by Ben Tarnoff
But he did, even as he left school at age thirteen to go to work. The antagonism between art and commerce, between the Muse and Mammon, seems to have imprinted itself early on. Also the cruelty of other people: his fellow schoolboys teased him for the “girlish pink-and-whiteness” of his complexion, he later remembered, calling him “Fanny.” Like many sensitive, misunderstood youth then and since, he developed a protective layer of irony to shield himself from the world’s meanness. He wrote a tragedy in which, by his account, “Gilded Vice was triumphant and Simple Virtue and Decent Respectability suffered through five acts.” For himself, he reserved the role of “Gorgeous Villainy.”
It was a part he would play his whole life, in one guise or another. Less flamboyantly than Twain, perhaps, but with a defiance just as deep and a wit just as savage. In 1854, the seventeen-year-old Harte and his younger sister boarded a ship from New York for California, to join their mother in Oakland. She had gone West the previous year, and married a rich lawyer named Andrew Williams, who later became the mayor of Oakland. The young Harte came to California for no particular purpose, and with “no better equipment,” he recalled, than an imagination fed by large quantities of books—an appetite he indulged by holing up in a small, skylighted garret on the top floor of his stepfather’s house and reading voraciously. Like any self-respecting teenager, he refused to let anyone enter. Charles Dickens was his favorite.
He also loved Don Quixote. Like Quixote, he lived mostly in his mind. When he left Oakland to wander through northern California in the mid-1850s, he might as well have been riding through La Mancha in full regalia. He stood out. By then his fair skin had been badly scarred by smallpox, but his foppish dress and aristocratic airs were more than enough to make him a curiosity in backcountry California. A “somewhat pathetic figure,” an eyewitness reported, “a gentleman of refined tastes with no means of support.” He tutored, taught school, and, possibly, mined gold. Mostly he struggled. “He was simply untrained for doing anything that needed doing.”
He always felt his outsiderness acutely. One New Year’s Eve, while the rest of the country celebrated the coming of 1858—a year distinguished chiefly by the hardening of the political standoff that would eventually trigger the Civil War—he stayed in his room, submerged in somber reflection. He was living near Uniontown, a hamlet on Humboldt Bay a few hundred miles north of San Francisco. Here, in this unremarkable place, Harte made the most important decision of his young life. Writing in his diary, he reflected on his past and reached a firm conclusion about his future. He decided he had no choice but to “seek distinction and fortune in literature.” “I am fit for nothing else,” he wrote.
This declaration would be decisive. A decade after his humiliating first encounter, he pledged himself to the writer’s life. If he ended up like Hogarth’s poet, dead broke in a dilapidated attic, so be it: “Perhaps I may succeed—if not I at least make a trial.” He had the desire and the discipline. All he needed now was the opportunity—and it came in December 1858, when the citizens of Uniontown started a newspaper called the Northern Californian. Harte joined its staff as a printer’s apprentice. This was the same job once held by Twain; other distinguished alumni included Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman. The “poor boy’s college,” Franklin called it—a place where young men toiled at the dirty, tedious work of typesetting, sleeping on the shop floor, suffering the abuse of tyrannical editors, all for the opportunity to see their writing in print every so often. At twenty-two Harte had published poetry and prose in California papers, and even placed verses in a New York magazine. But the Northern Californian opened a new horizon. In its offices he learned how to build sentences the way Twain did: from the ground up, with nimbler rhythms than those taught in the classrooms of the eastern colleges. Harte’s diligence endeared him to the editor, who let him contribute odds and ends to fill the columns. And he might’ve continued doing so for years, if tragedy hadn’t intervened.
On the morning of Sunday, February 26, 1860, canoes filled with dead Indians began appearing in Uniontown. The victims numbered at least sixty and as many as two hundred. They had been hideously mutilated. They were mostly women, children, and the elderly. Some were still alive, and from the testimony of the survivors, Harte stitched together the story of what had happened. The night before, a band of white men had paddled to Indian Island, a marshy lump of land in Humboldt Bay where the peaceable Wiyots lived. Another tribe, thought to be allied with the Wiyots, had recently killed cattle belonging to white ranchers. In retaliation, the attackers murdered the Wiyots with axes and knives.
