The Life of Bret Harte, with Some Account of the California Pioneers

THE POST-OFFICE, SAN FRANCISCO, 1849-50
A. Castaigne, del.
Copyright by the Century Co.

The great beards grown in California were sometimes a source of embarrassment. When a steamer arrived fathers might be seen caressing little ones whom they now saw for the first time, while the children, in their turn, were frightened at finding themselves in the arms of such fierce-looking men. Wives almost shared the consternation of the children. “Why don’t you kiss me, Bessie?” said a Pioneer to his newly arrived wife. She stood gazing at the hirsute imitation of her husband in utter astonishment. At last she timidly ejaculated, “I can’t find any place.”

In March, 1852, forty four women and thirty-six children arrived on one steamer. The proportion of women Pioneers in that year was one to ten. By 1853, women were one in five of the population, and children one in ten. Even so late as 1860, however, marriageable women were very scarce. In November of that year the “Calaveras Chronicle” declared: “No sooner does a girl emerge from her pantalettes than she is taken possession of by one of our bachelors, and assigned a seat at the head of his table. We hear that girls are plenty in the cities below, but such is not the case here.”

The same paper gives an account of the first meeting between a heroine of the Plains, and a Calaveras bachelor. “One day this week a party of immigrants came down the ridge, and the advance-wagon was driven by a young and pretty woman—one of General Allen’s maidens. When near town the train was met by a butcher’s cart, and the cart was driven by a young ‘bach.’ He, staring at the lovely features of the lady, neglected to rein his horse to one side of the road, and the two wagons were about to come in collision, when a man in the train, noticing the danger, cried out to the female driver, ‘Gee, Kate, Gee!’ Said Kate, ‘Ain’t I a-tryin’, but the dog-gone horses won’t gee!’”

Mrs. Bates speaks of two emigrant wagons passing through Marysville one day in 1850, “each with three yoke of oxen driven by a beautiful girl. In their hands they carried one of those tremendous, long ox-whips which, by great exertion, they flourished to the admiration of all beholders. Within two weeks each one was married.”

But it was seldom that a woman who had crossed the Plains presented a comely appearance upon her arrival. The sunken eyes and worn features of the newcomers, both men and women, gave some hint of what they had endured.[59]

A letter from Placerville, written in September, 1850, describes a female Pioneer who had not quite reached the goal. “On Tuesday last an old lady was seen leading a thin, jaded horse laden with her scanty stores. The heat of the sun was almost unbearable, and the sand ankle deep, yet she said that she had travelled in the same way for the last two hundred miles.”

And then comes a figure which recalls that of Liberty Jones on her arrival in California: “By the side of one wagon there walked a little girl about thirteen years old, and from her appearance she must have walked many hundreds of miles. She was bare-footed and haggard, and she strode on with steps longer than her years would warrant, as though in the tiresome journey she had thrown off all grace, and had accustomed herself to a gait which would on the long marches enable her with most ease to keep up with the wagon.”

The long journey across the Plains without the comforts and conveniences, and sometimes without even the decencies of life, the contact with rough men, the shock of hardships and fatigues under which human nature is apt to lose respect for itself and consideration for others,—these things inevitably had a coarsening effect upon the Pioneer women. Only those who possessed exceptional strength and sweetness of character could pass through them unscathed. As one traveller graphically puts it: “A woman in whose virtue you might have the same confidence as in the existence of the stars above would suddenly horrify you by letting a huge oath escape from her lips, or by speaking to her children as an ungentle hostler would to his cattle, and perhaps listening undisturbed to the same style of address in reply.”[60] The callousness which Liberty Jones showed at the death of her father was not in the least exaggerated by Bret Harte.

And yet these defects shrink almost to nothing when we contrast them with the deeds of love and affection silently performed by women upon those terrible journeys, and often spoken of with emotion by the Pioneers who witnessed them. A few of those deeds are chronicled in this book, many more may be found in the narratives and newspapers of the day, but by far the greater number were long since buried in oblivion. They are preserved, if preserved at all, only in the characters of those descended from the women who performed them.

Upon one thing the Pioneer women could rely,—the universal respect shown them by the men. In the roughest mining camp in California an unprotected girl would not only have been safe, she would have been treated with the utmost consideration and courtesy. Such was the society of which the English critic declared that “its laxity surpassed the laxity of savages!”[61]

In this respect, if in no other, the Pioneers insisted that foreigners should comply with their notions. Nothing, indeed, gave more surprise to the “Greasers” and Chilenos than the fact that they were haled into court and punished for beating their wives.

As to the Mexican and Chilean women themselves, it must be admitted that they contributed more to the gaiety than to the morality or peacefulness of California life. “Rowdyism and crime,” remarked the “Alta California” in October, 1851, “increase in proportion to the increase in the number of Señoritas. This is true in the mines as well as in the city.”

At a horse-race that came off that year in San Francisco, we hear of the Señoritas as freely backing their favorite nags with United States money, though how it came into their possession, as a contemporary satirist remarked, “is matter of surmise only.” This species of woman is portrayed by Bret Harte in the passionate Teresa, who met her fate, in a double sense, in The Carquinez Woods, finding there both a lover and her death. The Spanish woman of good family is represented by Doña Rosita in The Argonauts of North Liberty, by Enriquez Saltello’s charming sister, Consuelo, and by Concepcion,[62] the beautiful daughter of the Commandante, who, after the death of her lover, the Russian Envoy, took the veil, and died a nun at Benicia.

Even before the discovery of gold a few Americans had married into leading Spanish families of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Monterey and Sonoma. The first house erected on the spot which afterward became San Francisco was built in 1836 by Jacob P. Leese, an American who had married a sister of General Vallejo. It was finished July 3, and on the following day was “dedicated to the cause of freedom.”

