Geography in Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp”

Abstract

The cultural geography of Bret Harte’s mining camp fiction is complex. The Gold Rush occurred in the wake of the annexation of what would become the western United States following the conflict with Mexico of 1846–1848. The rush of economic immigrants to the region complicated an existing nexus of cultural and demographic tensions between colonists of various originations and tenures alongside the native peoples of the West Coast. In particular, the influx of white American settlers seeking social mobility tended to produce racialized social and legal codes with disproportionate negative impacts for black, Asian, and Native peoples’ access to public space, laws, and opportunities (Hsu 707). Harte, arriving in San Francisco in 1854 and working in varying capacities as a messenger, teacher, writer, and editor in and around the Bay Area (Scharnhorst 6, 10–13), recognized the moral problems endemic to the Americanization of California and tended to write about them without hesitation, from his damning Northern Californian editorial on the 1860 Wiyot Indian massacre to his 1870 send-up of anti-Chinese sentiment “Plain Language from Truthful James.” Even so, Harte was not restricted to writing in a vein of social protest. In his preface to The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches, he declared himself “a humble writer of romance” who intended to illustrate the “era of which Californian history has preserved the incidents more often than the character” of a people “replete with a certain heroic Greek poetry” (xx). His aim was to capture the spirit rather than the facts of Gold Rush-era California, and if doing so entailed spotlighting contemporary ills, so much the better. For example, in “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Harte “made the diametrically opposed, provocative and evocative claim that a mining camp—the most maledominated, coarse, inveterately sinful and unchristian environment in America—could be the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom, and an illegitimate child of mixed race its chief minister” (Nissen 381). Harte makes Roaring Camp into a new New Canaan, a mythology upon mythology that rests on the lawlessness and non-homogeny of its residents. In “Luck,”