1875. It had a decided local flavor, and the
vignette on its title-page was a happily chosen emblem, representing a
grizzly bear crossing a railway track. In an early number of the
_Overland_ was a story entitled the _Luck of Roaring Camp_, by Francis
Bret Harte, a {578} native of Albany, N. Y., 1835, who had come to
California at the age of seventeen, in time to catch the unique aspects
of the life of the Forty-niners, before their vagabond communities had
settled down into the law-abiding society of the present day. His first
contribution was followed by other stories and sketches of a similar
kind, such as the _Outcasts of Poker Flat_, _Miggles_, and _Tennessee's
Partner_, and by verses, serious and humorous, of which last, _Plain
Language from Truthful James_, better known as the _Heathen Chinee_, made
an immediate hit, and carried its author's name into every corner of the
English-speaking world. In 1871 he published a collection of his tales,
another of his poems, and a volume of very clever parodies, _Condensed
Novels_, which rank with Thackeray's _Novels by Eminent Hands_. Bret
Harte's California stories were vivid, highly-colored pictures of life in
the mining camps and raw towns of the Pacific coast. The pathetic and
the grotesque went hand in hand in them, and the author aimed to show how
even in the desperate characters gathered together there--the fortune
hunters, gamblers, thieves, murderers, drunkards, and prostitutes--the
latent nobility of human nature asserted itself in acts of heroism,
magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and touching fidelity. The same men who
cheated at cards and shot each another down with tipsy curses were
capable on occasion of the most romantic generosity and the most delicate
chivalry. Critics were not wanting who held that, in the matter of
dialect {579} and manners and other details, the narrator was not true to
the facts. This was a comparatively unimportant charge; but a more
serious question was the doubt whether his characters were essentially
true to human nature, whether the wild soil of revenge and greed and
dissolute living ever yields such flowers of devotion as blossom in
_Tennessee's Partner_ and the _Outcasts of Poker Flat_. However this may
be, there is no question as to Harte's power as a narrator. His short
stories are skillfully constructed and effectively told. They never
drag, and are never overladen with description, reflection, or other
lumber.

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