There is something of great interest in the union of races so diverse, and Bret Harte has touched upon this aspect of California life in the character of that unique heroine, Maruja. “‘Hush, she’s looking.’ She had indeed lifted her eyes toward the window. They were beautiful eyes, and charged with something more than their own beauty. With a deep, brunette setting, even to the darkened cornea, the pupils were blue as the sky above them. But they were lit with another intelligence. The soul of the Salem whaler looked out of the passion-darkened orbits of the mother, and was resistless.”

Chapter and verse can always be given to confirm Bret Harte’s account of California life, and even Maruja can be authenticated. A Lieutenant in the United States Navy, who visited the Coast in 1846, gave this description of the reigning belle of California: “Her father was an Englishman, her mother a Spanish lady. She was brunette, with an oval face, magnificent grey eyes, the corners of her mouth slightly curved downward, so as to give a proud and haughty expression to the face. She was tall, graceful, well-shaped, with small feet and hands, a dead shot, an accomplished rider, and amiable withal. I never saw a more patrician style of beauty and native elegance.”[63]

California was always the land of romance, and Bret Harte in his poems and stories touched upon its whole history from the beginning. Even the visit of Sir Francis Drake in 1578 was not overlooked. In The Mermaid of Light-House Point, Bret Harte quotes a footnote, perhaps imaginary, from an account of Drake’s travels, as follows: “The admiral seems to have lost several of his crew by desertion, who were supposed to have perished miserably by starvation in the inhospitable interior or by the hands of savages. But later voyagers have suggested that the deserters married Indian wives, and there is a legend that a hundred years later a singular race of half-breeds, bearing unmistakable Anglo-Saxon characteristics, was found in that locality.”

This was the origin of the blue-eyed and light-haired mermaid of the story; and it is only fair to add that the tradition of which the author speaks was current among the Nicasio Indians who inhabited the valley of that name, about fifteen miles eastward of Drake’s Bay.

Among the women who first arrived from the East by sea, there were many of easy virtue; but even these women—and here is disclosed a wonderful compliment to the sex—were held by observing Pioneers to have an elevating influence upon the men. “The bad women,” says one careful historian, “have improved the morals of the community. They have banished much barbarism, softened many hard hearts, and given a gentleness to the men which they did not have before.”[64]

If this was the effect of the bad, what must have been the influence of the good women! Let the same writer tell us: “Soon after their arrival, schools and churches began to spring up; social circles were formed; refinement dawned upon a debauched and reckless community; decorum took the place of obscenity; kind and gentle words were heard to fall from the lips of those who before had been accustomed to taint every phrase with an oath; and smiles displayed themselves upon countenances to which they had long been strangers.”

And then the author pays a tribute to woman which could hardly be surpassed: “Had I received no other benefit from my trip to California than the knowledge I have gained, inadequate as it may be, of woman’s many virtues and perfections, I should account myself well repaid.” In a ship-load of Pioneers which sailed from New York around Cape Horn to San Francisco in 1850 there was just one woman; and yet her influence upon the men was so marked and so salutary that it was often spoken of by the Captain.

The effect of their peculiar situation upon the married women was not good. They were apt to be demoralized by the attentions of their men friends, and they were too few in number to inflict upon improper females that rigid ostracism from society, which, some cynics think, is the strongest safeguard of feminine virtue. Women in California were released from their accustomed restraints, they were much noticed and flattered; and, then, as a San Francisco belle exclaimed, “The gentlemen are so rich and so handsome, and have such superb whiskers!”

In a single issue of the “Sacramento Transcript,” in July, 1850, are the following two items: “A certain madam now in this town buried her husband, and seventy-four hours afterward she married another.” “One of our fair and lovely damsels had a quarrel with her husband. He took the stage for Stockton, and the same day she married another man.”

Even those Pioneers who were fortunate enough to have their wives with them did not always appreciate the blessing. Being absorbed in business they often felt hampered by obligations from which their bachelor rivals were free, or perhaps, they chafed at the wholesome restraint imposed upon a married man in a community of unmarried persons. There was a dangerous tendency among California husbands to permit their friends to look after their wives. On this subject Professor Royce very acutely remarks: “The family grows best in a garden with its kind. When family life does not involve healthy friendship with other families, it is likely to be injured by unhealthy if well-meaning friendships with wanderers.” This is a sentiment which Brown of Calaveras would have echoed.

Men with attractive wives were apt to be uncomfortably situated in California. It is matter of history how The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s protected his young and pretty spouse from dangerous communications: “When I married my wife and brought her down here, knowin’ this yer camp, I sez: ‘No flirtin’, no foolin’, no philanderin’ here, my dear! You’re young and don’t know the ways o’ men. The first man I see you talking with, I shoot.’”

In 1851, there was a man named Crockett whose predicament was something like that of the Bell-Ringer, and still more like that of Brown of Calaveras, for he not only had a very handsome wife, but it was his additional misfortune to keep a tavern on the road between Sacramento and Salmon Falls. It was not unusual for a dozen or more bearded miners to be gazing at Mrs. Crockett or watching for an opportunity to speak with her. This kept Crockett in a continual state of jealous irritation. He was a very small man, and he carried ostentatiously a very large pistol, which he would often draw and exhibit. A guest who stopped at the tavern for breakfast at a time when miners along the road had been more numerous than usual, found Crockett “charging around like a madman, and foaming at the mouth.” However, he received the guest with hospitality, informed him that “he (Crockett) was a devilish good fellow when he was right side up,” and finally set before him an excellent meal. Mrs. Crockett presided at the table, “but in a very nervous manner, as if she were in expectation of being at almost any minute made a target of.”

