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The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales
'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.
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About the author
Bret Harte
3,134 books63 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 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 26, 2020
YES. Some good, some better. All edifying, heart-warming and such. Stark reminder to waste less time on the (literary and other) passing fancies of the times in which you chanced to be born.
September 25, 2025
4.5 stars. There’s something very commercial about these stories. The ideas are very Hollywood. The humor and sentiment reminded me of The Andy Griffith Show but for the Old West, and a bit naughtier, a bit obsessed with cuckolds.
Full of gold miners and gamblers, half-breeds and whores, these fictional dispatches from the frontier were greatly admired by Kipling and perhaps influenced his own half-arch, half-tragic reports on a community on the empire’s fringes. Harte’s world was a novelty then, but now of course it’s just fascinating to get this early glimpse of beautiful, beautiful northern California, back when a wife joining her husband from the “effete” East was news for the local paper and held up as a model for others, and when a few children played in the bucolic landscape and ran up to kiss the even fewer strangers. Hard to comprehend how recent it all was. Also hard to fathom a time when these characters were fresh and not the national archetypes the whole world knows today.
Harte reuses a small number of props to set his California scenes: the sighing pines, the stars, a gulch, a grizzly, a white cabin by a gurgling stream, the snowy Sierras. The red dust and the flood. A sycamore hung with bodies. He seems to have written a lot of stories, and there’s little overlap in the selections of editors. I formed my own, from an audiobook and a paperback on my shelves:
____
“The Luck of Roaring Camp.” 1868. Same formula as Three Men and a Baby, same kind of mass appeal, both touching and comedic. It caused a sensation, but only after the literati back East, like Mark Twain, made a big deal out of it. (Twain, incidentally, would later come to detest his friend).
____
“Tennessee’s Partner.” 1869. Humorous picture of the idiosyncrasies and mysteries of friendship. Despite the conflict over a woman, Wikipedia offers a “homosexual context,” which is of course de rigueur in this moment, when every deep male relationship must necessarily be gay. (And then people wonder why straight men no longer have friends).
____
“The Idyl of Red Gulch.” 1869. A meeting between a schoolmarm and a prostitute derails a man’s romantic hopes.
____
“How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar.” 1872.
The blue-ribbon winner of the bunch.
There are some great characters: the “old” guy (he’s only 50) who conforms to the mood of whatever room he’s in; his sick little boy, with the manners of an old man. He wants to know about Sandy Claws, a sort of Chinaman, he’s heard. Even the horse is a crazy character, with its signs of “vice.”
With all the obstacles, like the crazy horse and the arm shattered by a highwayman’s bullet and the rising river—and the rising sun—the story becomes suspenseful in a funny way. The incongruity between the high stakes and the “low” reward (getting a poor kid some toys for Xmas) is part of the offbeat pathos.
____
“Brown of Calaveras.” 1869. Another artfully told tale. Harte doesn’t tell you Jack is sleeping with his friend’s wife, or that he is planning on running off with her, or that he is trying to talk himself out of it. He makes it plain enough without saying it.
____
“Miggles.” 1869. Harte makes Miggles come to life immediately, and she is genuinely fetching. But then the story fizzles into a character sketch relying on some quirks like a pet grizzly and a backstory that is slightly sentimental.
____
“A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst.” 1871(?) Story of a remarkable cripple. The way Harte turns her from a hard-luck case to a sort of old-timey femme fatale is pretty amazing.
Now the fight is between two lovers instead of a husband and a lover. Despite the soapy plot and melodramatic dialogue, Harte can’t quite conceal his laughter.
____
“The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” 1869. Really captures how fast a situation out in the wilderness can become harrowing. You also see the bonds that form among the stranded. That skunk Uncle Billy!
____
“Salomy Jane's Kiss.” 1889. Later story, if my info is accurate, and quite exciting and sexy.
A lot of these stories leave you hanging just at the most suspenseful moment, then cut to a knock on the door of some sleeper. By now I’ve come to brace myself for Harte’s endings, unsure if they’ll be saccharine or traumatic. The author somewhat acknowledges this and offers instead a more mundane conclusion.
____
“The Poet of Sierra Flat.” (1871) This was funny but I’m confused. He was a woman?
____
“Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff.” (1901) Great.
Bewitching young woman sues a deacon for breach of promise, hiring a silver-tongued, old-fashioned lawyer quick to challenge people to duels and in danger of falling under the girl’s spell himself. Long one, but the trial is hilarious and ends on an unexpectedly heartbreaking note. Harte was now 65.
____
“Wan Lee, the Pagan.” 1874. This is one of those stories that gave Harte’s adopted city a black eye and caused such resentment towards him. A sketch of a small Chinese community and of one little imp in particular, stoned to death in a race riot. Again, probably influenced Kipling.
