cessity,
speculators in mining stock and city lots set up their offices in the
town; later came a sprinkling of school-teachers and ministers.
Fortunes were made in one day and lost the next at poker or loo.
To-day the lucky miner who had struck a good "lead" was drinking
champagne out of pails and treating the town; to-morrow he was
"busted," and shouldered the pick for a new onslaught upon his luck.
This strange, reckless life was not without fascination, and highly
picturesque and dramatic elements were present in it. It was, as Bret
Harte says, "an era replete with a certain heroic Greek poetry," and
sooner or later it was sure to find its poet. During the war
California remained loyal to the Union, but was too far from the seat
of conflict to experience any serious disturbance, and went on
independently developing its own resources and becoming daily more
civilized. By 1868 San Francisco had a literary magazine, the
_Overland Monthly_, which ran until 1875, and was revived in 1883. 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 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 l