The massacre shocked Harte, and inspired his most powerful piece of writing to date. With his editor away on business, he sharpened his pen to its finest point. Uniontown preferred to shut its eyes to the slaughter. Harte’s editorial would violently pry them open:
[A] more shocking and revolting spectacle was never exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people. Old women, wrinkled and decrepit, lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long gray hair. Infants scarce a span long, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds.
Here was the nightmarish underside of the Jeffersonian dream. America’s westward march may have invigorated its democracy, but only at the price of provoking bloody collisions with the land’s native inhabitants. In California, as elsewhere, these collisions came to be known as the “Indian Wars,” a misleading term for what was essentially an extermination campaign waged with overwhelming force. State militia and local vigilantes annihilated whole villages on daybreak raids, forced survivors onto reservations, and enslaved the children as indentured servants—a practice sanctioned under California law, despite a clause in the state constitution prohibiting slavery. Americans had often extolled the virtue of freedom while depriving other people of it, and on the Far Western frontier, this tendency was especially stark. The hypocrisy disgusted Harte. He took the unpopular view that the “white civilizer” bore responsibility for the bloodshed, and condemned the “barbarity” of “white civilization.” His moral convictions drew in part from a personal source: as the grandson of an Orthodox Jew—a fact he didn’t advertise—he felt a special affinity for members of persecuted races. And when his conscience rebelled, those who knew him only as a wallflowerish young man would witness an extraordinary transformation. In print, the lamb became a lion.
Harte’s impassioned broadside in the Northern Californian didn’t exactly delight his neighbors. The young editor’s life was “seriously threatened and in no little danger,” one friend remembered. Within the month, he fled Uniontown. The butchers of Indian Island would never be held accountable for their crimes. They were businessmen and landowners, men of standing who enjoyed the support of their community. For Harte to challenge them in so public a venue, and with such implacable prose, took backbone. People had been calling him useless his whole life. Later, they would call him worse: insincere, arrogant, cowardly—“too much of a gentleman to quarrel and too much of a lady to fight.” But the events of February 1860 proved that, under his refined exterior, Harte had as much courage as any leather-footed frontiersman.
The Indian Island massacre had one happy result: it brought Harte to San Francisco, where he ended his half decade of wandering. He arrived in the spring of 1860, and used his newly acquired typesetting skills to find a job at a newspaper. Fortunately, the city had at least fifty, and Harte landed at one of the best: the Golden Era, the most popular literary weekly on the Pacific coast. “Literary” was loosely defined: its editor, a universally beloved Long Islander named Joe Lawrence, printed everything from pulp fiction to farming intelligence. What he couldn’t harvest locally he imported from abroad, poaching large portions from eastern periodicals and pirating European novelists like Dickens—turning the absence of international copyright laws to his advantage. The Era enjoyed an immense readership, especially among miners and farmers. Their favorite section w
as the “Correspondents’ Column,” which published verse written by readers. Within its densely printed lines, amateurs could play at being a Browning or a Burns—a sort of literary karaoke for people whose days were spent in the least literary ways imaginable, sifting for gold in freezing rivers or tilling soil under the hot sun. Often the Era couldn’t resist poking fun at a particularly dreadful piece of work, and one suspects the column’s readers loved these snickering asides as much as the uneven efforts that occasioned them. To frontier Californians, the Era was a cherished institution. “Many times the Era has gladdened my heart amid the rude mountains of the Sierra,” wrote one rural reader, “when the whoop of the Digger-Indian, the growl of the fierce grizzly, or the screams of our emblem bird, the Eagle, were more frequent and familiar sounds than those of church bells.”
