Bret Harte

Bret Harte: The Man Who Invented the West

In February 1860, settlers on Humboldt Bay slaughtered somewhere between eighty and two hundred Wiyot people, most of them women and children. The assistant editor of the local paper, a twenty-three-year-old from Albany, printed the details: "A more shocking and revolting spectacle was never exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people." Within a month he was running for his life ahead of lynching threats. Ten years later the same man had made the American West into a literature, and Europe was reading him.

Albany to the Diggings

He was born Francis Brett Hart on 25 August 1836 in Albany, New York; his father Henry added the "e." The family lines were mixed: his paternal grandfather Bernard Hart was an Orthodox Jewish merchant and a founder of the New York Stock Exchange; his mother, Elizabeth Rebecca Ostrander, was of English and Dutch stock and raised him in the Dutch Reformed church.

He read voraciously and published a satirical poem, "Autumn Musings," at eleven — and was mocked for it by his family, which nearly ended the experiment. His formal schooling stopped in 1849, when he was thirteen.

In 1853 he went to California and worked at everything the Gold Rush offered: miner, teacher, messenger, journalist. He guarded treasure boxes on stagecoaches for Wells Fargo, taught school near Sonora in the Sierra foothills, and later served as secretary of the San Francisco Mint. None of it was research at the time. The stagecoach drivers he rode with turned into his recurring character Yuba Bill.

Union, 1860

Between 1857 and 1860 he lived in Union — now Arcata — on Humboldt Bay, working as tutor, schoolteacher, typesetter and reporter for *The Northern Californian*. His condemnation of the Wiyot massacre is the first thing he wrote that history has kept, and it cost him the town. He escaped to San Francisco in the spring of 1860.

THE FREE TEST

How high is yours?

Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.

Take the IQ test →

The Bohemian

San Francisco made him. He had published his first poem in *The Golden Era* in 1857; now he became its editor and set about raising its literary tone, writing as "The Bohemian." Even Mark Twain, later his most vicious enemy, allowed that Harte's editorship "struck a new and fresh and spirited note." The minister Thomas Starr King recommended him to James T. Fields at the *Atlantic Monthly*, which printed his first short story in October 1863. In 1864 he co-founded *The Californian* and mentored the poet Ina Coolbrith. He married Anna Griswold in San Rafael on 11 August 1862; his early biographer Henry C. Merwin thought her almost impossible to live with.

Roaring Camp

In 1868 Anton Roman made him editor of *The Overland Monthly*, and in its second issue he ran his own story, "The Luck of Roaring Camp": a mining camp of hard men adopting an orphaned infant. It made him famous across America and Europe within months. "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" followed. Harte had found a formula — the sentimental redemption of the disreputable, staged in an exactly rendered Sierra landscape, told in cool ironic prose against a gaudy dialect.

"Plain Language from Truthful James" appeared in September 1870 and became a monster. Reprinted in Boston in 1871 as "The Heathen Chinee," it was meant as satire against anti-Chinese violence, with the reader's sympathy going to the victim, Ah Sin. Readers instead cheered his attacker. Harte spent the rest of his life disowning it — "the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote" — and tried again in 1874 with "Wan Lee, the Pagan," in which the white Americans are the savages.

Ten Thousand Dollars, and After

In 1871 he moved east and signed with the *Atlantic Monthly* for $10,000 a year, an unprecedented sum. It was the peak, and it lasted about eighteen months. By the end of 1872 he had no publishing contract at all. He lectured, rented a Morristown mansion he could not afford, and by the winter of 1877–78 was describing a "hand-to-mouth life," writing to his wife about barely surviving "that awful December and January."

Consul

Rescue came through politics. In May 1878, after months of lobbying, he was made United States commercial agent at Krefeld, Germany, at $2,500 a year; in 1880 he moved to the consulship at Glasgow, at $3,000 plus fees. He was better at the job than anyone expected — at Krefeld he overhauled the processing of shipping documents and vastly increased fee collections, and at Glasgow he produced substantial reports on trade and industry, leaning on able local staff. Grover Cleveland's administration dismissed him in 1885, and he settled permanently in London.

He never went home. Over twenty-four years in Europe he wrote to his wife and four children and sent money, but declined to bring them over or to return, pleading finances; in forty years of marriage the couple lived together for sixteen. He kept writing to the end; Ellery Queen called his Sherlock Holmes parody "The Stolen Cigar-Case" probably the best ever written.

Twain

Mark Twain had been a friend, then became a demolition project. When Harte sought a consulship, Twain lobbied against it, telling President Hayes that Harte "hadn't any more passion for his country than an oyster has for its bed," and writing to William Dean Howells that Harte was "a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward." Only Howells's intervention got the appointment through. Twain went on calling him "The Immortal Bilk," accused him of borrowing money he never meant to repay, and claimed in his autobiography that the miners' dialect Harte used "never existed outside of his imagination."

Why Bret Is Called a Genius

The specific achievement is generic invention: Harte did not write well about the West so much as create the West as a literary place. Before "The Luck of Roaring Camp" the mining camps were newspaper copy; after it they were a genre, with a cast — the gambler with a code, the whore with a conscience, the drunken sage, the stage driver — that has run through American fiction and then film for a hundred and fifty years. He also had a real technical gift for the short story: compression, a landscape rendered in a few strokes, and a dry authorial voice held at ironic distance from very sentimental material.

Serious people used serious language about him. Andrew Carnegie in 1878 called him "America's most distinctively national poet." Rudyard Kipling wrote that San Francisco was "hallowed ground" because of Harte, and that the city was "worth a great deal less than the man."

The counter-case is brutal and largely correct. Harte's gift was, in the phrase of one account, mined out by forty; he spent three decades varying work done in a handful of years around 1870. His signature effects are sentimental, and his miners' dialect may be substantially invented — Twain's charge is not merely malice. His most famous poem misfired so badly it fed the racism it attacked. What survives is not a great body of work but a great template, executed brilliantly a few times. That is a narrow kind of genius, but it is a real one.

Legacy

He died of throat cancer at Camberley, England, on 5 May 1902, and was buried at Frimley, far from the country he had put on the literary map. California is thick with schools, streets and landmarks carrying his name; the United States put him on a $5 stamp in the Great Americans series in 1987. Every gunfighter's moral code and every gold-camp redemption in American storytelling still runs back to a young editor who had to leave town for telling the truth about a massacre.