30 pages • 1 hour read
Bret HarteA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Francis Brett Hart was born in Albany, New York on August 25, 1836. When he was young, his father changed their last name to Harte. Francis preferred to use his middle name but dropped the second T, going by Bret. At age 11, Harte published his first work, a poem now lost, to the ridicule of his family. His formal education ended soon after when he was 13.
After moving to California in 1853, Harte tried his hand at different jobs, including an unsuccessful attempt at prospecting for gold. He was also a writer, poet, reporter, and editor, and his work was praised by Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Rudyard Kipling, and mystery writer Ellery Queen. He lived in a northern California coastal town until he received death threats provoked by his editorial, which criticized an 1860 massacre of Indigenous Americans. He then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he wrote a widely-published poem critical of anti-Chinese hate. Titled “Plain Language from Truthful James,” it became better known by a different name, “The Heathen Chinee.” Intended to be satirical, it was taken literally by the very people he satirized, to Harte’s dismay.
“The Luck of Roaring Camp” was first published in 1868 in The Overland Monthly literary magazine. The story was not immediately embraced by its California audience, but its enthusiastic reception in Eastern states in America catapulted Harte to international fame. Harte drew on his experiences in California to produce his most lively characters and his best-received writing. His own life in a prospecting camp provided background and texture for his popular gold rush stories. He also briefly worked guarding stagecoach cargo for Wells Fargo & Co. Express, and he modeled another character, Yuba Bill, off a real stagecoach driver.
In 1871, Harte returned to the East Coast and lived there until 1878, when he became the consul to Krefeld, Germany. After holding similar positions throughout Europe, he settled in London in 1855. He never returned to the United States, but he continued writing stories for the 24 years he lived in Europe. He died at the age of 65 in Canterbury, England, on May 5, 1902.
“The Luck of Roaring Camp” is set in 1850, during the California Gold Rush in the chaotic years after gold was discovered in 1848. California itself had only joined the United States in 1848 after the Mexican-American War, and statehood was still two years away. The first gold seekers came from within California, and some towns virtually emptied as prospectors headed for the gold fields. Others came from neighboring Oregon. Newspapers soon reported on the discovery, and posters touted passage to California by ship. Travelers signed on to wagon trains heading west, and people from other locales soon arrived in droves. Over 300,000 poured into California from all over the world, many of them the so-called “forty-niners” because they arrived in 1849.
The trip was not easy. Some arrived in wagons after long and arduous overland journeys plagued by illness, harsh conditions, conflict with Indigenous Americans, and banditry. Others took the equally strenuous steamship route, either around the tip of South America or landing first in Panama, traveling across the isthmus through the dangerous jungle, and catching a second ship to San Francisco on the other side. San Francisco’s population exploded, rising from 800 to 20,000 in under two years. It also served as an entry point for the hundreds of thousands of optimistic gold seekers merely passing through.
These new settlers were overwhelmingly men. Although some started businesses and set up in new towns, those who went to seek their fortunes in gold were often rough and, as Harte says in the story, “reckless.” They lived in tents and hastily-constructed cabins in communities that were relatively lawless compared to the towns with their sheriffs. Supplies had to be brought in from other communities and were often extremely expensive. The camps were frequently violent places since there was little to do in the wilderness besides drink, gamble, and fight. Roaring Camp is set in one of these isolated prospecting communities, and the changes brought about by Tommy’s birth are meant to contrast against the archetypal dirty and brutal gold settlement.
By Bret Harte