The Outcasts of Poker Flat

Bret Harte (1836–1902)
From The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century

Interesting Links

Video: “Bret Harte and the Gold Rush” (Chris O’Sullivan, San Francisco Historical Society)

“Bret Harte’s Voice for the Wiyots” (Robert Aquinas McNally, HistoryNet)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Legend of Monte del Diablo,” Bret Harte
• “The Lady of Little Fishing,” Constance Fenimore Woolson
• “A Lady from Redhorse,” Ambrose Bierce
• “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Stephen Crane

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“Mining Life in California: Faro,” illustration by Scottish artist John David Borthwick (1824–1892), who spent several years among California Gold Rush miners during the early 1850s. Published in the October 3, 1857, issue of Harper’s Weekly and as a lithographic plate in his memoir Three Years in California (1857), from which the above image is taken.

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Perhaps the most bittersweet episode of Bret Harte’s life occurred early in his writing career. During the spring of 1870, Charles Dickens somehow got his hands on copies of The Overland Monthly, the new magazine edited by Harte in San Francisco. The publication’s second issue, dated July 1868, contained Harte’s story “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” while the January 1869 issue included “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” Dickens forwarded those two issues to John Forster, his close friend and future biographer, who recalled that Dickens “had found such subtle strokes of character as he had not anywhere else in late years discovered; the manner resembling himself, but the matter fresh to a degree that had surprised him; the painting in all respects masterly, and the wild rude thing painted a quite wonderful reality. I have rarely known him more honestly moved.”

A few weeks later, on June 9, 1870, Dickens died after suffering from a stroke at the age of 58; when Harte learned the news, he halted printing of the July issue of The Overland Monthly so he could add a poetic tribute to the writer he had idolized since childhood. A narrative elegy, “Dickens in Camp” evoked the appreciation of the British author in a place as remote and rugged as a Gold Rush mining camp. Harte was still unaware that Dickens was an admirer when, a few days after the issue appeared, a letter arrived from Dickens himself, in which the novelist praised the two stories in the Overland, invited Harte to contribute to his own magazine, All the Year Round, and urged the young writer to visit him should he ever travel to England. During Harte’s first visit to London, in 1878, his friend Joaquin Miller accompanied him to Dickens’s grave. As Miller recalled to a biographer, “Bret is dead now, and it will not hurt him . . . to tell the plain truth, how he tried to speak, but choked up, how tears ran down and fell on the stone as he bowed his bare head very low; how his hand trembled as I led him away.”

Harte’s two groundbreaking stories, along with “Tennessee’s Partner,” which also appeared in The Overland, catapulted him to prominence among American writers of fiction; all three were included in the story collection The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches. Harte was suddenly the hottest name in publishing: His previous volume of parodies, the locally printed Condensed Novels and Other Papers, was reissued by a publisher in New York; The Atlantic Monthly offered him $10,000 for twelve new stories; and a collection of his poems appeared in 1871, the year he left California for good and headed east.

It is fair to claim that, by the early 1870s, Harte was the most famous (and certainly the best paid) living American writer of fiction. His popularity allowed him to crisscross the country on lecture tours and while he was on one such trip in 1873, he found himself traveling alongside a wagon train of immigrants on the prairie. “One of the young men, after riding beside me for a few moments, suddenly asked me if I weren't ‘Bret Harte.’” he wrote to his sister. “I answered ‘yes’ and asked him why he asked the question. He said I looked like my picture and produced it with the greatest naiveté from his pocket, greasy with handling. He said all my books were in the wagon, and to my great astonishment repeated nearly everything I had ever written.” A note in the literary section of the magazine Every Saturday compared Harte’s new celebrity status to Dickens’s early fame but cautioned, “It is nothing to be ashamed of; but it imposes upon the writer who is made subject of it the severe test of keeping up to the high-water mark of his own achievement, which must be rather trying to a modest man.”

Indeed, within a few years Harte was struggling to make ends meet as his output increased, his quality became uneven, and his popularity declined. His debut novel, the 476-page Gabriel Conroy (1876), was an abysmal failure. He sought a succession of political appointments to pay the bills and, when his position as the United States consul in Glasgow ended in 1885, he remained in England permanently. There, he wrote steadily for the last seventeen years of his life; the edition of his collected works fills some ten thousand pages in twenty volumes. While Harte’s attempts at experimentation, his efforts in other genres, and stories set outside the American frontier were apathetically greeted, his California and Western romances remained extremely popular. As he wrote to his wife, from whom he was permanently separated, “In spite of all the envious sneers and wicked prophecies that follow me, I find I still hold my old audience and that the publishers are quite ready for me when I have anything ready for them. It is quite wonderful also what a large and growing audience I have all over the Continent; anything I write is instantly translated.”

Four decades after Harte died of throat cancer in England at the age of 65, Oscar Lewis, a historian of the American West and a longtime fan, conceded that much of the late writing was “hack work” written to formula. “Gold Rush stories were what were expected of him, and he gave editors (and the public) what they wanted.” As William Dean Howells had put it shortly after the author’s death, Harte “went back to the semi-mythical California he had half discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as long as he lived.” Nevertheless, several of the late stories, such as “The Ingenue of the Sierras” and “The Protégé of Jack Hamlin’s,” are considered among Harte’s best and are still included in anthologies. His major contribution to literature, though, remains the group of tales published between 1868 and 1872 that, according to biographer Axel Nissen, “reinvented the American short story and laid the foundation for the Western.” Or, as Gary Scharnhorst concludes in another relatively recent study, “His best stories are as durable, if not as stylish, as denim pants. In the end, they lack everything but an audience.”

Notes: A sluice-robber is someone who steals gold from the unattended troughs or boxes used for sifting it.

The above passages from the letter to Harte's sister and from Every Saturday magazine are reprinted in Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper (2000), by Axel Nissen.

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As Mr. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker Flat on the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850, he was conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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