Bret Harte

In San Francisco the rainy season had been making itself a reality to the wondering Eastern immigrant. There were short days of drifting clouds and flying sunshine, and long succeeding nights of incessant downpour, when the rain rattled on the thin shingles or drummed on the resounding zinc of pioneer roofs. The shifting sand-dunes on the outskirts were beaten motionless and sodden by the onslaught of consecutive storms; the southeast trades brought...

The cautious reader will detect a lack of authenticity in the following pages. I am not a cautious reader myself, yet I confess with some concern to the absence of much documentary evidence in support of the singular incident I am about to relate. Disjointed memoranda, the proceedings of ayuntamientos and early departmental juntas, with other records of a primitive and superstitious people, have been my inadequate authorities. It is but just to state,...

There was no mistake this time: he had struck gold at last! It had lain there before him a moment ago-a misshapen piece of brown-stained quartz, interspersed with dull yellow metal; yielding enough to have allowed the points of his pick to penetrate its honeycombed recesses, yet heavy enough to drop from the point of his pick as he endeavored to lift it from the red earth.

Harte-who once rode shotgun on a stagecoach-knew the prospectors, gamblers, and gold-hearted frontier gals who won the West. The collection of treasures, published in 1896 includes "A Blue Grass Penelope," "Left Out on Lone Star Mountain," "A Ship of '49," "An Apostle of the Tules," "Devil's Ford," and "A Secret of Telegraph Hill."

Just where the track of the Los Gatos road streams on and upward like the sinuous trail of a fiery rocket until it is extinguished in the blue shadows of the Coast Range, there is an embayed terrace near the summit, hedged by dwarf firs. At every bend of the heat-laden road the eye rested upon it wistfully; all along the flank of the mountain, which seemed to pant and quiver in the oven-like air, through rising dust, the slow creaking of dragging...

The heroine of A Waif of the Plains returns in this 1893 novel. "Has his flowing serapes and his flying horsehair lariats...The man who first opened ground in an unknown realm of fiction likes to delineate what is 'pure cussedness,' and Susy is a mean girl."-The New York Times.

Harte's protagonist, John Hale, is relieved of his cash by highway robbers while riding in a stagecoach. Hale decides to get together a group of men to catch the thieves, but as the story moves along, many of his co-conspirators seem to have their own, more malevolent, motives.

Of Bret Harte's literary style, the London Spectator wrote, "No living writer has struck so powerful and original a note as he sounded throughout the tales which made his reputation." Harte was acclaimed for his gripping tales of life in the rough, lawless, early California mining camps-exemplified in the riveting The Story of a Mine.

As night crept up from the valley that stormy afternoon, Sawyer's Ledge was at first quite blotted out by wind and rain, but presently reappeared in little nebulous star-like points along the mountain side, as the straggling cabins of the settlement were one by one lit up by the miners returning from tunnel and claim.

"Sally Dows," a novella set in Georgia during the Reconstruction, was compared to "Mr. Henry James's analytical studies of conduct" in a contemporary review in the New York Times. In addition to the title work, this 1893 collection includes "The Conspiracy of Mrs. Bunker," "The Transformation of Buckeye Camp," and "Their Uncle from California."