____
“An Ingenue of the Sierras.” A “coach” (a stagecoach—I always have difficulty knowing if I’m reading about a train or carriage) awaits a robbery which mysteriously doesn’t occur, but the passengers learn they carry aboard an accomplice, who’d signaled from the darkened vehicle with a white handkerchief or veil. So, good suspense and paranoia off the bat, with a gruff, sharp hero named Yuba Bill. This is such a good old-fashioned tale, full of turns that keep getting turned on their head. The final twist is another surprise, and another Hollywood trope: the innocent-seeming female character who outwits all the scheming men in the end.
___________________
Marginalia:
*An example of why you don’t want to get on Twain’s bad side: ““Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward. He is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth…as if he considered it a disgrace…. To send this nasty creature to puke upon the American name in a foreign land is too much.”
Considering Harte’s sudden boom and bust in popularity, I wonder if Twain, who helped make him, had a hand in unmaking him. But I’m not sure the date of their falling-out lines up.
*Harte’s father was a merchant and one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. This was not some son of the backwoods writing these tales.
*Apparently Kipling was a fan of “How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar” too, and not a fan of the San Francisco accent. On his visit there: “Now that I have heard their voices, all the beauty of Bret Harte is being ruined for me, because I find myself catching through the roll of his rhythmical prose the cadence of his peculiar fatherland. Get an American lady to read to you ‘How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar,’ and see how much is, under her tongue, left of the beauty of the original.”
Kipling went on: “But I am sorry for Bret Harte. It happened this way. A reporter asked me what I thought of the city, and I made answer suavely that it was hallowed ground to me, because of Bret Harte. That was true. ‘Well, ‘ said the reporter, ‘Bret Harte claims California, but California don’t claim Bret Harte. He’s been so long in England that he’s quite English. Have you seen our cracker factories or the new offices of the ‘Examiner?’ He could not understand that to the outside world the city was worth a great deal less than the man.”
Full of gold miners and gamblers, half-breeds and whores, these fictional dispatches from the frontier were greatly admired by Kipling and perhaps influenced his own half-arch, half-tragic reports on a community on the empire’s fringes. Harte’s world was a novelty then, but now of course it’s just fascinating to get this early glimpse of beautiful, beautiful northern California, back when a wife joining her husband from the “effete” East was news for the local paper and held up as a model for others, and when a few children played in the bucolic landscape and ran up to kiss the even fewer strangers. Hard to comprehend how recent it all was. Also hard to fathom a time when these characters were fresh and not the national archetypes the whole world knows today.
Harte reuses a small number of props to set his California scenes: the sighing pines, the stars, a gulch, a grizzly, a white cabin by a gurgling stream, the snowy Sierras. The red dust and the flood. A sycamore hung with bodies. He seems to have written a lot of stories, and there’s little overlap in the selections of editors. I formed my own, from an audiobook and a paperback on my shelves:
____
“The Luck of Roaring Camp.” 1868. Same formula as Three Men and a Baby, same kind of mass appeal, both touching and comedic. It caused a sensation, but only after the literati back East, like Mark Twain, made a big deal out of it. (Twain, incidentally, would later come to detest his friend).
____
“Tennessee’s Partner.” 1869. Humorous picture of the idiosyncrasies and mysteries of friendship. Despite the conflict over a woman, Wikipedia offers a “homosexual context,” which is of course de rigueur in this moment, when every deep male relationship must necessarily be gay. (And then people wonder why straight men no longer have friends).
____
“The Idyl of Red Gulch.” 1869. A meeting between a schoolmarm and a prostitute derails a man’s romantic hopes.
____
“How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar.” 1872.
The blue-ribbon winner of the bunch.
There are some great characters: the “old” guy (he’s only 50) who conforms to the mood of whatever room he’s in; his sick little boy, with the manners of an old man. He wants to know about Sandy Claws, a sort of Chinaman, he’s heard. Even the horse is a crazy character, with its signs of “vice.”
With all the obstacles, like the crazy horse and the arm shattered by a highwayman’s bullet and the rising river—and the rising sun—the story becomes suspenseful in a funny way. The incongruity between the high stakes and the “low” reward (getting a poor kid some toys for Xmas) is part of the offbeat pathos.
____
“Brown of Calaveras.” 1869. Another artfully told tale. Harte doesn’t tell you Jack is sleeping with his friend’s wife, or that he is planning on running off with her, or that he is trying to talk himself out of it. He makes it plain enough without saying it.
____
“Miggles.” 1869. Harte makes Miggles come to life immediately, and she is genuinely fetching. But then the story fizzles into a character sketch relying on some quirks like a pet grizzly and a backstory that is slightly sentimental.
