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The Luck of Roaring Camp & Other Stories
'The Luck' in this story is a baby boy born in Roaring Camp, a California gold rush settlement. The baby's mother dies in childbirth and the men decide to bring up the boy themselves. His presence inspires them to drop their gambling and brawling. When gold is discovered, they believe the child has brought them this good fortune, but can this 'Luck' last? These are classic American short stories - published in 1868.
Contents:
The Outcasts of Poker Flat
The Luck of Roaring Camp
Tennessee's Partner
The Idyl of Red Gulch
Brown of Calaveras
Salomy Jane's Kiss
The Poet of Sierra Flat
Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff
A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst
Wan Lee, the Pagan
An Ingènue of the Sierras
How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar
Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands
The Four Guarians of Lagrange
Contents:
The Outcasts of Poker Flat
The Luck of Roaring Camp
Tennessee's Partner
The Idyl of Red Gulch
Brown of Calaveras
Salomy Jane's Kiss
The Poet of Sierra Flat
Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff
A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst
Wan Lee, the Pagan
An Ingènue of the Sierras
How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar
Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands
The Four Guarians of Lagrange
- GenresShort StoriesWesterns
320 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
About the author
Bret Harte
3,197 books64 followersPeople note American writer Francis Bret Harte for
The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches
(1870), his best-known collection of his stories about California mining towns.
People best remember this poet for his short-story fiction, featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the Gold Rush. In a career, spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern United States to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but people most often reprinted, adapted, and admired his tales of the Gold Rush.
Parents named him after Francis Brett, his great-grandfather. Bernard Hart, paternal grandfather of Francis and an Orthodox Jewish immigrant, flourished as a merchant and founded the New York stock exchange. Henry, father of the young Francis, changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte. Later, Francis preferred that people know his middle name, which he spelled Bret with only one t.
An avid reader as a boy, Harte at 11 years of age published his first work, a satirical poem, titled "Autumn Musings", now lost. Rather than attracting praise, the poem garnered ridicule from his family. As an adult, he recalled to a friend, "Such a shock was their ridicule to me that I wonder that I ever wrote another line of verse". His formal schooling ended at 13 years of age in 1849.
People best remember this poet for his short-story fiction, featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the Gold Rush. In a career, spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern United States to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but people most often reprinted, adapted, and admired his tales of the Gold Rush.
Parents named him after Francis Brett, his great-grandfather. Bernard Hart, paternal grandfather of Francis and an Orthodox Jewish immigrant, flourished as a merchant and founded the New York stock exchange. Henry, father of the young Francis, changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte. Later, Francis preferred that people know his middle name, which he spelled Bret with only one t.
An avid reader as a boy, Harte at 11 years of age published his first work, a satirical poem, titled "Autumn Musings", now lost. Rather than attracting praise, the poem garnered ridicule from his family. As an adult, he recalled to a friend, "Such a shock was their ridicule to me that I wonder that I ever wrote another line of verse". His formal schooling ended at 13 years of age in 1849.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 13, 2018
I have always heard of 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat' and 'The Luck of Roaring Camp' but I had never read a word of Bret Harte. I even live next to an elementary school named for him!
A neighbor lent me this volume and I must say that I was really surprised by what I found. I expected folksy, heart-warming tales of the old West, but man! that is not at all what is in these stories. Funny and edgy, tart and sad, these stories are very modern in their sensibility and the plots are way darker than I expected.
Why is he a forgotten writer?
A neighbor lent me this volume and I must say that I was really surprised by what I found. I expected folksy, heart-warming tales of the old West, but man! that is not at all what is in these stories. Funny and edgy, tart and sad, these stories are very modern in their sensibility and the plots are way darker than I expected.
Why is he a forgotten writer?
July 16, 2026
More Bret Harte. I liked these a little less than the collection under the title of Colonel Starbottle's Client, but they had much the same flavor and quality. I continued to like his colorful early California characters and the sense of reality that I got from the settings, so I was a little surprised to learn that it was all made up from his office in San Francisco with little direct contact between Harte and the types of people who populated his stories. It was also interesting to find out that his version of the miners' speech is entirely invented. But my reaction to all of that was to admire him more for his inventiveness than to disrespect him as a faker. And his mythology of the West was taken up by more than a few other writers in the Western genre, so that the products of his imagination became American archetypes.
Still, I wondered why Harte is so little known and read today. It turns out that much of it was due to his own struggles - writer's block, ego, financial troubles and a weak relationship with the truth. Several nails were pounded into his literary coffin by Mark Twain with whom he had a major falling out after a close early relationship. And then in the twentieth century, the Robert Penn Warren crew tossed a few more shovelfuls of dirt onto the grave. Bret Harte may have been a not so good a human being and only a pretty good writer, but he deserves to be remembered better.
Still, I wondered why Harte is so little known and read today. It turns out that much of it was due to his own struggles - writer's block, ego, financial troubles and a weak relationship with the truth. Several nails were pounded into his literary coffin by Mark Twain with whom he had a major falling out after a close early relationship. And then in the twentieth century, the Robert Penn Warren crew tossed a few more shovelfuls of dirt onto the grave. Bret Harte may have been a not so good a human being and only a pretty good writer, but he deserves to be remembered better.
February 19, 2025
I found the stories uninteresting. Maybe just me. Could not keep my focus on this book. It took me three times as long to finish this book than my normal rate. I was constantly falling asleep.
June 30, 2025
The title story, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, and Mliss were amusing, but reading the other twenty stories about life in California mining camps became tedious.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews