ticket to the Bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all-sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture “Californian,” it is an insult to the State that has produced the gifted “Yellowhammer,” whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the “Jay Hawk.” That this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the docks and thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make no allusion to California’s greatest bard is rather a confession of his idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.’”

Other criticisms, inspired by like omissions, followed, each one rivalling its predecessor in severity. “The big dailies collected the criticisms and published them in their own columns with the grim irony of exaggerated head-lines. The book sold tremendously on account of this abuse, but I am afraid that the public was disappointed. The fun and interest lay in the criticisms, and not in any pointedly ludicrous quality in the rather commonplace collection ... and I have long since been convinced that my most remorseless critics were not in earnest, but were obeying some sudden impulse, started by the first attacking journal.... It was a large, contagious joke, passed from journal to journal in a peculiar cyclonic Western fashion.”

A year later, not, as Bret Harte himself states, in 1865, but in 1867, the first collection of his own poems was published. The volume was a thin twelvemo, bound in green cloth, with a gilt design of a sail on the cover, the title-page reading as follows: “The Lost Galleon and Other Tales. By Fr. Bret Harte, San Francisco. Tame and Bacon, Printers, 1867.” Most of these poems are contained in the standard edition of his works.

In the same year were published the Condensed Novels and the Bohemian Papers, reprinted from “The Bulletin” and “The Californian,” and making, as the author himself said, “a single, not very plethoric volume, the writer’s first book of prose.” He adds that “during this period,” i. e. from 1862 to 1867, he produced “The Society upon the Stanislaus, and The Story of M’liss,—the first a dialectical poem, the second a Californian romance,—his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility,—a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages of the ‘Overland Monthly,’ he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of The Luck of Roaring Camp, and the poem of the Heathen Chinee.”

The “Overland Monthly” was founded in July, 1868, by Anton Roman, a bookseller on Montgomery Street, and later on Clay Street. Mr. Roman was possessed of that enthusiasm which every new enterprise demands. “He had thought and talked about the Magazine,” he declared, “until it was in his bones.” Bret Harte became the first Editor, and it was he who selected the name. The “Overland” was well printed, on good paper, and the cover was adorned by that historic grizzly bear who, standing on the ties of the newly-laid railroad track, with half-turned body and lowered head, seems prepared to dispute the right of way with the locomotive which might shortly be expected to come screaming down the track.

There was originally no railroad track in the picture, simply the bear; and how the deficiency was supplied is thus explained by Mark Twain in a letter to Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot through Harte’s brain? It was this: When they were trying to decide upon a vignette for the cover of the ‘Overland,’ a grizzly bear (of the arms of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him and the page was printed, with him in it, looking thus:

“As a bear, he was a success—he was a good bear.—But then, it was objected, that he was an objectless bear—a bear that meant nothing in particular, signified nothing,—simply stood there snarling over his shoulder at nothing—and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that—none were satisfied. They hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no point to him. But presently Harte took a pencil and drew these two simple lines under his feet and behold he was a magnificent success!—the ancient symbol of Californian savagery snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive Civilization, the first Overland locomotive!

“I think that was nothing less than inspiration itself.”

In the same letter Mark Twain pays the following magnanimous tribute to his old friend: “Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land,—and this grateful remembrance of mine ought to be worth its face, seeing that Bret broke our long friendship a year ago without any cause or provocation that I am aware of.”

The Editor had no prose article of his own in the first number of the “Overland,” but he contributed two poems, the noble lines about San Francisco, which, with characteristic modesty he placed in the middle of the number, and the poem entitled Returned[9] in the “Etc.” column at the end.

And now we come to the publication which first made Bret Harte known upon the Atlantic as well as upon the Pacific coast. The opening number of the “Overland” had contained no “distinctive Californian romance,” as Bret Harte expressed it, and none such being offered for the second number, the Editor supplied the omission with The Luck of Roaring Camp. But the printer, instead of sending the proof-sheets to the writer of the story, as would have been the ordinary course, submitted them to the publisher, with a statement that the matter was so “indecent, irreligious and improper” that his proofreader, a young lady, had with difficulty been induced to read it. Then followed many consultations between author, publisher, and various high literary authorities whose judgment had been invoked. Opinions differed, but the weight of opinion was against the tale, and the expediency of printing it. Nevertheless, the author—conceiving that his fitness as Editor was now in question—stood to his guns; the publisher, though fearful of the result, stood by him; and the tale was published without the alteration of a word. It was received very coldly by the secular press in California, its “singularity” being especially pointed out; and it was bitterly denounced by the religious press as being immoral and unchristian. But there was a wider public to hear from. The return mail from the East brought newspapers and reviews “welcoming the little foundling of Californian literature with an enthusiasm that half frightened its author.”[10] The mail brought also a letter from the Editor of the “Atlantic Monthly” with a request “upon the most flattering terms” that he would write a story for the “Atlantic,” similar to the Luck.

It should be recorded, as an interesting contrast to the impression made by the Luck upon the San Francisco young woman, that it was also a girl, Miss Susan M. Francis, a literary assistant with the publishers of the “Atlantic Monthly,” who, struck by the freshness and beauty of the tale, brought it to the attention of Mr. James T. Fields, then the Editor of the magazine, with the result which Bret Harte has described.

Nor should the attitude of the California young person, and of San Francisco in general, excite surprise. The Pioneers could not be expected to see the moral beauty that lay beneath the rough outward aspect of affairs on the Pacific Slope. The poetry of their own existence was hidden from them. But California, though crude, was self-distrustful, and it bowed to the decision of the East. Bret Harte was honored, even if not understood or appreciated.

The “Overland” was well received, and the high character of the first two numbers was long maintained. Aside from Bret Harte’s work, many volumes of prose and verse have been republished from the magazine, and most of them deserved the honor. In the early Fifties the proportion of really educated men to the whole population was greater in California than in any other State, and probably this was true even of the period when the “Overland” was founded. Scholarship and cultivation were concealed in rough mining towns, in lumber camps, and on remote ranches. Among the women, especially, were many who, like the Sappho of Green Springs, gathered from their lonely, primitive lives a freshness and originality which perhaps they never would have shown in more conventional surroundings. This class furnished numerous readers and a few writers. Officers of the Army and Navy stationed in California contributed some interesting scientific and literary articles to the early numbers of the “Overland.”

