Tennessee's Partner

Bret Harte moved to California in 1853 in the middle of a well-known and often mythologized period in American history known as the Gold Rush. Harte spent some time in one of the mining camps that developed during this era, hearing the miners’ stories, documenting some of the culture, and establishing his style as an author in the local color style of writing. Much of his work addresses the way social identity and justice are collectively constructed in the rugged and remote camps.

The hyperlocal culture and ethos of the mining camps developed within the broader context of the early days of California’s American statehood. In 1847, at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, American settlers began entering California seeking opportunities to trade and harvest resources like lumber. In 1848, Johann Sutter and James Marshall reported discovering gold, prompting a frenzy of prospectors to seek their fortunes in the gold fields. News spread through ships up and down the coast, across the Pacific to China, and to the eastern United States. When President Polk announced the gold strike to Congress in late 1848, the Gold Rush officially began, a flood of settlers migrating across the country. Formerly small trading towns boomed, and new businesses arose alongside the mining towns, including card houses, dancehalls, and other services of varying respectability.

Rather than wait for the federal government to develop a governing system for California, the settlers instituted their own state constitution. In practice, however, justice was even more localized. Miners largely governed affairs in their camps and dealt their own justice, sometimes resulting in vigilante violence. As “Tennessee’s Partner” demonstrates, the makeshift nature of the frontier justice system could also raise questions about conflicts of interest. For example, the judge who tries Tennessee’s case is also the man who apprehends him, which Harte implies predisposes him toward conviction: “The trial of Tennessee was conducted as fairly as was consistent with a judge and jury who felt themselves to some extent obliged to justify, in their verdict, the previous irregularities of arrest and indictment” (Paragraph 8). Even here, however, Harte presents a balanced view of The Pros and Cons of Self-Created Justice by reminding readers of the unique pressures shaping the frontier legal system. This impulse to document the region’s idiosyncrasies also informs choices such as Harte’s use of dialect and speaks to his founding status in the local color movement