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as it is, not indeed with the coldness of an historian but with the sympathy and insight of a poet. But this is not all, in fact, as need hardly be said, it is not enough to make the poem endure. It endures because it has a beauty of form which approaches perfection. It is hackneyed, and yet as fresh as on the day when it was written.[11]

      Truthful James himself who tells the story was a real character—nay is, for, at the writing of these pages, he still lived in the same little shanty where he was to be found when Bret Harte knew him. At that time, in 1856, or thereabout, Bret Harte was teaching school at Tuttletown, a few miles north of Sonora, and Truthful James, Mr. James W. Gillis, lived over the hill from Tuttletown, at a place called Jackass Flat. Mr. Gillis was well known and highly respected in all that neighborhood, and he figures not only in Bret Harte’s poetry, but also in Mark Twain’s works, where he is described as “The Sage of Jackass Hill.”

      It is a proof both of Bret Harte’s remarkable freedom from vanity, and of the keen criticism which he bestowed upon his own writings, that he never set much value upon the Heathen Chinee, even after its immense popularity had been attained. When he wrote it, he thought it unworthy of a place in the “Overland” and handed it over to Mr. Ambrose Bierce, then Editor of the “News Letter,”[12] a weekly paper, for publication there. Mr. Bierce, however, recognizing its value, unselfishly advised Bret Harte to give it a place in the “Overland,” and this was finally done. “Nevertheless,” says Mr. Bierce, “it was several months before he overcame his prejudice against the verses and printed them. Indeed he never cared for the thing, and was greatly amused by the meanings that so many read into it. He said he meant nothing whatever by it.”

      We have Mark Twain’s word to the same effect. “In 1866,” he writes, “I went to the Sandwich Islands, and when I returned, after several years, Harte was famous as the author of the Heathen Chinee. He said that the Heathen Chinee was an accident, and that he had higher literary ambitions than the fame that could come from an extravaganza of that sort.” “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Mr. Clemens goes on to say, “was the salvation of his literary career. It placed him securely on a literary road which was more to his taste.”

      Bret Harte, indeed, frequently held back for weeks poems which he had completed, but with which he was not content. As one of his fellow-workers declared, “He was never fully satisfied with what he finally allowed to go to the printer.”

      His position in San Francisco was now assured. He had been made professor of recent literature in the University of California; he retained his place at the Mint, he was the successful Editor of the “Overland,” and he was happy in his home life. One who knew him well at this period speaks of him as “always referring to his wife in affectionate terms, and quoting her clever speeches, and relating with fond enjoyment the funny sayings and doings of his children.”

      Let us, for the moment, leave Bret Harte thus happily situated, and glance at that Pioneer life which he was now engaged in portraying. Said a San Francisco paper in 1851, “The world will never know, and no one could imagine the heart-rending scenes, or the instances of courage and heroic self-sacrifice which have occurred among the California Pioneers during the last three years!”

      And yet when these words were penned there was growing up in the East a stripling destined to preserve for posterity some part, at least, of those very occurrences which otherwise would have remained “unrecorded and forgot.”

CHAPTER V

       Table of Contents

THE PIONEER MEN AND WOMEN

       Table of Contents

      When Bret Harte first became famous he was accused of misrepresenting Pioneer society. A California writer of great ability—no less a person than Professor Royce, the eminent philosopher—once spoke of the “perverse romanticism” of his tales; and after Mr. Harte’s death these accusations, if they may be called such, were renewed in San Francisco with some bitterness. It is strange that Californians themselves should have been so anxious to strip from their State the distinction which Bret Harte conferred upon it—so anxious to prove that its heroic age never existed, that life in California has always been just as commonplace, respectable and uninteresting as it is anywhere else in the world.

      But, be this as it may, the diaries, letters and narratives written by Pioneers themselves, and, most important of all, the daily newspapers published in San Francisco and elsewhere from 1849 to 1855, fully corroborate Bret Harte’s assertion that he described only what actually occurred. “The author has frequently been asked,” he wrote, “if such and such incidents were real—if he had ever met such and such characters. To this he must return the one answer, that in only a single instance was he conscious of drawing purely from his imagination and fancy for a character and a logical succession of incidents drawn therefrom. A few weeks after his story was published, he received a letter, authentically signed, correcting some of the minor details of his facts, and inclosing as corroborative evidence a slip from an old newspaper, wherein the main incident of his supposed fanciful creation was recorded with a largeness of statement that far transcended his powers of imagination.” Even that bizarre character, the old Frenchman in A Ship of ’49, was taken absolutely from the life, except that the real man was of English birth. His peculiarities, mental and physical, his dress, his wig, his residence in the old ship were all just as they are described by Bret Harte.[13]

      This is not to say that everybody in California was a romantic person, or that life there was simply a succession of startling incidents. Ordinary people were doing ordinary things on the Pacific Slope, just as they did during the worst horrors of the French Revolution. But the exceptional persons that Bret Harte described really existed; and, moreover, they existed in such proportion as to give character and tone to the whole community.

      The fact is that Bret Harte only skimmed the cream from the surface. To use his own words again, “The faith, courage, vigor, youth, and capacity for adventure necessary to this emigration produced a body of men as strongly distinctive as were the companions of Jason.”

      They were picked men placed in extraordinary circumstances, and how could that combination fail to result in extraordinary characters, deeds, events, and situations! The Forty-Niners,[14] and those who came in the early Fifties, were such men as enlist in the first years of a war. They were young men. Never, since Mediæval days when men began life at twenty and commonly ended it long before sixty, was there so youthful a society. A man of fifty with a gray beard was pointed out in the streets of San Francisco as a curiosity. In the convention to organize the State which met at Monterey, in September, 1849, there were forty-eight delegates, of whom only four were fifty years or more; fifteen were under thirty years of age; twenty-three were between thirty and forty. These were the venerable men of the community, selected to make the laws of the new commonwealth. A company of California emigrants that left Virginia in 1852 consisted wholly of boys under twenty.[15]

      The Pioneers were far above the average in vigor and enterprise, and in education as well. One ship, the “Edward Everett,” sailed from Boston in January, 1849, with one hundred and fifty young men on board who owned both ship and cargo; and the distinguished gentleman for whom they had named their ship gave them a case full of books to beguile the tedium of the voyage around Cape Horn. William Grey, who wrote an interesting account of California life,[16] sailed from New York with a ship-load of emigrants. He describes them as a “fine-looking and well-educated body of men—all young”; and he gives a similar description of the passengers on three other ships that came into the port of Rio Janeiro while he was there. He adds that on his ship there were only three bad characters, a butcher from Washington Market and his two sons. They all perished within a year of their arrival in California. The father died while drunk, one of the sons was hanged, and the other was killed in a street row.

      The Pioneers were handsome men.[17] They were tall men. Of the two hundred grown men in the

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