by Ben Tarnoff
By early summer, Twain had a deliverable text. “[T]he book is finished,” he wrote Bliss on June 17, 1868, “& I think it will do.” He planned to return to New York by the end of the month but couldn’t resist extending his stay for one final lecture. On the evening of July 2, an immense crowd cheered his return to the San Francisco stage. He spoke on Venice, blending humor and memoir and history in a gripping performance that lasted nearly two hours and included “no slang & no inelegancies,” as he boasted to a friend. The critics loved it: “wit without vulgarity,” declared the Dramatic Chronicle. He had redeemed himself. Instead of cracking off-color jokes about the Savior, he gave gondolas in the Grand Canal by moonlight. He described a Venetian Republic that, centuries ago, had ruled the rich trade between Europe and Asia—a perfect subject for San Franciscans, who expected the railroad to bestow similar privileges. Four days later, he sailed for New York. He would never again return to the city that raised him as a writer. He didn’t need to: it had already given him what he wanted. When he first came seesawing down its streets in 1863, he was mostly unknown. By the time he left for the last time, he carried the manuscript that would forever make him famous.
• • •
THE SAME MONTH TWAIN WENT EAST, Harte debuted the Overland. Both men were on the brink of glory, and helped each other across the threshold. In exchange for Harte’s heroic edits, Twain gave him four excerpts for the magazine. When the inaugural issue appeared in July 1868, it included the first of these—a preview of a highly anticipated project by one of the Far West’s best-loved writers. It was a brilliant coup by Harte, an early sign of his editorial shrewdness. Whatever his initial doubts, he put his whole heart into making the Overland soar. It offered a gleam of hope after the disaster of his first book and the death of his infant son. It drew him out. A man who rarely socialized in the street now waylaid his writers when he saw them. If they dodged him, his letters would follow them home, one after another, until they surrendered and sent him pages.
Then the real work began: out came the editor’s pen, for Harte to start chiseling the raw text into something that met his standards. He wasn’t timid, although he treated his writers with enough tact to dull whatever pain they felt at his incisions. They knew that he made the same demands on his own writing as he did on theirs. He also had a gift for making them feel as if they were in it together: as if the hundred-odd pages of essays, poetry, and fiction that filled the Overland each month were a collaboration, and not just the product of one overworked genius.
The day after the Overland launched, Harte invited Stoddard and Coolbrith to the magazine’s offices above Roman’s bookshop. The summer of 1868 found both in a fragile place: Stoddard had recently slunk back home after ditching his stage career in Sacramento; Coolbrith felt stagnant and blue. Harte would help deliver them from their collective funk. They would become his star contributors, and his copilots: the crew he relied on to keep this glittering new flagship of the literary West afloat. “He called us his children,” Coolbrith remembered. “[W]e were almost like members of one family.” He gave them keys to the Overland sanctum. They would meet there, or climb the hill to Coolbrith’s house to take tea in her parlor and talk over the next issue’s table of contents.
They became inseparable: the Overland Trinity, as they came to be known. It was a hefty title for such a delicate-looking group. Anyone who caught them rushing down Montgomery Street with bundles of proofs under their arms could be forgiven for not realizing these three were the all-powerful arbiters of literary taste in California. But they had certainly earned it. For years, they had watched the coast grow, and had grown along with it: from the Golden Era of its infancy to the Californian of its adolescence. Now came the Overland Monthly to usher in its adulthood, on the eve of the railroad that would complete California’s coming-of-age.
“We were critics, editors, poets, authors, type-setters,” Coolbrith recalled. “Each and any duty, any one of us was ready to perform, and we worked for one common end, the success of Bret Harte’s—nay, our—magazine.” But Harte didn’t just edit the Overland: he also wrote for it. In fact, the magazine carried his finest writing to date, the work that finally brought him national acclaim.
