Bret Harte

Bret Harte was one of the most interesting writers of the California goldrush

The mining-camp stories he published in the Overland Monthly (especially “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” 1868) made a new set of correlations available to later readers. The actual camps had been violent, short-lived, and largely male.

Harte’s versions rendered them as temporary communities capable of sudden, temporary order around an infant or a gambler’s code. Those versions did not replace the earlier records; they became additional records that later agents could consult. Mark Twain and others noted the discrepancy. The discrepancy itself is the point: two different configurations of what could be stably recorded about the same stretch of ground and the same decade were now both accessible.

The records that later historians could consult about the California camps were not fixed by the camps themselves. Bret Harte’s stories, beginning with “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” introduced a further set of stable correlations: an infant or a code of honor could temporarily reorganize a settlement that the earlier reports had described only as noise, violence, and extraction. Those new correlations did not erase the earlier ones. They simply became available alongside them. What a historian could then know about the Gold Rush depended on which of the two sets of records remained reconstructible.

Bret Harte (already noted). Editor of the Overland Monthly; “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868), “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” “Tennessee’s Partner.” Established the sentimental-mythic mining-camp correlation.