If life in California during the earlier years was bad for women, it was still worse for children. In San Francisco there was no public school until the autumn of 1851. Before that time there had been several small private schools, and one free school supported by charity, but in 1851 this was given up for want of funds. In the cities and towns outside of San Francisco there was even greater delay in establishing public schools. In 1852 there were many children at Marysville who were receiving no instruction, and others, fourteen years old and even older, were only just learning to read. Horace Greeley visited California in the year 1859, and he wrote, “There ought to be two thousand good common schools in operation this winter, but I fear there will not be six hundred.”[65]

Partly in consequence of this lack of schools, partly on account of the general demoralization and ultra freedom of California society, boys grew up in the streets, and were remarkable for their precocious depravity. Even the climate contributed to this result, for, except in the rainy season, the shelter of a house could easily be dispensed with by night as well as by day. “It was the voice of a small boy, its weak treble broken by that preternatural hoarseness which only vagabondage and the habit of premature self-assertion can give. It was the face of a small boy, a face that might have been pretty and even refined but that it was darkened by evil knowledge from within, and by dirt and hard experience from without.”[66]

It was no uncommon thing, in San Francisco especially, to see small boys drinking and gambling in public places.

A Pioneer describes “boys from six upward swaggering through the streets, begirt with scarlet sashes, cigar in mouth, uttering huge oaths, and occasionally treating men and boys at the bar.” Miners not more than ten years old were washing for gold on their own account, and obtaining five or ten dollars a week, which they spent chiefly on drinks and cigars. Bret Harte’s Youngest Prospector in Calaveras was not an uncommon child.

An instance of precocity was the attempted abduction in May, 1851, of a girl of thirteen by two boys a little older. They were all the children of Sydney parents, and the girl declared that she loved those boys, and had begged them to take her away, and she thought it very hard to be compelled to return to her home. This incident may recall to the Reader the precocious love affairs of Richelieu Sharpe, whose father thus explained his absence from supper: “‘Like ez not, he’s gone over to see that fammerly at the summit. There’s a little girl there that he’s sparkin’, about his own age.’

“‘His own age!’ said Minty indignantly, ‘why, she’s double that, if she’s a day. Well—if he ain’t the triflinest, conceitedest little limb that ever grew!’”

The son of a tavern-keeper at Sacramento, a boy only eight years old, was described as a finished gambler. Upon an occasion when he was acting as dealer, all the other players being men, one of them accused him of cheating. The consequence was a general fight: two men were shot, one fatally, and the man who killed him was hung the next day by a vigilance committee. Even Bret Harte’s “perverse romanticism” never carried him quite so far in delineation of the California child. The word “hoodlum,” meaning a youthful, semi-criminal rough, originated in San Francisco.

But there is another side to this picture of childhood on the Pacific Slope, and we obtain a glimpse of it occasionally. There was a Sunday-school procession at Sacramento in July, 1850, upon which the “Sacramento Transcript” remarked, “We have seen no sight here which called home so forcibly to our minds with all its endearments.” Three years later in San Francisco, there was a May-Day procession of a thousand children, each one carrying a flower.

Even Bret Harte’s story of the adoption of a child by the city of San Francisco[67] had a solid foundation in fact, though perhaps he was not aware of it. In July, 1851, the City Fathers charged themselves with the support and protection of an orphan girl, and on the thirteenth of that month a measure providing for her maintenance was introduced in the Board of Aldermen.

The scarcity, or rather, as we have seen, the almost total absence at first of women and children, of wives and sweethearts, led to the adoption by the Pioneers of a great number and variety of pet animals. Dogs and cats from all quarters, parrots from over-seas, canaries brought from the East, bears from the Sierras, wolves from the Plains, foxes and raccoons from the Foot-Hills,—all these were found in miners’ cabins, in gambling saloons and in restaurants. They occupied the waste places in the hearts of the Argonauts, and furnished an object, if an inadequate one, for those affections which might otherwise have withered at the root. One miner was accompanied in all his wanderings by a family consisting of a bay horse, two dogs, two sheep and two goats.

These California pets had their little day, perished, and are forgotten,—all save one. Who can forget the bear cub that Bret Harte immortalized under the name of Baby Sylvester! “He was as free from angles as one of Leda’s offspring. Your caressing hand sank away in his fur with dreamy languor. To look at him long was an intoxication of the senses; to pat him was a wild delirium; to embrace him an utter demoralization of the intellectual faculties.... He takes the only milk that comes to the settlement—brought up by Adams’ Express at seven o’clock every morning.”

CHAPTER IX

That there was no exaggeration in Bret Harte’s pictures of Pioneer friendship might be shown by many extracts from contemporary observers, but one such will suffice:—“Two men who lived together, slept in the same cabin, ate together, took turns cooking and washing, tended on each other in sickness, and toiled day in and day out side by side, and made an equal division of their losses and gains, were regarded and generally regarded themselves as having entered into a very intimate tie, a sort of band of brotherhood, almost as sacred as that of marriage. The word ‘partner,’ or ‘pard’ as it was usually contracted, became the most intimate and confidential term that could be used.”[68]

Even in the cities friendship between men assumed a character which it had nowhere except in California. Partners in business were partners in all social and often in all domestic matters. They took their meals and their pleasures together, and showed that interest in each other’s welfare which, at home, they would have expended upon wives and children. The withdrawal of one member from a firm seemed like the breaking up of a family. The citizens of San Francisco and Sacramento were all newcomers, they were mostly strangers to one another; and every partnership, though established primarily for business purposes, became a union of persons bound together by a sense of almost feudal loyalty, confident of one another’s sympathy and support under all circumstances, and forming a coherent group in a chaotic community.

In the mines the partnership relation was even more idyllic. Gold was sought at first by the primitive method of pan-mining. The miners travelled singly sometimes, but much more often in pairs, with knapsacks, guns and frying-pans; and they used a wooden bowl, or a metal pan, and sometimes an Indian wicker basket for washing the gravel or sand which was supposed to contain gold. Even a family bread-pan might be made to serve this purpose, and that was the article which the youthful miner, Jack Fleming, borrowed from beautiful Tinka Gallinger, and so became possessed in the end, not indeed of gold, but of something infinitely more valuable,—Tinka herself, the Treasure of the Redwoods.