The Era could count on the rural market. But its editor wanted more urban readers—the better-heeled sort who reflected the city’s rising stature. By 1860, San Francisco had outgrown the gold rush. The makeshift houses of clapboard and canvas had given way to sturdier ones of stone and brick. The plush hotels Twain would patronize were about to be built, and in the ultrafashionable neighborhood of South Park, the wives of powerful men were serving seventeen-course dinners on teakwood tables to their corseted and crinolined guests.
Joe Lawrence hoped to capture a greater slice of this lucrative city market. To succeed, he would need new talent. Fortunately, he didn’t have to look farther than the second floor of the Era’s offices, where the young fugitive from Uniontown had recently started setting type. The twenty-three-year-old may not have been brilliant at the type case—he set too slowly—but he could certainly write. He had already contributed to the Era while living up north; now he became a regular. Lawrence, whose grandfatherly warmth endeared him to all his writers, gave Harte every encouragement. Soon he was supplying poems, stories, and sketches—within the month he even had his own weekly column. His prose grew more playful, more propulsive. It revealed a mind nourished on long rambles through the city and an omnivorous delight in its peculiar customs and characters. What made the deepest impression were the trade winds, those whistling ocean zephyrs that kept San Francisco in perpetual motion. A legend grew up that Harte set his Era pieces into type directly, without first writing them down. Regardless, Harte conquered the Era. He struck “a new and fresh and spirited note,” Twain recalled, “that rose above that orchestra’s mumbling confusion and was recognizable as music.” Before long, that music would find the ear of the most powerful woman in California, the matriarch who would pave the way for San Francisco’s literary rise.
• • •
IF CALIFORNIA WERE A KINGDOM, Jessie Benton Frémont would have been its queen. From her Gothic cottage on Black Point, a steep prominence overlooking the city’s north coast, she beheld the glittering breadth of San Francisco Bay like a sovereign surveying her realm. She loved the sea and the sky. And the sounds: the crashing surf, the fluttering sails, the plaintive warble of the fog bells. It was like living in the bow of a ship, she wrote. When she tired of the view, she took her carriage into the city—a “true city,” she remarked to a friend, with “very good opera” and “lots of private parties.” Beautiful, brilliant, and tremendously self-confident, she would’ve cut a conspicuous figure anywhere in the country. But in California she commanded special respect, on account of the two legendary men whose names she bore: Benton and Frémont.
Her father, Thomas Hart Benton, was one of the eminences of antebellum Washington, a five-term senator from Twain’s home state of Missouri. A disciple of Thomas Jefferson, Benton thundered early and often in Congress on behalf of western expansion. He acquired such an outsized reputation that the hero of Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, after seeing the statesman in the flesh for the first time, comes away disappointed that he isn’t twenty-five feet tall—“nor even anywhere in the neighborhood of it.” During his three decades in the Senate, Benton urged the construction of an overland route to the Pacific. Cutting a path across the continent would “realize the grand idea of Columbus” by opening a western passage to India, Benton believed, enriching America with the Asia trade. But he saw more than the West’s material advantages: he grasped its cultural potential as well. “The nations of Europe hold us in contempt because we are their servile copyists and imitators,” he declared, “because too many among us can see no merit in anything American but as it approaches the perfection of something European.” In the West, America could cast off the lingering influence of the Old World and blossom into a truly original civilization.
His daughter would carry this idea with her to California. Jessie inherited her father’s grit and his undying faith in the future of the Pacific coast. She also absorbed his stubbornness, a fact starkly demonstrated by her decision, at age seventeen, to elope with a handsome army officer eleven years her senior named John Charles Frémont. Once the senator’s anger subsided, and he reconciled himself to the match, he found an excellent partner in Frémont. An intrepid explorer, Frémont shared his father-in-law’s enthusiasm for the West. With Benton’s help, he embarked on several expeditions to the far side of the continent. He collaborated with his wife on the published reports of these journeys, crafting rip-roaring adventure stories that became hallmarks of American popular literature.