Notwithstanding the success of his first story, Bret Harte was in no haste to rush into print with another. He had none of that disposition to make hay while the sun shines which has spoiled many a story-writer. Six months elapsed before the Luck was followed by The Outcasts of Poker Flat. Meanwhile he was carefully and patiently discharging his duties as Editor. Mr. Stoddard has thus described him in that capacity: “Fortunately for me he took an interest in me at a time when I was most in need of advice, and to his criticism and his encouragement I feel that I owe all that is best in my literary efforts. He was not afraid to speak his mind, and I know well enough what occasion I gave him: yet he did not judge me more severely than I judged myself.... I am sure that the majority of the contributors to the ‘Overland Monthly’ profited as I did by his careful and judicious criticism. Fastidious to a degree, he could not overlook a lack of finish in the manuscript offered to him. He had a special taste in the choice of titles, and I have known him to alter the name of an article two or three times in order that the table of contents might read handsomely and harmoniously.”

One of the most frequent contributors to the “Overland” was Miss Ina B. Coolbrith, author of many polished and imaginative poems and stories. In a recent letter Miss Coolbrith thus speaks of Bret Harte as an Editor: “To me he was unfailingly kind and generous, looking out for my interests as one of his contributors with as much care as he accorded to his own. I can only speak of him in terms of unqualified praise as author, friend and man.”

The poem entitled Plain Language from Truthful James, or the Heathen Chinee, as it is popularly known, and as Bret Harte himself afterward called it, first appeared in the “Overland” for September, 1870. Within a few weeks it had spread over the English-speaking world. The Luck of Roaring Camp gave Bret Harte a literary reputation, but this poem made him famous. It was copied by the newspapers almost universally, both here and in England; and it increased the circulation of the “Overland” so much that, two months after its appearance, a single news company in New York was selling twelve hundred copies of the magazine. Almost everybody had a clipping of these verses tucked into his waistcoat pocket or carried in his purse. Quotations from it were on every lip, and some of its most significant lines were recited with applause in the National House of Representatives.

It came at a fortunate moment when the people of this country were just awaking to the fact that there was a “Chinese problem,” and when interest in the race was becoming universal in the East as well as in the West. Says that acute critic, Mr. James Douglas: “There is an element of chance in the fabrication of great poems. The concatenation comes, the artist puts the pieces into their places, and the result is permanent wonder. The Heathen Chinee in its happy felicity is quite as unique as ‘The Blessed Damozel.’”

The Heathen Chinee is remarkable for the absolutely impartial attitude of the writer. He observes the Chinaman neither from the locally prejudiced, California point of view, nor from an ethical or reforming point of view. His part is neither to approve nor condemn, but simply to state the fact as it is, not indeed with the coldness of an historian but with the sympathy and insight of a poet. But this is not all, in fact, as need hardly be said, it is not enough to make the poem endure. It endures because it has a beauty of form which approaches perfection. It is hackneyed, and yet as fresh as on the day when it was written.[11]

Truthful James himself who tells the story was a real character,—nay is, for, at the writing of these pages, he still lived in the same little shanty where he was to be found when Bret Harte knew him. At that time, in 1856, or thereabout, Bret Harte was teaching school at Tuttletown, a few miles north of Sonora, and Truthful James, Mr. James W. Gillis, lived over the hill from Tuttletown, at a place called Jackass Flat. Mr. Gillis was well known and highly respected in all that neighborhood, and he figures not only in Bret Harte’s poetry, but also in Mark Twain’s works, where he is described as “The Sage of Jackass Hill.”

It is a proof both of Bret Harte’s remarkable freedom from vanity, and of the keen criticism which he bestowed upon his own writings, that he never set much value upon the Heathen Chinee, even after its immense popularity had been attained. When he wrote it, he thought it unworthy of a place in the “Overland” and handed it over to Mr. Ambrose Bierce, then Editor of the “News Letter,”[12] a weekly paper, for publication there. Mr. Bierce, however, recognizing its value, unselfishly advised Bret Harte to give it a place in the “Overland,” and this was finally done. “Nevertheless,” says Mr. Bierce, “it was several months before he overcame his prejudice against the verses and printed them. Indeed he never cared for the thing, and was greatly amused by the meanings that so many read into it. He said he meant nothing whatever by it.”

We have Mark Twain’s word to the same effect. “In 1866,” he writes, “I went to the Sandwich Islands, and when I returned, after several years, Harte was famous as the author of the Heathen Chinee. He said that the Heathen Chinee was an accident, and that he had higher literary ambitions than the fame that could come from an extravaganza of that sort.” “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Mr. Clemens goes on to say, “was the salvation of his literary career. It placed him securely on a literary road which was more to his taste.”

Bret Harte, indeed, frequently held back for weeks poems which he had completed, but with which he was not content. As one of his fellow-workers declared, “He was never fully satisfied with what he finally allowed to go to the printer.”

His position in San Francisco was now assured. He had been made professor of recent literature in the University of California; he retained his place at the Mint, he was the successful Editor of the “Overland,” and he was happy in his home life. One who knew him well at this period speaks of him as “always referring to his wife in affectionate terms, and quoting her clever speeches, and relating with fond enjoyment the funny sayings and doings of his children.”

Let us, for the moment, leave Bret Harte thus happily situated, and glance at that Pioneer life which he was now engaged in portraying. Said a San Francisco paper in 1851, “The world will never know, and no one could imagine the heart-rending scenes, or the instances of courage and heroic self-sacrifice which have occurred among the California Pioneers during the last three years!”

And yet when these words were penned there was growing up in the East a stripling destined to preserve for posterity some part, at least, of those very occurrences which otherwise would have remained “unrecorded and forgot.”

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.

From the Western and Southwestern States there came across the Plains a different type. These men were Pioneers already by inheritance and tradition, somewhat ignorant, slow and rough, but of boundless courage and industry, stoical as Indians, independent and self-reliant. Most of Bret Harte’s tragic characters, such as Tennessee’s Partner, Madison Wayne, and the Bell-Ringer of Angel’s, were of this class.

Many of these emigrants, especially those who crossed the Mountains before the discovery of gold, were trappers and hunters,—stalwart, bearded men, clad in coats of buffalo hide, with faces deeply tanned and wrinkled by long exposure to wind and weather. Perhaps the best known among them was “old Greenwood,” a tall, raw-boned, muscular man, who at the age of eighty-three was still vigorous and active. For thirty years he made his home among the Crow Indians, and he had taken to wife a squaw who bore him four handsome sons. His dress was of tanned buckskin, and one observer, more squeamish than the ordinary Pioneer, noted the seeming fact that it had never been removed since first he put it on. His heroic calibre may be estimated from the fact that he was capable of eating ten pounds of meat a day. This man used to boast that he had killed more than a hundred Indians with his own hand. But all that killing had been done in fair fight; and when a cowardly massacre of seven Indians, captured in a raid led by Greenwood’s sons, took place near Sacramento in 1849,—one of many such acts,—the Greenwood family did their best to save the victims. After the deed had been done, “Old Greenwood,” an eye-witness relates, “raved around his cabin, tossed his arms aloft with violent denunciation, and, stooping down, gathered the dust in his palms, and sprinkled it on his head, swearing that he was innocent of their blood.”