It all began with “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in the Overland’s second issue, a short story about the gold rush. The subject wasn’t a new one for Harte. He had tried writing fiction about the pioneer era before, using place-names and slang and other touches of local color to create a distinctively Californian setting. What made “The Luck of Roaring Camp” different was its use of irony—the ingredient that enabled him to unlock the creative power of the Pacific coast.
“The Luck of Roaring Camp” opens in a California mining town in 1850. In a cabin at the edge of a clearing, an Indian prostitute is giving birth. A hundred miners stand outside, waiting. These broken, barely human men have names like Stumpy and Kentuck, and are missing fingers and toes and ears and eyes. Instead of feeling sympathy for the woman’s suffering, they make bets on whether she will survive.
She dies, but the baby lives. The miners adopt it as their own. But child rearing doesn’t come easily to them: the best they can manage is a weird parody of parenting. They shower the child with wildly inappropriate gifts, like a revolver and a tobacco box. They christen it in a “burlesque of a church service,” complete with a choir and “mock altar.” They name it “The Luck,” out of the belief that it brings them good fortune in the gold ditches, and even begin to worship the child as a little god. Then winter comes, and the snowmelt causes the water to rise. A flood overruns the camp and The Luck drowns.
Harte had discovered what frontier yarn spinners had long known: that the West was a darkly funny place. What elsewhere would happen naturally—raising a child—becomes a ridiculous farce in the upside-down world of Roaring Camp. The miners try to civilize themselves for The Luck’s sake, but the most they can muster is an absurd caricature of normal society. They don’t know the first thing about traditional institutions like family or religion. Luck is their only faith: a belief in fortune, and the knowledge that it can change. The same water that washes gold down the Sierras also destroys the camp. “Water put the gold into them gulches!” exclaims one of the miners. “It’s been here once and will be here again!” Their story isn’t a triumphant epic of western conquest, but a sick joke, the ironies heightened by the narrator’s slyly satiric tone.
Not everyone saw the humor. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” found detractors early, starting with the proofreader at the Overland’s printing office. She was a pious woman, a “vestal virgin” in the opinion of one Overland staffer, and she bristled at the impropriety of Harte’s tale: particularly the use of a prostitute as a character and the expletives uttered by the miners. Anton Roman later recalled riding valiantly into this “great hullabaloo” to override the proofreader and order the story published. Harte remembered it a bit differently: Roman got cold feet, fearing the tale might “imperil the prospects of the magazine,” prompting a showdown between editor and publisher. Harte “writhed under it, even to the point of resigning,” Coolbrith recalled. But at length he prevailed, Roman yielded, and “The Luck” went to press.
Locally, the critics shrugged. A “pleasant little sketch,” yawned the Alta California. In Harte’s recollection, the religious press had a harsher verdict. “Christians were cautioned against pollution by its contact,” he later wrote. “[B]usiness men were gravely urged to condemn and frown upon this picture of California society that was not conducive to Eastern immigration.” These halfwits might have had the last word, if the August 1868 issue of the Overland hadn’t reached the Atlantic coast and touched off a tidal wave of applause that came crashing across the continent that fall. “[O]ne of the best magazine articles that we have read in many months,” gushed the Nation. A “genuine California story,” proclaimed the Springfield Republican. Nothing from Harte’s pen had ever landed quite like this. The Atlantic Mont
hly’s editor, James T. Fields, rated “The Luck” so highly that he offered to publish anything its author wrote. This amounted to a blank check from America’s most prestigious literary paper, a windfall that would make most writers fall weeping out of their chair. Not Harte. “I’ll try to find time to send you something,” he replied. “The Overland is still an experiment,” and “should it fail . . . why I dare say I may be able to do more.”
