Bret Harte and Local Color

Bret Harte was born Francis Brett Hart in Albany, New York, on August 25, 1836. (A few sources give 1837.) His father changed the family name to Harte, and the son later went by his middle name, spelled with one t. He had a poem printed at 11, and his schooling ended when he was 13.

One fact matters for every story in this unit. Harte wrote his famous mining-camp tales in the late 1860s about camps of 1850 and 1851. He was looking back at a world that was already gone, for readers who had never seen it.

Local color, also called regionalism, is a kind of American writing that grew popular after the Civil War. A local color story is rooted in one region and tries to show what makes it different from everywhere else. Most of these stories share a few traits:

• Setting first. The place is so important that it can feel like the main character.
• Dialect. Characters talk the way people of that region talked, with spellings that show the sound.
• Types. Characters stand for the region: the gambler, the miner, the stagecoach driver.
• Customs and detail. Food, clothes, work and local habits get close attention.
• Nostalgia. The stories often look back at a way of life that is vanishing or gone.

Britannica says Harte “helped create the local-colour school in American fiction.” After him came writers of New England villages, Southern towns and Midwestern farms, including Kate Chopin, whose Louisiana stories are Unit 4 of this course.

Local color can also flatten real people into colorful types. A Springfield, Massachusetts, newspaper praised “The Luck of Roaring Camp” as “a genuine California story,” yet critics later said Harte had romanticized rather than realistically depicted life “in the diggings.” Twain went further and claimed that Harte’s miners’ dialect never existed outside Harte’s imagination. Keep both views in mind: these stories are vivid, and they are also made up.

Summary. On “the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850,” the gambler John Oakhurst notices a chill in the town of Poker Flat. The town is going through “a spasm of virtuous reaction, quite as lawless and ungovernable as any of the acts that had provoked it.” “A secret committee had determined to rid the town of all improper persons.” It has already hanged two men “from the boughs of a sycamore in the gulch.” Now it banishes four more: Oakhurst; two women whose “impropriety was professional,” known as the “Duchess” and “Mother Shipton”; and “Uncle Billy,” a suspected sluice-robber and confirmed drunkard. Some men want Oakhurst hanged too, since he has won their money. “It's agin justice,” says Jim Wheeler, to let “this yer young man from Roaring Camp” keep it. Oakhurst accepts his sentence with “philosophic calmness.” He “recognized the usual percentage in favor of the dealer.”

The four set out for the camp of Sandy Bar, “distant a day's severe travel” over the mountains. Oakhurst trades his own horse, “Five Spot,” for the Duchess’s worn-out mule. At noon the Duchess refuses to go on, and they stop in “A wooded amphitheater, surrounded on three sides by precipitous cliffs of naked granite.” Oakhurst warns them against “throwing up their hand before the game was played out,” but the others drink. He does not; he “couldn't afford it.”

Then Tom Simson, the “Innocent” of Sandy Bar, rides up. Months before, Oakhurst won “some forty dollars” from him at cards, then gave it all back with a warning: “Tommy, you're a good little man, but you can't gamble worth a cent. Don't try it over again.” Tom has adored him ever since. Tom has run away with Piney Woods, a girl of fifteen who used to wait “on the table at the Temperance House,” because her father objected to their marriage. Tom knows of “a rude attempt at a log house” nearby, and the party settles in. He takes the Duchess for Oakhurst’s wife, and nobody corrects him.

That night Uncle Billy sneaks off with all the mules. In the morning they are “snowed in!” The food stored in the hut “might last ten days longer.” Oakhurst hides Billy’s theft from the young couple, reasoning that “They'll find out the truth about us all when they find out anything.” Tom is cheerful: “We'll have a good camp for a week, and then the snow'll melt, and we'll all go back together.” They sing hymns to Piney’s accordion, and Tom retells Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad in camp slang, turning swift-footed Achilles into “Ash-heels.”

The snow keeps falling until the drifts “towered twenty feet above their heads.” “At midnight on the tenth day” Mother Shipton dies. She has been saving her food for Piney: “Give 'em to the child.” Oakhurst makes snowshoes “from the old pack saddle” and sends Tom to Poker Flat for help, saying, “There's one chance in a hundred to save her yet.” He walks with Tom “As far as the canyon” and does not come back.