Another hero of the Pacific Slope in those large, early days was Peg-leg Smith. He derived his nickname from a remarkable incident. While out on the Plains with a wagon-load of supplies, Smith—plain Smith at that time—was accidentally thrown from his seat, and the heavy wheel passed over his leg below the knee, crushing it so that amputation became necessary. There was no surgeon within hundreds of miles; but if the amputation were not performed, it was plain that mortification and death would soon result. In this emergency, Smith hacked out a rude saw from a butcher’s knife which he had with him, built a fire and heated an iron bolt that he took from the wagon, and then, with his hunting knife and his improvised saw, cut off his own leg. This done, he drew the flesh down over the wound, and seared it with the hot iron to prevent bleeding. He recovered, procured a wooden leg, and lived to take part in many succeeding adventures.

We owe California primarily to these hunters, trappers and adventurous farmers who crossed the Mountains on their own account, or, later, as members of Frémont’s band:

Stern men, with empires in their brains.

They firmly believed that it was the “manifest destiny” of the United States to spread over the Continent; and this conviction was not only a patriotic, but in some sense a religious one. They were mainly descendants of the Puritans, and as such had imbibed Old Testament ideas which justified and sanctioned their dreams of conquest. We have seen how the venerable Greenwood covered his head with dust as a symbolic act. The Reverend Mr. Colton records a significant remark made to him by a Pioneer, seventy-six years old, who had four sons in Frémont’s company, and who himself joined the Volunteers raised in California. “I asked him if he had no compunction in taking up arms against the native inhabitants, the moment of his arrival. He said he had Scripture example for it. The Israelites took the promised land of the East by arms, and the Americans must take the promised land of the West in the same way.”

And Mr. Colton adds: “I find this kind of parallel running in the imagination of all the emigrants. They seem to look upon this beautiful land as their own Canaan, and the motley race around them as the Hittites, the Hivites and Jebusites whom they are to drive out.”[18]

But, it need hardly be said, the Biblical argument upon which they relied was in the nature of an afterthought—the justification, rather than the cause of their actions. What really moved them, although they did not know it, was that primeval instinct of expansion, based upon conscious superiority of race, to which have been due all the great empires of the past.

Many of these people were deeply religious in a Gothic manner, and Bret Harte has touched lightly upon this aspect of their natures, especially in the case of Mr. Joshua Rylands. “Mr. Joshua Rylands had, according to the vocabulary of his class, ‘found grace’ at the age of sixteen, while still in the spiritual state of ‘original sin,’ and the political one of Missouri.... When, after the Western fashion, the time came for him to forsake his father’s farm, and seek a new ‘quarter section’ on some more remote frontier, he carried into the secluded, lonely, half-monkish celibacy of pioneer life—which has been the foundation of so much strong Western character—more than the usual religious feeling.”

Exactly the same kind of man is described in that once famous story, Mr. Eggleston’s “Circuit-Rider”; and it is still found in the mountains of Kentucky, where the maintenance of ferocious feuds and a constant readiness to kill one’s enemies at sight are regarded as not inconsistent with a sincere profession of the Christian religion.

The reader of Bret Harte’s stories will remember how often the expression “Pike County” or “Piker” occurs; and this use is strictly historical. As a very intelligent Pioneer expressed it, “We recognize in California but two types of the Republican character, the Yankee and the Missourian. The latter term was first used to represent the entire population of the West; but Pike County superseded, first the name of the State, and soon that of the whole West.”

How did this come about? Pike County, Missouri, was named for Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the discoverer of Pike’s Peak, and the officer who was sent by the United States Government to explore the upper part of the Mississippi River. He was killed in the War of 1812. The territory was first settled in 1811 by emigrants from Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana; and it was incorporated as a county in 1818. It borders on the Mississippi River, about forty miles north of St. Louis; and its whole area is only sixty square miles. It was and is an agricultural county, and in 1850 the population amounted to only thirteen thousand, six hundred and nine persons, of whom about half were negroes, mostly slaves. The climate is healthy, and the soil, especially on the prairies, is very fertile, being a rich, deep loam.[19]

Pike County, it will thus be seen, is but a small part, both numerically and geographically, of that vast Western territory which contributed to the California emigration; and it owes its prominence among the Pioneers chiefly to a copy of doggerel verses. In 1849, Captain McPike, a leading resident of the County, organized a band of two hundred Argonauts who crossed the Plains. Among them was an ox-driver named Joe Bowers, who soon made a reputation in the company as a humorist, as an “original,” as a “greenhorn,” and as a “good fellow” generally. Joe Bowers was poor, he was in love, he was seeking a fortune in order that he might lay it at the feet of his sweetheart; and the whole company became his confidants and sympathizers.

Another member of the party was a certain Frank Swift, who afterward attained some reputation as a journalist; and one evening, as they were all sitting around the camp-fire, Swift recited, or rather sang to a popular air, several stanzas of a poem about Joe Bowers, which he had composed during the day’s journey. It caught the fancy of the company at once, and soon every member was singing it. The poem grew night by night, and long before they reached their destination it had become a ballad of exasperating length. The poet, looking forward in a fine frenzy, describes the girl as proving faithless to Joe Bowers and marrying a red-haired butcher. This bad news comes from Joe’s brother Ike in a letter which also states the culminating fact of the tragedy, as the following lines reveal:—

It told me more than that,
Oh! it’s enough to make me swear.
It said Sally had a baby,
And the baby had red hair!

GRAND PLAZA, SAN FRANCISCO, 1852

Upon their arrival in California, the two hundred men who composed this party dispersed in all directions, and carried the ballad with them. It was heard everywhere in the mines, and in 1856 it was printed in a cheap form in San Francisco, and was sung by Johnson’s minstrels at a hall known as the Old Melodeon. Joe Bowers thus became the type of the unsophisticated Western miner, and Pike County became the symbol of the West. Crude as the verses are they are sung to this day in the County which gave them birth, and “Joe Bowers” is still a familiar name in Missouri, if not in the West generally.

This ballad which came across the Plains had its counterpart in a much better song produced by Jonathan Nichols, a Pioneer who sailed on the bark “Eliza” from Salem, Massachusetts, in December, 1848. The first stanza is as follows:—

Tune, Oh! Susanna. (Key of G.)

I came from Salem city,
With my washbowl on my knee,
I’m going to California,
The gold dust for to see.
It rained all night the day I left,
The weather, it was dry,
The sun so hot I froze to death,
Oh! brothers, don’t you cry,
Oh! California,
That’s the land for me!
I’m going to Sacramento
With my washbowl on my knee.

Under the title of the “California Song” these verses soon became the common property of every ship sailing from Atlantic ports for San Francisco, and later they were heard in the mines almost as frequently as “Joe Bowers.” But, as hope diminished and homesickness increased, both ballads—so an old miner relates—gave place to “Home, Sweet Home,” “Ole Virginny,” and other sad ditties.