Harte knew exactly where his loyalties lay: at the head of the Overland Trinity, alongside the friends who had shared his frustrations at the story’s hard path to print and now shared his joy at its breakout success. He was right: the Overland was an experiment. It tested a hypothesis long pondered on the Pacific coast: whether the Far West could produce a national literary platform on a par with the Atlantic. By the fall of 1868, the results were in. Eastern papers had embraced the Overland’s “Far Western flavor,” its “Pacific freshness.” “It is by no means a mere copy of Atlantic or European habits of thought and style, but smacks of its native soil,” noted the New York Home Journal. These strange new tastes arrived at an opportune time, as America’s rapidly growing readership fueled an expanding market for print. The novelty-hungry masses helped make the Overland a hit. Within its first two years, the magazine’s circulation in the eastern states would be the same as in California, Nevada, and Oregon combined.
A building at Clay and Battery Streets damaged in the 1868 earthquake.
Yet Harte, instead of being hailed as a hero, remained a controversial figure in California. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” found favor with local critics only after their eastern counterparts praised it. “Since Boston endorsed the story, San Francisco was properly proud of it,” Harte explained. This dynamic wasn’t difficult to explain. “The Luck” showed California in a distinctly unsentimental light. From a purely promotional point of view, it was bad publicity. Harte didn’t care: he liked being the flea in the region’s boosterish hide, and in the fall of 1868, he would routinely play that role in the pages of the Overland.
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ON THE MORNING OF October 21, 1868, a violent earthquake shook San Franciscans out of their houses and into the streets. Panic prevailed. “Many acted as if they thought the Day of Judgment had come,” one journalist reported. When the dust settled, people found their city in ruins, wrecked by the worst tremor since the American conquest of California. The earth had cracked open in many places, and sank several feet in others. Many major buildings suffered severe damage, including City Hall. Areas built on landfill, like the business district east of Montgomery Street, looked especially postapocalyptic. Toppled chimneys, shattered glass, and loosened chunks of masonry littered the pavement.
In an eerie coincidence, Harte had recently written about earthquakes in the Overland Monthly. “The nineteenth century is unfortunately no more superior to earthquakes than was the ninth,” he said, and the disaster that followed would offer terrible evidence of that fact. Despite all the advances of modern technology—“electric telegraphs, photography, chloroform,” to name a few—temblors could still strike whenever they pleased. It was a lesson that would’ve been obvious to an earlier era of Californians, back when people regularly lost their homes to fires and floods, or their money to the faro table. Life during the gold rush was full of sudden reversals of fortune, the sort dramatized by “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” But to the rising capitalist class of San Francisco, who envisioned a more solidly prosperous future fixed to the coming railroad, the earthquake of 1868 was profoundly embarrassing. It exposed a frightening instability beneath the veneer of civilization they had worked hard to create. It showed that no matter how much progress the city had made since 1849, some dark undomesticated wildness endured—that San Francisco was still a gambler’s paradise, if only because it sat on such incorrigibly quaky soil.
The city would be rebuilt. But its businessmen feared for its reputation. If San Francisco became permanently branded as an earthquake town, it might kill future investment and immigration. Within hours of the disaster, the Chamber of Commerce held an emergency meeting to discuss ways to prevent this. Moments after the first shock, reports of the destruction had gone out over the transcontinental telegraph. The chamber needed to take control of the narrative. So its members drafted a telegram, to send to eastern and European cities. They substantially underreported the damage and blamed the collapsed buildings on poor construction. Over the coming weeks, most of the city’s papers repeated these lies. Knowing their words would reach the rest of the nation by wire, they trumpeted the idea that “criminal carelessness” was the culprit—not immutable natural forces of the sort that might make San Francisco inhospitable to development.
Harte couldn’t have asked for a bigger slice of boosterism to sink his satirical teeth into. In the next Overland, he ridiculed the notion that the earthquake could’ve been avoided “with a little more care and preparation on our part.” His defiance stirred the wrath of the “dignified dons of the city,” a friend recalled, who didn’t enjoy seeing their public-relations campaign exposed as a fraud.