The Duchess and Piney fall asleep in each other’s arms, and the snow covers them. When rescuers arrive, you could not tell “which was she that had sinned.” At the head of the gulch, “on one of the largest pine trees, they found the deuce of clubs pinned to the bark with a bowie knife.” On it, “written in pencil, in a firm hand,” Oakhurst has left his own epitaph: he “STRUCK A STREAK OF BAD LUCK ON THE 23D OF NOVEMBER, 1850, AND HANDED IN HIS CHECKS ON THE 7TH DECEMBER, 1850.” He lies beneath the tree, dead by his own hand.

Summary. In Roaring Camp, a mining camp of “about a hundred men,” a woman called Cherokee Sal is giving birth. She is “the only woman in Roaring Camp,” and deaths are common there, “but a birth was a new thing.” A miner named Stumpy acts as midwife. Sal dies, and the baby lives.

The men file past the candle-box where the baby lies and leave gifts: a gold specimen, a diamond ring, a Bible “(contributor not detected),” and a silver teaspoon whose initials “were not the giver's.” The baby grabs Kentuck’s finger, and the big miner cannot stop talking about it: “He rastled with my finger.” The camp considers sending the baby to Red Dog, “a distance of forty miles,” but decides to raise him. He is fed on the milk of a donkey named “Jinny.” Oakhurst the gambler says the baby has brought the camp luck, and the men agree on the name. “Call him Luck, and start him fair,” Oakhurst says. Stumpy christens him, “I proclaim you Thomas Luck, according to the laws of the United States and the State of California, so help me God.”

“And so the work of regeneration began in Roaring Camp.” The baby’s cabin is cleaned and papered. The fancy cradle, “packed eighty miles by mule,” “sorter killed the rest of the furniture,” so the cabin must be fixed up to match it. A rival saloon, “Tuttle's grocery,” buys a carpet and mirrors. Kentuck appears every afternoon “in a clean shirt.” The men give up shouting and swearing near the baby. An English sailor known as “Man-o'-War Jack” sings him a gloomy ballad about the warship Arethusa as a lullaby, and the men bring him flowers from the gulch. They were “flush times,” a golden summer.

Then comes the winter of 1851. Snow lies deep in the Sierra, every creek becomes a river, and one night the North Fork “suddenly leaped over its banks,” and in the morning Stumpy’s cabin is gone and Stumpy is dead. A relief boat finds Kentuck “cruelly crushed and bruised, but still holding The Luck of Roaring Camp in his arms.” The baby is dead, and Kentuck is dying. “Tell the boys I've got The Luck with me now,” he says.

Bret Harte and Mark Twain met in San Francisco in the 1860s, when both were young newspaper writers. Their friendship later fell apart.

• The San Francisco years. Twain moved to San Francisco in 1864 and met Harte there. Britannica says Harte, as an editor of The Californian, hired Twain to write weekly articles. Twain later recalled that Harte struck “a new and fresh and spirited note” as an editor.
• Early praise. Twain called “The Luck of Roaring Camp” “the best prose magazine article that has seen the light for many months on either side of the ocean.”
• A sore point. In December 1870 a Buffalo newspaper ran a parody of Harte’s Truthful James poem, signed “Carl Byng,” and many people thought Twain had written it. He angrily denied it: “I am not in the imitation business.”
• Ah Sin (1876–1877). In October 1876 Harte visited Twain in Hartford and asked him to help write a play, and the two worked on it there that fall. Its title character takes his name from the Chinese card player in Harte’s Truthful James poem. By February 1877 they had fallen out, and Twain finished it alone, writing that he “left hardly a foot-print of Harte in it.” It opened in Washington, D.C., on May 7, 1877, and lasted only a few months.
• The break. When Harte sought a government post abroad, Twain tried to block it. In a letter to William Dean Howells he called Harte “a liar, a thief, a swindler,” and more. In his autobiography, written after Harte’s death, Twain accused him of borrowing money with no plan to repay it and of abandoning his family, and called him “The Immortal Bilk.” Harte struck back in fiction: a character named Charley Bing in his 1893 story “Ingénue of the Sierras” is said to be modeled on Twain.