Pike County seems to have had a natural tendency to burst into poetry. In the story called Devil’s Ford, Bret Harte gives us two lines from a poem otherwise unknown to fame,—

“‘Oh, my name it is Johnny from Pike,
I’m hell on a spree or a strike.’”

In the story of The New Assistant at Pine Clearing School, three big boys from Pike County explained to the schoolmistress their ideas upon the subject of education, as follows: “‘We ain’t hankerin’ much for grammar and dictionary hogwash, and we don’t want no Boston parts o’ speech rung in on us the first thing in the mo’nin’. We reckon to do our sums and our figgerin’, and our sale and barter, and our interest tables and weights and measures when the time comes, and our geograffy when it’s on, and our readin’ and writin’ and the American Constitution in regular hours, and then we calkillate to git up and git afore the po’try and the Boston airs and graces come round.’”

The “Sacramento Transcript,” of June 11, 1850, tells a story about a minister from Pike County which has a similar ring. “A miner took sick and died at a bar that was turning out very rich washings. As he happened to be a favorite in the camp, it was determined to have a general turn-out at his burial. An old Pike County preacher was engaged to officiate, but he thought it proper to moisten his clay a little before his solemn duty. The parson being a favorite, and the grocery near by, he partook with one and another before the services began, until his underpinning became quite unsteady. Presently it was announced that the last sad rites were about to be concluded, and our clerical friend advanced rather unsteadily to perform the functions of his office. After an exordium worthy of his best days, the crowd knelt around the grave, but as he was praying with fervency one of the party discovered some of the shining metal in the dirt thrown from the grave, and up he jumped and started for his pan, followed by the crowd. The minister, opening his eyes in wonder and seeing the game, cried out for a share; his claim was recognized and reserved for him until he should get sober. In the mean time, another hole was dug for the dead man, that did not furnish a like temptation to disturb his grave, and he was hurriedly deposited without further ceremony.”

Bret Harte’s best and noblest character, Tennessee’s Partner, might have been from Pike County,—he was of that kind; and Morse, the hero of the story called In the Tules, certainly was:—

“The stranger stared curiously at him. After a pause he said with a half-pitying, half-humorous smile:—

“‘Pike—aren’t you?’

“Whether Morse did or did not know that this current California slang for a denizen of the bucolic West implied a certain contempt, he replied simply:—

“‘I’m from Pike County, Mizzouri.’”

To the same effect is the historian: “To be catalogued as from Pike County seems to express a little more churlishness, a little more rudeness, a greater reserve when courtesy or hospitality is called for than I ever found in the Western character at home.”[20]

The type thus indicated was a very marked one, and was often spoken of with astonishment by more sophisticated Pioneers. Some of these Missouri men had never seen two houses together, until they came to California, so that even a little village in the mines appeared to them as a marvel of civilization and luxury. Their dress was home-made and by no means new or clean. Over their shoulders they wore strips of cotton or cloth as suspenders, and their coats were tight-waisted, long-tailed surtouts such as were fashionable in the eighteenth century. Their inseparable companion was a long-barrelled rifle, with which they could “draw a bead” on a deer or a squirrel or the white of an Indian’s eye with equal coolness and certainty of killing.

Bayard Taylor describes the same type as he met it in the ship which carried him from New Orleans to Panama in ’49. “Long, loosely-jointed men, with large hands, and awkward feet and limbs; their faces long and sallow; their hair long, straight and black; their expression one of settled melancholy. The corners of their mouths curved downward, and their upper lips were drawn tightly over their lower ones, thus giving to their faces that look of ferocity which is peculiar to Indians. These men chewed tobacco incessantly, drank copiously, were heavily armed with knives and pistols, and breathed defiance to all foreigners.”[21]

These long, sallow-faced men were probably sufferers from that fever and ague, or malaria, as we now call it, which was rife in all the “bottom lands” of the Western States; and the greater part of Pike County was included in that category. Much, indeed, of the emigration from Missouri and Illinois to California was inspired less by the love of gold than by the desire to escape from disease. Bret Harte, in many places, speaks of these fever-ridden Westerners, especially in An Apostle of the Tules, where he describes a camp-meeting, attended chiefly by “the rheumatic Parkinsons, from Green Springs; the ophthalmic Filgees, from Alder Creek; the ague-stricken Harveys, from Martinez Bend; and the feeble-limbed Steptons, from Sugar Mill.” “These,” he adds, “might in their combined families have suggested a hospital, rather than any other social assemblage.”

But these sickly or ague-smitten people formed only a small part of the Pioneers. The greater number represented the youth and strength of both the Western and Eastern States. In 1852, an interior newspaper called the “San Andreas Independent” declared, “We have a population made up from the most energetic of the civilized earth’s population”; and the boast was true.

Moreover, the Pioneers who reached California had been winnowed and sifted by the hardships and privations which beset both the land and the sea route. Thousands of the weaker among them had succumbed to starvation or disease, and their bones were whitening the Plains or lying in the vast depths of the Pacific Ocean. There was scarcely a village in the West or South, or even in New England, which did not mourn the loss of some brave young gold-seeker whose unknown fate was a matter of speculation for years afterward.

The length of the voyage from Atlantic ports to San Francisco was from four to five months, but most of the Pioneers who came by sea avoided the passage around Cape Horn, and crossed the Isthmus of Nicaragua, or, more commonly, of Panama. This, in either case, was a much shorter route; but it added the horrors of pestilence and fever, and of possible robbery and murder, to the ordinary dangers of the sea. All the blacklegs, it was noticed, took the shorter route, deeming themselves, no doubt, incapable of sustaining the prolonged ennui of a voyage around the Cape. Passengers who crossed the Isthmus of Panama disembarked at Chagres, a port so unhealthy that policies of life insurance contained a clause to the effect that if the insured remained there more than one night, his policy would be void. Chagres enjoyed the distinction of being the dirtiest place in the world. The inhabitants were almost all negroes, and one Pioneer declared that a flock of buzzards would present a favorable comparison with them.

From Chagres there was, first, a voyage of seventy-five miles up the river of the same name to Gorgona, or to Cruces, five miles farther. This was accomplished in dugouts propelled by the native Indians. Thence to Panama the Pioneers travelled on foot, or on mule-back, over a narrow, winding bridle-path through the mountains, so overhung by trees and dense tropical growths that in many places it was dark even at mid-day.

This was the opportunity of the Indian muleteer, and more than one gold-seeker never emerged from the gloomy depths of that winding trail. Originally, it was the work of the Indians; but the Spaniards who used the path in the sixteenth century had improved it, and in many places had secured the banks with stones. Now, however, the trail had fallen into decay, and in spots was almost impassable. But the tracks worn in the soft, calcareous rock by the many iron-shod hoofs which had passed over it, still remained; and the mule that bore the American seeking gold in California placed his feet in the very holes which had been made by his predecessors, painfully bearing the silver of Peru on its way to enrich the grandees of Spain.