The operation of washing was thus described by a Pioneer: “The bowl is held in both hands, whirled violently back and forth through a half circle, and pitched this way and that sufficiently to throw off the earth and water, while the gold mixed with black sand settles to the bottom. The process is extremely tiresome, and involves all the muscles of the frame. In its effect it is more like swinging a scythe than any other labor I ever attempted.”

This work was much less laborious when the miner had access to a current of water, and in later times it was assisted by the use of a magnet to draw away the iron of which the black sand was largely composed.

The bowl or pan stage was the first stage, and its tendency was to arrange the miners in couples like that of Tennessee and his Partner. Next came the use of the rocker or cradle,—the “golden canoe,” as the Indians called it. The rocker was an oblong box, open at the lower end, the upper end being protected by a screen or grating. The screen intercepted all pebbles and gravel, and the finer material, earth and sand, was swept through the screen by the action of water thrown or directed against it. The same water carried the earth through the box, and out at the lower end; but the heavy sand, containing the gold, sank and was intercepted by cleats nailed across the inside of the box. A rough cradle, formed from a hollow log, would sell at one time for two hundred dollars.

This process required the services of four or five men, and in pursuing it the miner ceased to be a vagrant. He acquired a habitation, more or less permanent, and entered into various relationships with his fellows, which finally included the lynching of a small portion of them. This is the life described by Bret Harte in The Luck of Roaring Camp, Left Out on Lone Star Mountain, and many other stories.

The rocker period lasted only about a year, and was succeeded by that of the sluice, a sort of magnified rocker, fifty or even a hundred feet long. The necessary stream of water was diverted from some river, or was supplied by an artificial reservoir. It was the bursting of such a reservoir, as the Reader may remember, that precipitated the romance in the life of the Youngest Miss Piper.

But the evolution of the industry was not yet complete. The next step was to explore the bed of a river by laboriously turning the stream aside. This was accomplished by constructing a dam across the river, and directing the water into a canal or flume prepared for it, thus leaving the bed of the river bare, perhaps for miles. These operations required the labor of many hands, and were extremely arduous and difficult. The dam could be built, of course, only in the dry season, and the first autumnal rains would be sure to send the stream back to its old channel. The coming of the rainy season in California is extremely uncertain, and river-bed mining was correspondingly precarious. Sometimes, great perseverance in these attempts was rewarded by great success. In November, 1849, the Swett’s Bar Company, composed of seventy miners, succeeded in damming and diverting the Sonora River after fifteen days of extreme exertion. Five hours later the dam was swept away by a flood. The following summer the same company, reduced to sixty members, constructed a second and larger dam, which required sixty-nine days’ labor. This also was swept away on the very day of its completion. But the miners did not give up. The next morning they began anew, the directors leading the way into the now ice-cold water, and the rest of the company following, some fairly shrieking with the contact. The dam was rebuilt as quickly as possible,—and, again, the river brushed it aside. The third year, a remnant of the company, some twenty-seven stubborn souls, for the fourth time completed a dam. This time it stood fast, and before the rains set in the persevering miners had obtained gold enough to make them all rich.

Men who had struggled, side by side, through such difficulties and disappointments were bound by no common tie,—and the tie was a still closer one when, as in the first idyllic days, the partnership consisted of two members only.

Bret Harte has devoted to friendship four of his best stories, namely, Tennessee’s Partner, Captain Jim’s Friend, In the Tules, Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy. The subject is touched upon also in the story called Under the Eaves.

Unquestionably the best of these stories is the first one, and if we should also set this down as the best of all Bret Harte’s stories, we could not go far wrong. The author himself is said to have preferred it. It is a complete tale and a dramatic one, and yet it has the simplicity of an incident. There is not, one makes bold to say, a superfluous word in it, and perhaps only one word which an exacting reader could wish to change. The background of scenery that the story requires is touched in with that deep but restrained feeling for nature, with that realization of its awful beauty, when contrasted with the life of man, which is a peculiar trait of modern literature. The Reader will remember that rough, mean, kerosene-lighted, upper room in which the trial took place. “And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter, passionless stars.”

The pathos of Tennessee’s Partner consists chiefly in the fact that Tennessee, so far as we can judge him, was unworthy of his partner’s devotion. He was courageous and good-humored, to be sure, but he was a robber, something of a drunkard, and inconsiderate enough to have run off with his partner’s wife. Had Tennessee been a model of all the virtues, his partner’s affection for him would have been a bestowal only of what was due. It would not have been, as it was in fact, the spontaneous outpouring of a generous and affectionate character. Whether we consider that the partner saw in Tennessee something which was really there, some divine spark or quality, known only to the God who created and to the friend who loved him, or that in Tennessee he beheld an ideal of his own creation, something different from the real man,—in either case his affection is equally disinterested and noble.

Those who do not give the first place to Tennessee’s Partner would probably assign it either to The Luck of Roaring Camp or The Outcasts of Poker Flat; but in both of those stories the element of accident is utilized, though not improbably. It was more or less an accident that the Luck was swept away by a flood; it was an accident that the Outcasts were banished on the eve of a storm. But in Tennessee’s Partner, there is no accident. Given the characters, all the rest followed inevitably.

An acute, if somewhat degenerate critic, Mr. James Douglas, writing in the “Bookman,”[69] presents the case against the Luck and the Outcasts in its most extreme form: “There is no doubt that we have outgrown the art which relies on picturesque lay figures grouped against a romantic background.... In Bret Harte’s best stories the presence of the scene painter, the stage carpenter and the stage manager jars on our consciousness.... Bret Harte takes Cherokee Sal, an Indian prostitute, puts her in a degraded mining settlement, and sanctifies her by motherhood. That is good art. He lets her die, while her child survives. That is not so good. It is the pathos of accident. He sends the miners in to see the child. That is good art. He makes the presence of the child work a revolution in the camp. Strong men wash their faces and wear clean shirts in order to be worthy of the child. That is not good art.”

But here let us interrupt Mr. Douglas for a moment. It should be remembered that the clean faces and clean shirts were not spontaneous improvements. “Stumpy imposed a kind of quarantine upon those who aspired to the honor and privilege of holding the Luck.” Moreover, the miners of Roaring Camp, like the miners generally in California, were no strangers to clean shirts or clean faces. With few exceptions, they had been brought up to observe the decencies of life, and if, in the wild freedom of the mining camp, some of those decencies had been cast off, it was not difficult to reclaim them.

However, let us hear Mr. Douglas out: “Finally he drowns the child and his readers in a deluge of melodramatic sentiment. That is bad art.... The Outcasts might be analyzed in the same way. The whole tableau is arranged with a barefaced resolution to draw your tears. You feel that there is nothing inevitable in the isolation of the Outcasts, in the snow-storm, in the suicide of the card-sharper, or in the in-death-they-were-not-divided pathos of vice and virtue. And even Miggles, I fear, will hardly bear a close examination. The assault and battery on our emotions is too direct, too deliberate. We like to be outflanked nowadays, and the old-fashioned frontal attack melts away before our indulgent smiles with their high velocity and flat trajectory. M’liss, alas! no longer moves us. We prefer ‘What Maisie Knew’ to what M’liss didn’t know.”

But at this point the Reader may become a little impatient. What attention should be paid to a critic who prefers the effeminate subtleties of Henry James to the wholesome pathos of Bret Harte! And the man himself seems to be conscious of his degeneracy, for he concludes by saying, with admirable frankness, “Perhaps, after all, the fault is ours, not Bret Harte’s, and we ought to apologize for the sophisticated insidiousness of our nerves.”

One or two obvious remarks are suggested by Mr. Douglas’s canon of romance against realism. If it were adopted without qualification, sad havoc would be made with established reputations. All the great tragedians from Æschylus to Shakspere, and almost all the great story-tellers from Haroun al Raschid to Daniel Defoe would suffer. Antigone, Juliet and Robinson Crusoe were all the victims of accident. Moreover, without the element of accident, or romance as Mr. Douglas calls it, life could not truly be represented. What might conceivably happen, and what occasionally does happen, are as much a part of life as is the thing which always happens. Many a “Kentuck” was swept away by floods in California. To perish in a snow-storm was by no means an unheard-of event. It was on the twenty-third of November, 1850, that the Outcasts were exiled, and on that very day, as the newspapers recorded soon afterward, a young man was frozen to death in the snow while endeavoring to walk from Poor Man’s Creek to Grass Valley. One week later a miner from Virginia was frozen to death a few miles north of Downieville; and Poker Flat and Downieville are in the same county.[70]

To know a man, we must know how he acts in the face of death as well as how he appears in his shop or parlor; and therefore, unusual and tragic events, as well as commonplace events, have their place in good art.

But the substratum of truth in Mr. Douglas’s view seems to be this, that a tragedy which results from the character of the hero or heroine is, other things being equal, a higher form of art than the tragedy which results wholly, or in part, from accident. If human passion can work out the destiny desired by the author, without the intervention of fire, flood or disease, without the help of any catastrophe quaintly known in the common law as “the act of God,” why so much the better. From this point of view, we may fairly place Tennessee’s Partner even above The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat.

It only remains to add that like most of Bret Harte’s stories, as we have seen, Tennessee’s Partner was suggested by a real incident, which, however, ended happily; and the last chapter of the true story may be gathered from a paragraph which appeared in the California newspapers in June, 1903:—

“J. A. Chaffee, famous as the original of Tennessee’s Partner, has been brought to an Oakland Sanatorium. He has been living since 1849 in a small Tuolumne county mining camp with his partner, Chamberlain. In the early days he saved Chamberlain from the vigilance committee by a plea to Judge Lynch when the vigilantes had a rope around the victim’s throat. It was the only instance on record in the county where the vigilantes gave way in such a case. Chamberlain was accused of stealing the miners’ gold, but Chaffee cleared him, as every one believed Chaffee. The two men settled down to live where they have remained ever since, washing out enough placer gold to maintain them. Professor Magee of the University of California found Chaffee sick in his cabin last week, and induced him to come to Oakland for treatment. Chamberlain was left behind. Both men are over eighty.”

One who witnessed Chaffee’s rescue of his partner gives some details of the affair, which show how closely Bret Harte kept to the facts until he saw occasion to depart from them. Chaffee had a donkey and a cart—the only vehicle in the settlement, and he is described as standing before the vigilance committee, “hat in hand, his bald head bare, his big bandanna handkerchief hanging loosely about his neck.”

Of the four stories especially devoted to friendship, the second is Captain Jim’s Friend, published in the year 1887. This is almost a reductio ad absurdum of Tennessee’s Partner, for Captain Jim’s friend, Lacy Bassett, is a coward, a liar, and an impostor. In the end, Captain Jim discovers this, and he endeavors to wipe out the disgrace which, he thinks, Bassett has brought upon him by forcing the latter, at the point of his pistol, to a more manly course of conduct. And yet, when Bassett commits the dastardly act of firing at his life-long friend and benefactor, the heroic Captain Jim feels not only that his own reputation for “foolishness” is redeemed, but also, in his dying moments, he recurs to his old affection for the man who shot him; and thus the tinge of cynicism which the story would otherwise wear is removed.

The third story, In the Tules, is a recurrence to the theme of Tennessee’s Partner, the two leading characters being almost a repetition of those in the earlier story. In the Tules has not the spontaneousness of its predecessor, not quite the same tragic reality; but it is a noble story, nevertheless, and the climax forms one of those rare episodes which raise one’s idea of human nature.

In the fourth story, Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy, published much later, Bret Harte takes the subject in a lighter vein. The sacrifice made to friendship is not of life, but of fortune; and though, unquestionably, some men would lay down their lives more easily than they would give up their property, yet the sacrifice does not wear so tragic an aspect.

In Left Out on Lone Star Mountain, among the very best of the later stories, we have a little group of miners held together, inspired, and redeemed from selfishness by the youngest of their number, affectionately spoken of as “The Old Man,” one of those brilliant, fine, lovable natures, rare but not unknown in real life, to which all the virtues seem to come as easily as vice and weakness come to the generality of men.[71]

HE LOOKED CURIOUSLY AT HIS REFLECTION
From “Left Out on Lone Star Mountain”
E. Boyd Smith, del.

The hero of this story plays a part much resembling that of the late James G. Fair, United States Senator from California, and a leading man in the State. Mr. Fair, who was of Scotch-Irish descent, crossed the Plains in 1850 with a company of men who were demoralized by their privations and misfortunes. Though the youngest of the party, being but eighteen years old, Fair, by mere force of natural fitness, became their leader; and it was owing to his determined good nature, energy and high spirits that they finally reached the Pacific Slope. A member of the band afterward wrote: “My comrades became so peevish from the wear upon the system, and ... the absence of accustomed comforts, that they were more like children than men, and at times it was as much as the boy could do to keep them from killing one another.”[72]

The moral of Bret Harte’s stories, it has often been said, is that even bad men have a good side, and are frequently capable of performing noble acts. But this, surely, is only a small part of the lesson, or rather of the inspiration to be derived from his works. In fact most of his heroes are not bad men, but good men. Would it not be far more true to say that the moral of Bret Harte’s stories is very nearly the same as the moral of the New Testament, namely, that the best thing a man can do with his life or anything else that he has, is to give it up,—for love, for honor, for a child, for a friend!

CHAPTER X

Nor does Bret Harte’s account lack direct confirmation. “The gamblers,” says a contemporary historian, “were usually from New Orleans, Louisville, Memphis, Richmond, or St. Louis. Not infrequently they were well-born and well-educated, and among them were as many good, honest, square-dealing men as could be found in any other business; and they were, as a rule, more charitable and more ready to help those in distress.”[73]

A certain William Thornton, a gambler from St. Louis, known as “Lucky Bill,” had many of the traits associated with Bret Harte’s gamblers. He was noted for his generosity, and, though finally hanged by a vigilance committee, he made a “good end,” for, on the scaffold, he exhorted his son who was among the spectators, to avoid bad company, to keep away from saloons, and to lead an industrious and honest life.

No surprise need be felt, therefore, that in California a gambler like Jack Hamlin should have the qualities and perform the deeds of a knight-errant. Bret Harte himself records the fact that it was the generous gift of a San Francisco gambler which started the Sanitary Commission in the Civil War, so far at least as California was concerned. The following incident occurred in the town of Coloma in the summer of 1849. Two ministers, a Mr. Roberts and a Mr. Dawson, preached there one Sunday to a company of miners, and one of them held forth especially against the sin of gambling. When the collection had been made, a twenty dollar and a ten dollar gold piece were found, carefully wrapped in paper, and on the paper was written: “I design the twenty dollars for Mr. Roberts because he fearlessly dealt out the truth against the gamblers. The ten dollars are for Mr. Dawson.” The paper was signed by the leading gambler in the town.

The principal building in the new city, the Parker House, a two-story, wooden affair, with a piazza in front, was erected in 1849 at a cost of thirty thousand dollars, and was rented almost immediately at fifteen hundred dollars a month for games of chance. Almost everybody played, and in ’49 and ’50 the gambling houses served as clubs for business and professional men. As Bret Harte wrote in the Introduction to the second volume of his works:—“The most respectable citizens, though they might not play, are to be seen here of an evening. Old friends who, perhaps, parted at the church door in the States, meet here without fear and without reproach. Even among the players are represented all classes and conditions of men. One night at a faro table a player suddenly slipped from his seat to the floor, a dead man. Three doctors, also players, after a brief examination, pronounced it disease of the heart. The coroner, sitting at the right of the dealer, instantly impanelled the rest of the players, who, laying down their cards, briefly gave a verdict in accordance with the facts, and then went on with their game!”

A similar but much worse scene is recorded as occurring in a Sacramento gambling house. A quarrel arose in the course of which a man was shot three times, each wound being a mortal one. The victim was placed in a dying condition on one of the tables; but the orchestra continued to play, and the gambling went on as before in the greater part of the room. A notorious woman, staggering drunk, assailed the ears of the dying man with profane and obscene remarks, while another by-stander endeavored to create laughter by mimicking the contortions that appeared in his face, as he lay there gasping in his death agony upon a gambler’s table.[74]

In San Francisco the principal gambling houses were situated in the very heart of the city, and they were kept open throughout the whole twenty-four hours. At night, the brilliantly lighted rooms, the shifting crowd of men, diverse and often picturesque in costume and appearance, the wild music which arose now and then, and which, except for the jingling of gold and silver, was almost the only sound,—all this, as a youthful spectator recalled in after years, “was a rapturous and fearful thing.” The rooms were gorgeously furnished, with a superabundance of gilt frames, sparkling chandeliers, and ornaments of silver.

Behind the long bar were more mirrors, gold clocks, ornamental bottles and decanters, china vases, bouquets of flowers, and glasses of many colors and fantastic shapes.

The atmosphere was often hazy with tobacco smoke and redolent of the fumes of brandy; but perfect order prevailed, and in the pauses of the music not a sound could be heard except the subdued murmur of voices, and the ceaseless chink of gold and silver. It was the fashion for those who stood at the tables to have their hands full of coins which they shuffled backward and forward, like so many cards. The noise of a cane falling upon the marble floor would cause everybody to look up. If a voice were raised in hilarity or altercation, the by-standers would frown upon the offender with a stare of virtuous indignation. Every gambling house, even the most squalid resort on Long Wharf, had its music, which might be that of a single piano-player or fiddler, or an orchestra of five or six performers. In the large gambling halls the music was often very good. Two thousand dollars a month for a nightly performance was the sum once offered to a violin-player by a San Francisco gambler; and, to the honor of the artist be it said, the offer was declined.

All California, sooner or later, was seen in the gambling rooms of San Francisco: Mexicans wrapped in their blankets, smoking cigarettes, and watching the game intently from under their broad-brimmed hats; Frenchmen in their blouses, puffing at black pipes; countrymen fresh from the mines, wearing flannel shirts and high boots, with pistols and knives in their belts; boys of ten or twelve years, smoking big cigars, and losing hundreds of dollars at a play, with the nonchalance of veterans; low-browed, villainous-looking convicts from Australia; thin, glassy-eyed men, in the last stages of a misspent life, clad in the greasy black of a former gentility. The professional gamblers usually had a pale, careworn look, not uncommon, by the way, in California; but no danger or excitement could disturb their equanimity. In this respect the players strove hard to imitate them, though not always with success. The most popular games were monte, usually conducted by Mexicans, and faro, an American game. The French introduced rouge-et-noir, roulette, lansquenet, and vingt-et-un.

In the larger halls the custom was to rent different parts of the room to different proprietors, each of whom carried on his own game independently. Most of the proprietors were foreigners, and many of them were women. These women included some of great beauty, and they were all magnificently attired, their rustling silks, elaborately dressed hair and glittering diamonds contrasting strangely with the hairy faces, slouch hats and flannel shirts of the miners.

That gambling was looked upon at first as a legitimate industry is plain from the surprising fact that the local courts in Sacramento upheld gambling debts as valid, and authorized their collection by process of law. But these decisions—almost sufficient to make Blackstone rise from his grave—were reversed the following year.

Indeed, a healthy public opinion against gambling developed very soon. Even in 1850, the grand jury sitting at San Francisco condemned the practice; and in 1851 gambling on Sunday was forbidden in that city by an ordinance which the authorities enforced in so far that open gambling on that day was no longer permitted. In December, 1850, an ordinance against gaming in the streets was passed by the city council of Sacramento. By the end of 1851 there was a perceptible decrease in both gaming and drinking in all the larger towns of California. “Gambling with all the attractions of fine saloons and tastefully dressed women is on the wane in Marysville,” a local observer reported; and the same thing was noticed in San Francisco. The gambling house, as a general rendez-vous, was succeeded by the saloon, and that, in turn, by the club.

Gambling houses continued to be licensed in San Francisco until 1856, but public opinion against them steadily grew. “They are tolerated,” said the “San Francisco Herald,” “for no other reason that we know of except that they are charged heavily for licenses. Almost all of them are owned by foreigners.” By the end of the year 1855, the “Bulletin” was condemning the gamblers as among the worst elements of society; and the death of the “Bulletin’s” heroic Editor in the following year marked the close of the gambling era in San Francisco. When Bret Harte’s first stories were written the type represented by John Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin had begun to pass away, and those worthies would soon have been forgotten.

But who can forget them now! “Bret Harte,” said the “Academy,” after his death, “was the Homer of Gamblers. Gamblers there had been before, but they were of the old sullen type.” In making his gamblers good-looking, Bret Harte only followed tradition, and the tradition is founded on fact. The one essential trait of the gambler is good nerves. These are largely a matter of good health and physique, and good looks have much the same origin. It follows that gamblers having good nerves should also have good looks. It is natural, too, that they should have excellent manners. The habit of easy shooting and of being shot at is universally recognized as conducive to politeness, and, moreover, a certain persuasiveness of manner, a mingling of suavity and authority, is part of the gambler’s stock-in-trade. An American of wide experience once declared that he had met but one fellow-countryman whose manners could fairly be described as “courtly,” and he was a professional gambler of Irish birth. Good looks and good manners, the former especially, were very common among the California Pioneers, and it is but natural that Oakhurst and Hamlin should have had an unusual share of these attractions.

Mr. Oakhurst appears in only a few of the stories, but there is a certain intensity in the description of him which makes one almost certain that he, like most of Bret Harte’s characters, was drawn from life. “There was something in his carriage, something in the pose of his beautiful head, something in the strong and fine manliness of his presence, something in the perfect and utter control and discipline of his muscles, something in the high repose of his nature—a repose not so much a matter of intellectual ruling as of his very nature,—that go where he would and with whom, he was always a notable man in ten thousand.”

In this description one cannot help perceiving the Author’s effort, not quite successful perhaps, to lay his finger upon the essential trait of a real and striking personality.

In two stories only does he play the part of hero, these being A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst, and the immortal Outcasts of Poker Flat. The former story closes with a characteristic remark. Two weeks after the duel in which his right arm was disabled, Mr. Oakhurst “walked into his rooms at Sacramento, and in his old manner took his seat at the faro table. ‘How’s your arm, Jack?’ asked an incautious player. There was a smile following the question, which, however, ceased as Jack looked up quietly at the speaker. ‘It bothers my dealing a little, but I can shoot as well with my left.’ The game was continued in that decorous silence which usually distinguished the table at which Mr. John Oakhurst presided.”

It has been objected by one critic that Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin are too much alike; but if we imagine one of these characters as placed in the situation of the other, we cannot help seeing how very different they are. Jack Hamlin could never have been infatuated, as Oakhurst was, by Mrs. Decker,—or indeed by any woman. Oakhurst was too simple, too solid, too grave a person to understand women. He lacked the humor, the sympathy, the cynicism, and the acute perceptive powers of Hamlin.