Much of what we know comes from letters and memories written in anger, so read each side’s claims with care. For more on Twain, see Mark Twain for High School.

Harte spoke out in print against the killing of Wiyot people and defended Chinese immigrants. His work still carries the attitudes of his age, and one of his poems did harm he did not intend.

• “Plain Language from Truthful James” (1870). In this comic poem, a white cardsharp named William Nye tries to cheat a Chinese man, Ah Sin, at cards, finds that Ah Sin is cheating better, and attacks him. Harte meant it as satire: the white man is the hypocrite, and readers were supposed to side with Ah Sin. Many readers took it the other way. They quoted lines out of context, reprinted it under a mocking title, and used it to mock Chinese immigrants. Opponents of Chinese immigration recited it in public. The Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882. Harte later called it “the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote.” The poem uses ethnic slurs and stereotypes, and we do not reprint it.
• What Harte said elsewhere. Harte had defended Chinese immigrants since at least 1863. In 1866 he called San Francisco’s Chinese residents “peaceable citizens,” and his 1874 story “Wan Lee, the Pagan” attacked stereotypes about them. The poem shows how satire can fail when readers miss the irony.
• Native Americans. Harte’s life was threatened after he condemned the 1860 Wiyot massacre. Yet in “The Luck of Roaring Camp” Cherokee Sal, whose name suggests Native ancestry, gets almost no life of her own: the narrator calls her sinful, and she dies a few paragraphs after she appears. Later the expressman, who carries news between the camps, describes the baby with a slur.
• Slurs in passing. In “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” Oakhurst uses an anti-Black slur in a casual remark about luck. The narrator does not comment on it, which tells you how ordinary such words were to Harte’s readers. We have not quoted either slur.
• Women. Every woman in these two stories is either a sex worker or a girl of fifteen, and all four of them die. The Duchess and Mother Shipton are given courage, but their goodness is shown mostly through suffering and death.
• Violence as comedy. A lynching is reported in a single light sentence. The camps’ violence is often treated as local color. Ask whose deaths the stories mourn and whose they pass over.

• Bret Harte, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches, Project Gutenberg eBook #1312 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/1312).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Bret Harte” (life dates, the local-colour school, 1854 and the brief mining trip, the Northern Californian and the 1860 editorial, Condensed Novels, the Mint and Twain at The Californian, the $10,000 Atlantic contract and the professorship, Ah Sin and its short run in 1877, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Krefeld, Glasgow and London, and “Ingénue of the Sierras”).
• Wikipedia, “Bret Harte” (birth name and family, 1853, Union and the Wiyot massacre, marriage, the first Atlantic story, The Californian, the Overland, the Truthful James poem and “Wan Lee, the Pagan,” the move east, the letter to Howells, Camberley and Frimley, the 16 of 40 years, Twain’s autobiography, the July 1916 Wells Fargo Messenger account of his messenger job and Yuba Bill, as Wikipedia summarizes it; we could not find a public scan of that issue), “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (August 1868, the reviews and Twain’s praise, the “in the diggings” criticism), “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (January 1869, film versions), “Plain Language from Truthful James” (Harte’s intent and readers’ reaction, his 1866 defense of Chinese residents, the 1870 parody, Ah Sin and the opening on May 7, 1877, Charley Bing) and “American literary regionalism” (the traits of local color).
• Mark Twain Project, Twain’s letter to William Dean Howells of October 11, 1876 (Harte’s visit to Hartford to start Ah Sin, and the editors’ note that the play was written between October 1876 and February 1877) and letter to Ainsworth R. Spofford of October 23, 1876 (the copyright title page, “Hartford: 1876”).
• Mark Twain on Harte’s editing and the parody is quoted from the Wikipedia articles above, which cite Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (2000), and Ben Tarnoff, The Bohemians (2014).
• Summaries are our own paraphrases. Every quotation from the stories was checked against the Project Gutenberg text above.
• Art: the snowbound camp and deuce of clubs illustrations and the preview image are original artwork made for Jugami.