Bad as the journey across the Isthmus was or might be, the enforced delay at Panama was worse. The number of passengers far exceeded the capacity of the vessels sailing from that port to San Francisco, and those who waited at Panama were in constant danger of cholera, of the equally dreaded Panama fever, and sometimes of smallpox. The heat was almost unbearable, and the blacks were a source of annoyance, and even of danger. “There is not in the whole world,” remarked a contemporary San Francisco paper, “a more infamous collection of villains than the Jamaica negroes who are congregated at Panama and Chagres.”

In their eagerness to get away from Panama, some Pioneers paid in advance for transportation in old rotten hulks which were never expected or intended to reach San Francisco, but which, springing a leak or being otherwise disabled, would put into some port in Lower California where the passengers would be left without the means of continuing their journey, and frequently without money.

Both on the voyage from Panama and also on the long route around Cape Horn, ship-captains often saved their good provisions for the California market, and fed their passengers on nauseous “lobscouse” and “dunderfunk.” Scurvy and other diseases resulted. An appeal to the United States consul at Rio Janeiro, when the ship touched there, was sometimes effectual, and in other cases the passengers took matters into their own hands and disciplined a rapacious captain or deposed a drunken one. In view of these uprisings, some New York skippers declined to take command of ships about to sail for California, supposing that passengers who could do such an unheard-of thing as to rebel against the master of a vessel must be a race of pirates. Great pains were taken to secure a crew of determined men for these ships, and a plentiful supply of muskets, handcuffs and shackles was always put on board. But such precautions proved to be ridiculously unnecessary. There was no case in which the Pioneers usurped authority on shipboard without sufficient cause; and in no case was an emigrant brought to trial on reaching San Francisco.

In the various ports at which they stopped much was to be seen of foreign peoples and customs; and not infrequently the Pioneers had an opportunity to show their mettle. At Santa Catharina, for example, a port on the lower coast of Brazil, a young American was murdered by a Spaniard. The authorities were inclined to treat the matter with great indifference; but there happened to be in the harbor two ship-loads of passengers en route for San Francisco, and these men threatened to seize the fortress and demolish it if justice was not done. Thereupon the murderer was tried and hung. Many South Americans in the various ports along the coast got their first correct notion of the people of the United States from these chance encounters with sea-going Pioneers.

Still more, of course, was the overland journey an education in self-reliance, in that resourcefulness which distinguishes the American, and in that courage which was so often needed and so abundantly displayed in the early mining days. Independence in the State of Missouri was a favorite starting-point, and from this place there were two routes, the southern one being by way of Santa Fé, and the northern route following the Oregon Trail to Fort Hall, and thence ascending the course of the Humboldt River to its rise in the Sierra Nevadas.

At Fort Hall some large companies which had travelled from the Mississippi River, and even from States east of that, separated, one half going to Oregon, the other turning westward to California; and thus were broken many ties of love and friendship which had been formed in the close intimacy of the long journey, especially between the younger members of the company. Old diaries and letters reveal suggestions of romance if not of tragedy in these separations, and in the choice which the emigrant maiden was sometimes forced to make between the conflicting claims of her lover and her parents.

In the year 1850 fifty thousand crossed the Plains. In 1851 immigration fell off because even at that early date there was a business “depression,” almost a “panic” in California, but in 1852 it increased again, and the Plains became a thoroughfare, dotted so far as the eye could see with long trains of white-covered wagons, moving slowly through the dust. In one day a party from Virginia passed thirty-two wagons, and during a stop in the afternoon five hundred overtook them. In after years the course of these wagons could easily be traced by the alien vegetation which marked it. Wherever the heavy wheels had broken the tough prairie sod there sprang up, from the Missouri to the Sierras, a narrow belt of flowering plants and familiar door-yard weeds,—silent witnesses of the great migration which had passed that way. Multitudes of horsemen accompanied the wagons, and other multitudes plodded along on foot. Banners were flying here and there, and the whole appearance was that of an army on the march. At night camp-fires gleamed for miles through the darkness, and if the company were not exhausted the music of a violin or a banjo floated out on the still air of the prairies. But the fatigue of the march, supplemented by the arduous labors of camping out, was usually sufficient to send the travellers to bed at the earliest possible moment.

The food consisted chiefly of salt pork or bacon,—varied when that was possible with buffalo meat or venison,—beans, baked dough called bread, and flapjacks. The last, always associated with mining life in California, were made by mixing flour and water into a sort of batter, seasoning with salt, adding a little saleratus or cooking soda, and frying the mixture in a pan greased with fat. Men ate enormously on these journeys. Four hundred pounds of sugar lasted four Pioneers only ninety days. This inordinate appetite and the quantity of salt meat eaten frequently resulted in scurvy, from which there were some deaths. Another cause of illness was the use of milk from cows driven along with the wagon-trains, and made feverish by heat and fatigue.

Many of the emigrants, especially those who undertook the journey in ’49 or ’50, were insufficiently equipped, and little aware of the difficulties and dangers which awaited them. Death in many forms hovered over those heavy, creaking, canvas-covered wagons—the “prairie-schooners,” which, drawn sometimes by horses, sometimes by oxen, sometimes by mules, jolted slowly and laboriously over two thousand miles and more of plain and mountain,—death from disease, from want of water, from starvation, from Indians, and, in crossing the Sierras, from raging snow-storms and intense cold. Rivers had to be forded, deserts crossed and a thousand accidents and annoyances encountered.

Some men made the long journey on foot, even from points east of the Mississippi River. One gray-haired Pioneer walked all the way from Michigan with a pack on his back. Another enthusiast obtained some notoriety among the emigrants of 1850 by trundling a wheelbarrow, laden with his goods, from Illinois to Salt Lake City.

Bret Harte, as we have seen, reached California by sea, and there is no record of any journey by ox-cart that he made; and yet in A Waif of the Plains he describes such a journey with a particularity which seems almost impossible for one who knew it only by hearsay. Thus, among many other details, he speaks of “a chalky taste of dust on the mouth and lips, a gritty sense of earth on the fingers, and an all-pervading heat and smell of cattle.” And in the same description occurs one of those minute touches for which he is remarkable: “The hoofs of the draught-oxen, occasionally striking in the dust with a dull report, sent little puffs like smoke on either side of the track.”

Often the cattle would break loose at night and disappear on the vast Plains, and men in search of them were sometimes lost, and died of starvation or were killed by Indians. Simply for the sake of better grazing oxen have been known to retrace their steps at night for twenty-five miles.

The opportunities for selfishness, for petulance, for obstinacy, for resentment were almost innumerable. Cooking and washing were the labors which, in the absence of women, proved most vexatious to the emigrants. “Of all miserable work,” said one, “washing is the worst, and no man who crossed the Plains will ever find fault again with his wife for scolding on a washing day.” All the Pioneers who have related their experiences on the overland journey speak of the bad effect on men’s tempers. “The perpetual vexations and hardships keep the nerves in a state of great irritability. The trip is a sort of magic mirror, exposing every man’s qualities of heart, vicious or amiable.”[22]

The shooting affairs which occurred among the emigrants were usually the result of some sudden provocation, following upon a long course of irritation between the persons concerned. Those who crossed the Plains in the summer of 1853, or afterward, might have passed a grave with this inscription:

BEAL SHOT BY BOLSBY, JUNE 15, 1853.

And, a day’s journey further, they would have noticed another grave thus inscribed:

BOLSBY SHOT FOR THE MURDER OF BEAL, JUNE 16, 1853.

This murder, to call it such, was the consequence of some insult offered to Bolsby by the other. Bolsby was forthwith tried by the company, and condemned to be shot the next morning at sunrise. He had been married only about a year before, and had left his wife and child at their home in Kentucky. For the remainder of the day he travelled with the others, and the short hours of the summer night which followed were spent by him in writing to his wife and to his father and mother. Of all the great multitude, scattered over the wide earth, who passed that particular night in sleepless agony of mind, perhaps none was more to be pitied. When morning came he dressed himself neatly in his wedding suit, and was led out to execution. With rare magnanimity, he acknowledged that his sentence was a just one, and said that he had so written to his family, and that he had been treated with consideration; but he declared that if the thing were to happen again, he would kill Beal as before. He then knelt on his blanket, gave the signal for shooting, and fell dead, pierced by six bullets.

The misfortunes of the Donner party began with a homicide. This is the party whose sufferings are described by Bret Harte without exaggeration in Gabriel Conroy. It included robbers, cannibals, murderers and heroes; and one interesting aspect of its experience is the superior endurance, both moral and physical, shown by the women. In the small detachment which, as a forlorn hope, tried to cross the Mountains in winter without provisions, and succeeded, there were twelve men and five women. Of the twelve men five died, of the five women none died![23]

Indians were often encountered on the Great Plains and in the valleys of the Colorado and Rio Grande. They were well-disposed, at first, and soon acquired some familiarity with the ordinary forms of speech used by the Pioneers. Thus one traveller reports the following friendly salutation from a member of the Snake Tribe:

“How de do—Whoa haw! G—d d—n you!”

On another occasion when a party of Pioneers were inquiring of some Indians about a certain camping-ground ahead of them, they were assured that there would be “plenty of grass there for the whoa haws, but no water for the g—d d—ns.”

Later, however, owing chiefly to unprovoked attacks by emigrants, the Indians became hostile and dangerous. Many Pioneers were robbed and some were killed by them. The Western Indian was a figure at once grotesque and terrible; and Bret Harte’s description of him, as he appeared to the emigrant boy lost on the Plains, gives the reader such a pleasant thrill of horror as he may not have experienced since Robinson Crusoe made his awful discovery of a human footprint in the sand.

“He awoke with a start. A moving figure had suddenly uplifted itself between him and the horizon!... A human figure, but so dishevelled, so fantastic, and yet so mean and puerile in its extravagance that it seemed the outcome of a childish dream. It was a mounted figure, yet so ludicrously disproportionate to the pony it bestrode, whose slim legs were stiffly buried in the dust in a breathless halt, that it might have been a straggler from some vulgar wandering circus. A tall hat, crownless and brimless, a castaway of civilization, surmounted by a turkey’s feather, was on its head; over its shoulders hung a dirty tattered blanket that scarcely covered the two painted legs which seemed clothed in soiled yellow hose. In one hand it held a gun; the other was bent above its eyes in eager scrutiny of some distant point.... Presently, with a dozen quick noiseless strides of the pony’s legs, the apparition moved to the right, its gaze still fixed on that mysterious part of the horizon. There was no mistaking it now! The painted Hebraic face, the large curved nose, the bony cheek, the broad mouth, the shadowed eyes, the straight long matted locks! It was an Indian!”[24]

There were some cases of captivity among the Indians the details of which recall the similar occurrences in New England in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most remarkable case was that of Olive Oatman, a young girl from Illinois, who was carried off by one tribe of Indians, was sold later to another, nearly died of starvation, and, finally, after a lapse of six years, was recovered safe and sound. Her brother, a boy of twelve, was beaten with clubs by the Indians, and left for dead with the bodies of his father and mother; but he revived, and succeeded in making his way back for a distance of seventy miles, when he met a party of Pima Indians, who treated him with kindness. Forty-five miles of that lonely journey lay through a desert where no water could be obtained.

Abner Nott’s daughter, Rosey, the attractive heiress of the Pontiac, was made of the same heroic stuff. “The Rosey ez I knows,” said her father, “is a little gal whose voice was as steady with Injuns yellin’ round her nest in the leaves on Sweetwater ez in her purty cabin up yonder.” Lanty Foster, too, was of “that same pioneer blood that had never nourished cravens or degenerates, ... whose father’s rifle had been levelled across her cradle, to cover the stealthy Indian who prowled outside.”

It was from these Western and Southwestern emigrants that Bret Harte’s nobler kind of woman, and, in most cases, of man also was drawn. The “great West” furnished his heroic characters,—California was only their accidental and temporary abiding-place. These people were of the muscular, farm type, with such health and such nerves as result from an out-door life, from simple, even coarse food, from early hours and abundant sleep.

The Pioneer women did indeed lack education and inherited refinement, as Bret Harte himself occasionally points out. “She brushed the green moss from his sleeve with some towelling, and although this operation brought her so near to him that her breath—as soft and warm as the Southwest trades—stirred his hair, it was evident that this contiguity was only frontier familiarity, as far removed from conscious coquetry as it was perhaps from educated delicacy.”[25]

And yet it is very easy to exaggerate this defect. In most respects the wholesomeness, the democratic sincerity and dignity of Bret Harte’s women, and of his men as well, give them the substantial benefits of gentle blood. Thus he says of one of his characters, “He had that innate respect for the secrets of others which is as inseparable from simplicity as it is from high breeding;” and this remark might have been put in a much more general form. In fact, the essential similarity between simplicity and high breeding runs through the whole nature of Bret Harte’s Pioneers, and perhaps, moreover, explains some obscure points in his own life.

Be this as it may, the defects of Bret Harte’s heroines relate rather to the ornamental than to the indispensable part of life, whereas the qualities in which they excel are those fundamental feminine qualities upon which, in the last analysis, is founded the greatness of nations. A sophisticated reader would be almost sure to underestimate them. Even that English critic who was perhaps his greatest admirer, makes the remark, literally true, but nevertheless misleading, that Bret Harte “did not create a perfectly noble, superior, commanding woman.” No, but he created, or at least sketched, more than one woman of a very noble type. What type of woman is most valuable to the world? Surely that which is fitted to become the mother of heroes; and to that type Bret Harte’s best women belong. They have courage, tenderness, sympathy, the power of self-sacrifice; they have even that strain of fierceness which seems to be inseparable in man or beast from the capacity for deep affection. They have the independence, the innocent audacity, the clear common-sense, the resourcefulness, typical of the American woman, and they have, besides, a depth of feeling which is rather primeval than American, which certainly is not a part of the typical American woman as we know her in the Eastern States.

Perhaps the final test of nobility in man or woman is the capacity to value something, be it honor, affection, or what you will, be it almost anything, but to value something more than life itself; and this is the characteristic of Bret Harte’s heroines. They are as ready to die for love as Juliet was, and along with this abandon they have the coolness, the independence, the practical faculty, which belong to their time and race, but which were not a part of woman’s nature in the age that produced Shakspere’s “unlessoned girl.”

Bret Harte’s heroines have a strong family resemblance to those of both Tourgueneff and Thomas Hardy. In each case the women obey the instinct of love as unreservedly as men of an archaic type obey the instinct of fighting. There is no question with them of material advantage, of wealth, position, or even reputation. Such considerations, so familiar to women of the world, never enter their minds. They love as nature prompts, and having once given their love, they give themselves and everything that they have along with it. There is a magnificent forgetfulness of self about them. This is the way of nature. Nature never counts the cost, never hoards her treasures, but pours them out, to live or die as the case may be, with a profusion which makes the human by-stander—economical, poverty-stricken man—stand aghast. In Russia this type of woman is frequently found, as Tourgueneff, and to a lesser degree Tolstoi, found her among the upper classes, which have retained a pristine quality long since bred out of the corresponding classes in England and in the United States. For women of the same type in England, Thomas Hardy is forced to look lower down in the social scale; and this probably accounts for the fact that his heroines are seldom drawn from the upper classes.

Women of this kind sometimes fail in point of chastity, but it is a failure due to impulse and affection, not to mere frivolity or sensuality. After all, chastity is only one of the virtues that women owe to themselves and to the race. The chaste woman who coldly marries for money is, as a rule, morally inferior to the unchaste woman who gives up everything for love.

It is to be observed, however, that Bret Harte’s women do not need this defence, for his heroines, with the single exception of the faithful Miggles, are virtuous. The only loose women in Bret Harte’s stories are the obviously bad women, the female “villains” of the play, and they are by no means numerous. Joan, in The Argonauts of North Liberty, the wives of Brown of Calaveras and The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s, respectively, the cold-blooded Mrs. Decker, and Mrs. Burroughs, the pretty, murderous, feline little woman in A Mercury of the Foot-Hills—these very nearly exhaust the list. On the other hand, in Thomas Hardy and Tourgueneff, to say nothing of lesser novelists, it is often the heroine herself who falls from virtue. Too much can hardly be made of the moral superiority of Bret Harte’s stories in this respect. It is due, not simply to his own taste and preference, but to the actual state of society in California, which, in this respect as in all others, he faithfully portrayed. The city of San Francisco might have told a different story; but in the mining and agricultural parts of the State the standard of feminine virtue was high. Perhaps this was due, in part at least, to the chivalry of the men reacting upon the women,—to that feeling which Bret Harte himself called “the Western-American fetich of the sanctity of sex,” and, again, “the innate Far-Western reverence for women.”

In all European societies, and now, to a lesser degree, in the cities of the United States, every man is, generally speaking, the enemy of every young and good-looking woman, as much as the hunter is the enemy of his game. How vast is the difference between this attitude of men to women and that which Bret Harte describes! The California men, as he says somewhere, “thought it dishonorable and a proof of incompetency to rise by their wives’ superior fortune.” They married for love and nothing else, and their love took the form of reverence.

The complement of this feeling, on the woman’s side, is a maternal, protecting affection, perhaps the noblest passion of which women are capable; and this is the kind of love that Bret Harte’s heroines invariably show. No mother could have watched over her child more tenderly than Cressy over her sweetheart. The cry that came from the lips of the Rose of Tuolumne when she flew to the rescue of her bleeding lover was “the cry of a mother over her stricken babe, of a tigress over her mangled cub.”

Bret Harte’s heroines are almost all of the robust type. A companion picture to the Rose is that of Jinny in the story When the Waters Were Up at “Jules’.” “Certainly she was graceful! Her tall, lithe, but beautifully moulded figure, even in its characteristic Southwestern indolence, fell into poses as picturesque as they were unconscious. She lifted the big molasses can from its shelf on the rafters with the attitude of a Greek water-bearer. She upheaved the heavy flour sack to the same secure shelf with the upraised palm of an Egyptian caryatid.”

Trinidad Joe’s daughter, too, was large-limbed, with blue eyes, black brows and white teeth. It was of her that the Doctor said, “If she spoke rustic Greek instead of bad English, and wore a cestus instead of an ill-fitting corset, you’d swear she was a goddess.”

Something more, however, goes to the making of a handsome woman than mere health and muscle. Bret Harte often speaks of the sudden appearance of beauty and refinement among the Western and Southwestern people. Kitty, for example, as the Reader will remember, “was slight, graceful, and self-contained, and moved beside her stumpy commonplace father and her faded commonplace mother, in the dining-room of the Boomville hotel, like some distinguished alien.” In A Vision of the Fountain, Bret Harte, half humorously, suggested an explanation. He speaks of the hero as “a singularly handsome young fellow with one of those ideal faces and figures sometimes seen in Western frontier villages, attributable to no ancestor, but evolved possibly from novels and books devoured by ancestresses in the long, solitary winter evenings of their lonely cabins on the frontier.”[26]

It seems more likely, however, that a fortunate environment is the main cause of beauty, a life free from care or annoyance; a deep sense of security; that feeling of self-respect which is produced by the respect of others, and, finally, surroundings which have either the beauty of art or the beauty of nature. These are the very advantages which, with many superficial differences, no doubt, are enjoyed alike by the daughters of frontiersmen and by the daughters of a nobility. On the other hand, they are the very advantages with which the middle class in cities, the cockney class, is almost always obliged to dispense, and that class is conspicuously deficient in beauty. Perhaps no one thing is more conducive to beauty than the absence of those hideous creations known as “social superiors.” Imagine a society in which it would be impossible to make anybody understand what is meant by the word “snob”! And yet such was, and to a considerable extent still is, the society of the Far West and of rural New England.