One of the best scenes in all Bret Harte is that in which Oakhurst bursts in upon Mrs. Decker, recounts her guilt and treachery, and declares his intention to kill her and then himself. “She did not faint, she did not cry out. She sat quietly down again, folded her hands in her lap, and said calmly,—

“‘And why should you not?’

“Had she recoiled, had she shown any fear or contrition, had she essayed an explanation or apology, Mr. Oakhurst would have looked upon it as an evidence of guilt. But there is no quality that courage recognizes so quickly as courage, there is no condition that desperation bows before but desperation; and Mr. Oakhurst’s power of analysis was not so keen as to prevent him from confounding her courage with a moral quality. Even in his fury he could not help admiring this dauntless invalid.”[75]

Jack Hamlin’s power of analysis was far more keen; and Mrs. Decker would never have deceived him.

The two men were equally brave, equally desperate, but perhaps Oakhurst was the more heroic. The simplicity of his nature was more akin to heroism than was the dashing, mercurial, laughter-loving temperament of Jack Hamlin. Hamlin is almost always represented with companions, male or female, but Oakhurst was a solitary man in life as in death. His dignity, his reserve, even his want of humor tended to isolate him. Bret Harte, it will be noticed, almost always speaks of him as “Mr.” Oakhurst. Though he was numbered among the outcasts of Poker Flat, he was far from being one of them.

There is a classic simplicity, not only in Bret Harte’s account of Oakhurst, but in the whole telling of the story, and a depth of feeling which is more than classic. Every line of that marvellous tale seems to thrill with anticipation of the tragedy in which it closes; and every incident is described in the tense language of real emotion. “Mr. Oakhurst was a light sleeper. Toward morning he awoke benumbed and cold. As he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood to leave it,—snow!”

Then comes the catastrophe of the snow-storm. We may condemn Oakhurst, on this or that ground, for his act of self-destruction, but we cannot regard it as weak or cowardly. To be capable of real despair is the mark of a strong character. A weaker man will shuffle, disguise the truth in his own mind, and hope not only against hope but against reason. Oakhurst, when he saw that the cards were absolutely against him, having done all that he could do for his helpless companions, decorously withdrew, and, in the awful solitude of the forest and the storm, forever renounced that game of life which he had played with so much courage and skill, and yet with so little success.

Jack Hamlin figures much more extensively than Oakhurst in the stories, and he would probably be regarded by most readers of Bret Harte as the Author’s best creation, surpassing even Colonel Starbottle;—and, as Mr. Chesterton exclaims, “How terrible it is to speak of any character as surpassing Colonel Starbottle!” His traits are now almost as familiar as those of George Washington; but the type was a new one, and it completely revolutionized the ideal of the gambler which had long obtained both in fiction and on the stage. As a London critic very neatly said, “With this dainty and delicate California desperado, Bret Harte vanquished forever the turgid villains of Ainsworth and Lytton.”

In his Bohemian Days in San Francisco Bret Harte gives an account of the real person who was undoubtedly Jack Hamlin’s prototype. He speaks of his handsome face, his pale Southern look, his slight figure, the scrupulous elegance and neatness of his dress,—his genial manner, and the nonchalance with which he set out for the duel that ended in his death.

In the representation of Jack Hamlin there are some seeming discrepancies. Such, for instance, is Hamlin’s arrogant treatment of the ostler in Brown of Calaveras, and still more his conduct toward Jenkinson, the tavern-keeper, whom Don José Sepulvida, with contrasting Spanish courtesy, described as “our good Jenkinson, our host, our father.” The barkeeper in A Sappho of Green Springs fares no better at his hands; and in Gabriel Conroy, Bret Harte, falling into the manner of Dickens at his very worst, represents Jack Hamlin as concluding a tirade against a servant by “intimating that he would forcibly dislodge certain vital and necessary organs from the porter’s body.” Even less excusable is his retort to the country youth in The Convalescence of Jack Hamlin; and in one story he is actually guilty of rudeness to a woman, the unfortunate Heiress of Red Dog.

In these passages Bret Harte might be accused of admiring Jack Hamlin in the wrong place. But was he not rather consciously depicting the bad points of what would seem to have been his favorite character? Hamlin had several imperfections. Bret Harte does not even represent him as a gentleman, but only as an approach to one. In the story which first brings us face to face with him, the gambler is described as lounging up and down “with that listless and grave indifference of his class which was perhaps the next thing to good breeding.”

That there should be any doubt as to the author’s attitude upon this point shows how carefully Bret Harte keeps his own personality in the background. He does not sit in judgment upon his characters; he seldom says even a word of praise or blame in regard to them. All that he leaves to the reader. Moreover, he has a rare power of perceiving the defects of his own heroes and heroines. Occasionally, in fact, the reader of Bret Harte is a little shocked by his admission of some moral or intellectual blemish in the person whom he is sketching; and yet, after a moment’s reflection, one is always forced to agree that the blemish is really there, and that without it the portrait would be incomplete and misleading.

A fine example of this subtlety of art is found in Maruja, where the author frankly declares that his heroine could not quite appreciate the delicacy shown by Captain Carroll when he abstained from any display of affection, lest he should presume upon the fact that he had just undertaken a difficult service at her request. “Maruja stretched out her hand. The young man bent over it respectfully, and moved toward the door. She had expected him to make some protestation—perhaps even to claim some reward. But the instinct which made him forbear even in thought to take advantage of the duty laid upon him, which dominated even his miserable passion for her, and made it subservient to his exaltation of honor, ... all this, I grieve to say, was partly unintelligible to Maruja, and not entirely satisfactory.... He might have kissed her! He did not.”

Bret Harte did not describe perfect characters or mere types, destitute of individual peculiarities, but real men and women. Let us, therefore, be thankful for Maruja’s lack of delicacy and for Jack Hamlin’s petulance and arrogance. His failings in this respect were a part of the piquancy of his character, and in part, also, they resulted from his discontent with himself.