Harte couldn’t help himself. Bolstered by the success of “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” he felt freer to indulge his contrarian impulses. In October 1868, he edited an article that offered a more sustained critique of California. Its author was Henry George, a local printer and journalist who had published a handful of literary sketches in the Californian. In the Overland, he showed a more polemical side, training his cantankerous eloquence on a topic of supreme urgency to all Californians: the transcontinental railroad. The result, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” was one of the most important pieces ever published in the magazine. It forecast a disaster worse than any earthquake, and one too large for San Francisco’s leading citizens to sweep under the rug.
George began with a simple question. “What is the railroad to do for us?—this railroad that we have looked for, hoped for, prayed for so long?” The Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were nearing their junction in the Utah desert, to be completed within a year. This long-awaited link would hopefully give California greater prosperity and population, and make San Francisco the seat of a commercial empire. And yet, within this apparently favorable turn of events lurked an awful threat. “The locomotive is a great centralizer,” George wrote. “It kills towns and builds up great cities, and in the same way kills little businesses and builds up great ones.” The economic forces unfettered by its arrival wouldn’t benefit everyone equally—on the contrary, it would concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and make life harder for the rest. Mass immigration would force real estate prices up and wages down. The railroad barons, big landholders, and factory owners stood to gain an ever-greater share of land and capital, while ordinary people found it harder to earn a decent living. California’s relatively egalitarian society would disappear, fractured by the growing gulf between rich and poor already seen in the industrializing East. San Francisco would have its own Astors and Vanderbilts—and its own scenes of ruthless poverty to match those of Massachusetts mill towns and Manhattan slums. “When liveries appear,” George wrote, “look out for bare-footed children.”
Later, George would expand on these insights to produce his 1879 best seller Progress and Poverty. He would become a godfather of American progressivism, an inspiration to those who sought to create a more humane alternative to the jungle capitalism of the late nineteenth century. In the pages of the Overland, George took his first step in that direction. He sounded a dissonant note of caution among the chorus of California’s optimists. Not everything he predicted would come to pass, but the pessimistic thrust of his argument would be largely borne out by the years that followed. He realized the scale of the coming changes, not just to California’s economy but to its soul—a society born in the gold rush, brought up by the Civil War, and now on the verge of losing its roots. “In California there has been a certain cosmopolitanism, a certain freedom and breadth o
f common thought and feeling, natural to a community made up from so many different sources,” he noted. This quality had sustained San Francisco’s literary scene. It had nourished Harte, Stoddard, Coolbrith, and Twain, and given them a sandbox to romp around in. The locomotive would eventually flatten this culture, iron out its idiosyncrasies. It would bring a grimmer era, blighted by economic uncertainty and social upheaval. In 1868, George caught sight of the bust at the end of the bonanza.
Chinese railroad workers in Bloomer Cut, 1860s. Bloomer Cut was a corridor through the Sierra Nevada, built for the transcontinental railroad.
SIX
The connection couldn’t be completed on time. Heavy rains and a labor dispute caused a delay. The railroad would take two more days to finish. On May 8, 1869, the two halves of the transcontinental track were to meet in Utah, and San Francisco was ready to celebrate. No single moment in its short history had been more keenly anticipated than this—and neither the bankers nor the stevedores nor any of the ethnic societies, fraternal orders, labor leagues, army battalions, marching bands, or unaffiliated revelers planning to take part wanted to postpone what promised to be the party of the century. So they did what westerners often did when inconvenient facts threatened to spoil a good story line: they ignored them.
At sunrise, cannon woke the city. By ten, the streets overflowed. A telegram came from Sacramento announcing the railroad’s completion—a fake message, intended to serve as the parade’s starting signal. The procession lurched forward in reply. Horse-drawn floats made a tableau of the city’s many tribes: German gymnasts swung from parallel bars, ironworkers brandished a newly built locomotive. Artillery, steam whistles, and church bells blared. Under the springtime sun, people of all classes and colors staged a performance worthy of the occasion. At night they lit bonfires and sent five hundred rockets sputtering into the night sky.