Bret Harte himself glanced at this subject in describing the Blue-Grass Penelope. “Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors. There were small, narrow, arched feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted floors of outlying cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright, clearly opened eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed upon princes and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the County judge read her own beauty without envy in the frank glances and unlowered crest of the blacksmith’s daughter.”

No less obvious is the connection of repose with beauty. Beauty springs up naturally among people who know the luxury of repose, and yet are vigorous enough to escape the dangers of sloth. Salomy Jane was lazy as well as handsome, and when we first catch a glimpse of her she is leaning against a door-post, engaged in the restful occupation of chewing gum. The same repose, amounting indeed to indolence, formed the chief charm of Mr. MacGlowrie’s Widow.

Whether or not the landscape plays a part in the production of womanly beauty is a question more open to dispute. Not many persons feel this influence, but, as experience will show, the proportion of country people who feel it is greater than that of city people, although they have considerably less to say upon the subject. The wide, open spaces, the distant horizon, the gathering of storms, the changing green of Spring and Summer, the scarlet and gold of Autumn, the vast expanse of spotless snow glistening in Midwinter,—these things must be seen by the countryman, his eyes cannot escape them, and in some cases they will be felt as well as seen. Whoever has travelled a New England country road upon a frosty, moonless night in late October, and has observed the Northern Lights casting a pale, cold radiance through the leafless trees, will surely detect some difference between that method of illumination and a kerosene lantern.

A New England farmer whose home commanded a noble view of mountain, lake and forest was blessed with two daughters noted for their beauty. They grew up and married, but both died young; and many years afterward he was heard to say, as he looked dreamily out from his doorway, “I have often thought that the reason why my girls became beautiful women was that from their earliest childhood they always had this scene before their eyes.” And yet he had never read Wordsworth or Ruskin!

Bret Harte’s heroines enjoyed all the advantages just enumerated as being conducive to beauty, and they escaped contamination from civilization. They were close to nature, and as primitive in their love-affairs as the heroines of Shakspere. “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight!” John Ashe’s betrothed and Ridgeway Dent had known each other a matter of two hours or so, before they exchanged that immortal kiss which nearly cost the lives of both. Two brief meetings, and one of those in the dark, sufficed to win for the brave and clever young deputy sheriff the affections of Lanty Foster. In A Jack and Jill of the Sierras, a handsome girl from the East tumbles over a precipice, and falls upon the recumbent hero, part way down, with such violence as to stun him. This is hardly romantic, but the dangerous and difficult ascent which they make together furnishes the required opportunity. Ten minutes of contiguity suffice, and so well is the girl’s character indicated by a few masterly strokes, that the reader feels no surprise at the result.

And yet there is nothing that savors of coarseness, much less of levity, in these abrupt romances. When Bret Harte’s heroes and heroines meet, it is the coming together of two souls that recognize and attract each other. It is like a stroke of lightning, and is accepted with a primeval simplicity and un-selfconsciousness. The impression is as deep as it is sudden.

What said Juliet of the anonymous young man whom she had known something less than an hour?

“Go, ask his name: if he be marrièd
My grave is like to be my wedding bed.”

So felt Liberty Jones when she exclaimed to Dr. Ruysdael, “I’ll go with you or I’ll die!”

It is this sincerity that sanctifies the rapidity and frankness of Bret Harte’s love-affairs. Genuine passion takes no account of time, and supplies by one instinctive rush of feeling the experience of years. Given the right persons, time becomes as long and as short as eternity. Thus it was with the two lovers who met and parted at midnight on the hilltop. “There they stood alone. There was no sound or motion in earth or woods or heaven. They might have been the one man and woman for whom this goodly earth that lay at their feet, rimmed with the deepest azure, was created. And seeing this they turned toward each other with a sudden instinct, and their hands met, and then their lips in one long kiss.”

But this same perfect understanding may be arrived at in a crowd as well as in solitude. Cressy and the Schoolmaster were mutually aware of each other’s presence at the dance before they had exchanged a look, and when their eyes met it was in “an isolation as supreme as if they had been alone.”

Could any country in the world except our own produce a Cressy! She has all the beauty, much of the refinement, and all the subtle perceptions of a girl belonging to the most sophisticated race and class; and underneath she has the strong, primordial, spontaneous qualities, the wholesome instincts, the courage, the steadfastness of that Pioneer people, that religious, fighting, much-enduring people to whom she belonged.

Cressy is the true child of her father; and there is nothing finer in all Bret Harte than his description of this rough backwoodsman, ferocious in his boundary warfare, and yet full of vague aspirations for his daughter, conscious of his own deficiencies, and oppressed with that melancholy which haunts the man who has outgrown the ideals and conventions of his youth. Hiram McKinstry, compared with the masterful Yuba Bill, the picturesque Hamlin, or the majestic Starbottle, is not an imposing figure; but to have divined him was a greater feat of sympathetic imagination than to have created the others.

It is characteristic, too, of Bret Harte that it is Cressy’s father who is represented as acutely conscious of his own defects in education; whereas her mother remains true to the ancestral type, deeply distrusting her husband’s and her daughter’s innovations. Mrs. McKinstry, as the Reader will remember, “looked upon her daughter’s studies and her husband’s interest in them as weaknesses that might in course of time produce infirmity of homicidal purpose and become enervating of eye and trigger finger.... ‘The old man’s worrits hev sorter shook out a little of his sand,’ she had explained.”

Mr. McKinstry, on the other hand, had almost as much devotion to “Kam” as Matthew Arnold had to Culture, and meant very nearly the same thing by it. Thus he said to the Schoolmaster: “‘I should be a powerful sight more kam if I knowed that when I was away huntin’ stock or fightin’ stakes with them Harrisons that she was a-settin’ in school with the other children and the birds and the bees, listenin’ to them and to you. Mebbe there’s been a little too many scrimmages goin’ on round the ranch sence she’s been a child; mebbe she orter know sunthin’ more of a man than a feller who sparks her and fights for her.’

“The master was silent. Had this selfish, savage, and literally red-handed frontier brawler been moved by some dumb instinct of the power of gentleness to understand his daughter’s needs better than he?”

Alas that no genius has arisen to write the epic of the West, as Hawthorne and Mary Wilkins and Miss Jewett have written the epic of New England! Bret Harte’s stories of the Western people are true and striking, but his limitations prevented him from giving much more than sketches of them. They are not presented with that fullness which is necessary to make a figure in fiction impress itself upon the popular imagination, and become familiar even to people who have never read the book in which it is contained. Cressy, like the other heroines of Bret Harte, flits across the scene a few times, and we see her no more. Mrs. McKinstry is drawn only in outline; and yet she is a strong, tragic figure, of a type now extinct, or nearly so, as powerful and more sane than Meg Merrilies, and far more worthy of a permanent place in literature.

CHAPTER VI