Furnished with thrilling vignettes and gorgeous scenery, Frémont’s tales created the founding myths of the Far West. They also provided a wealth of practical information for westward emigrants in the 1840s, and became an indispensable guide to those traveling overland during the gold rush. Frémont himself was hailed as a national hero, known to Americans everywhere as the Pathfinder, after James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier novel of the same name. A consummate self-promoter, Frémont won many symbolic victories, but relatively few real ones. On the eve of the Mexican-American War in 1846, he waved the Stars and Stripes within sight of the Mexican garrison at Monterey before retreating. A decade later, he ran for president as the Republican Party’s first candidate, and lost. He never made much of a scientist, soldier, or politician; but as a storyteller, as a forger of useful fictions, he went a long way toward fulfilling Benton’s fantasy of a peopled, prosperous West.
One can imagine Harte’s reaction when, one day in 1860, he heard that the Pathfinder’s wife wanted to meet him. He hadn’t been in the city a year and was already rocketing into the upper reaches of California society. She had enjoyed his Era pieces, and requested his presence at her parlor at Black Point. He swallowed his social anxiety and accepted. He came on a Sunday, his only free day, and on many Sundays after that, with his manuscripts under his arm. “I have taken a young author to pet,” Jessie confided in a letter. A gardener, she liked watching things grow. Now she had something new to nurture: a writer who, with the proper pruning, might redeem the promise of her father’s beloved West.
As 1860 ground on to its catastrophic conclusion, with the election of Abraham Lincoln in November and the secession of South Carolina the following month, the mood at Black Point turned grim. For the Frémonts and their Republican abolitionist friends, the coming crisis marked the final breaking point after decades of deadlock over slavery. They feared for the Union’s future, yet welcomed a struggle that would purify it of its founding sin. In the chaos of early 1861, as one Southern state after another seceded, Jessie mobilized to ensure California would remain steadfast. She enlisted another of her protégés to lead the crusade: Thomas Starr King, the Unitarian minister. In places like Missouri, the struggle over secession would be fought with guns. In California, it would be fought with words: in the pages of its newspapers and in the populist theater of its streets and saloons and tree stumps. “I do not measure enough inches around the chest to go for a soldier,” King told Jessie, “but I see the way to make this fight.” At her urging, he transformed himself from a slight, sickly preacher into a fiery evangelist for the Union cause. He gave Californians what they wanted: rhetorical fusillades t
o inflame them, bursts of wit to buoy them, and a vision of divine righteousness every bit as riveting as their favorite entertainments.
Harte, too, answered the call. The moral clarity of the moment exhilarated him. He made an American flag out of flannel, which he flew proudly from his house. He wrote patriotic poems, which King read aloud at pro-Union speeches throughout the state: stirring songs of battle feverish with “patriot pride” and “clashing steel.” Together the two men made a good team. King understood poetry. At the height of the Civil War, he gave lectures on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and other living legends of American letters. A product of New England, King knew many of these luminaries personally, and persuaded them to contribute original verses, which he then delivered to crowds of enraptured Californians. To be honored by these distinguished men, whose volumes graced their shelves, whose poems they memorized and recited as solemnly as Scripture, made westerners swell with pride. It served King’s purposes brilliantly. “The state must be Northernized thoroughly, by schools, Atlantic Monthlies, lectures, N. E. preachers,” he wrote James T. Fields, the editor of the nation’s most powerful literary periodical, the Atlantic Monthly. These would build an unshakable foundation for national unity, King believed, and help realize the region’s potential. In his sermons he praised the natural beauty of the Far West, and urged Californians to create inner landscapes as majestic as the ones outside. He exhorted them to build “Yosemites in the soul.” Like Benton before him, he prophesied not merely a prosperous future but a transcendent one. When King told Californians they belonged to America, they listened. When he told them that they, too, could create great literature, they believed.