____
“A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst.” 1871(?) Story of a remarkable cripple. The way Harte turns her from a hard-luck case to a sort of old-timey femme fatale is pretty amazing.
Now the fight is between two lovers instead of a husband and a lover. Despite the soapy plot and melodramatic dialogue, Harte can’t quite conceal his laughter.
____
“The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” 1869. Really captures how fast a situation out in the wilderness can become harrowing. You also see the bonds that form among the stranded. That skunk Uncle Billy!
____
“Salomy Jane's Kiss.” 1889. Later story, if my info is accurate, and quite exciting and sexy.
A lot of these stories leave you hanging just at the most suspenseful moment, then cut to a knock on the door of some sleeper. By now I’ve come to brace myself for Harte’s endings, unsure if they’ll be saccharine or traumatic. The author somewhat acknowledges this and offers instead a more mundane conclusion.
____
“The Poet of Sierra Flat.” (1871) This was funny but I’m confused. He was a woman?
____
“Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff.” (1901) Great.
Bewitching young woman sues a deacon for breach of promise, hiring a silver-tongued, old-fashioned lawyer quick to challenge people to duels and in danger of falling under the girl’s spell himself. Long one, but the trial is hilarious and ends on an unexpectedly heartbreaking note. Harte was now 65.
____
“Wan Lee, the Pagan.” 1874. This is one of those stories that gave Harte’s adopted city a black eye and caused such resentment towards him. A sketch of a small Chinese community and of one little imp in particular, stoned to death in a race riot. Again, probably influenced Kipling.
____
“An Ingenue of the Sierras.” A “coach” (a stagecoach—I always have difficulty knowing if I’m reading about a train or carriage) awaits a robbery which mysteriously doesn’t occur, but the passengers learn they carry aboard an accomplice, who’d signaled from the darkened vehicle with a white handkerchief or veil. So, good suspense and paranoia off the bat, with a gruff, sharp hero named Yuba Bill. This is such a good old-fashioned tale, full of turns that keep getting turned on their head. The final twist is another surprise, and another Hollywood trope: the innocent-seeming female character who outwits all the scheming men in the end.
___________________
Marginalia:
*An example of why you don’t want to get on Twain’s bad side: ““Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward. He is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth…as if he considered it a disgrace…. To send this nasty creature to puke upon the American name in a foreign land is too much.”
Considering Harte’s sudden boom and bust in popularity, I wonder if Twain, who helped make him, had a hand in unmaking him. But I’m not sure the date of their falling-out lines up.
*Harte’s father was a merchant and one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. This was not some son of the backwoods writing these tales.
*Apparently Kipling was a fan of “How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar” too, and not a fan of the San Francisco accent. On his visit there: “Now that I have heard their voices, all the beauty of Bret Harte is being ruined for me, because I find myself catching through the roll of his rhythmical prose the cadence of his peculiar fatherland. Get an American lady to read to you ‘How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar,’ and see how much is, under her tongue, left of the beauty of the original.”
Kipling went on: “But I am sorry for Bret Harte. It happened this way. A reporter asked me what I thought of the city, and I made answer suavely that it was hallowed ground to me, because of Bret Harte. That was true. ‘Well, ‘ said the reporter, ‘Bret Harte claims California, but California don’t claim Bret Harte. He’s been so long in England that he’s quite English. Have you seen our cracker factories or the new offices of the ‘Examiner?’ He could not understand that to the outside world the city was worth a great deal less than the man.”
January 30, 2024
These short stories are not very interesting. Each one has some sort of a twist, but not a very good one. My edition is an undated copy of The Riverside Library, published by Houghton Mifflin.
January 19, 2023
The "Introduction" explains how Bret Harte submitted this first group of short stories to his California publisher, who was appalled and begged the author to reconsider publishing them. Countless erudite people were asked to read them and give honest opinions. The California consensus was there was no consensus; different folks had differing views on the value of the stories. Finally, Bret Harte told his publisher to publish, or he would go elsewhere. The publisher reluctantly agreed and waited for the backlash from the Eastern press. It never came.
Harte was hired to write more stories -- directly by Eastern publishers. Harte rode the wave of nostalgia taking hold of the country. The West was disappearing, and Easterners wanted to savor what made the West distinctive -- hard-working cowboys, brutal criminals, and harder lawmen. Dime Novels were (the common name for inexpensive novels with Western themes) and colorists (authors like Bret Harte, who wrote regional realism) captured people's imaginations.** These books flew off the store shelves and were read by dozens of readers before the booklets fell apart from heavy use. Reading a dime novel was a guilty pleasure.
What was regional realism? The easiest way to explain this is to give a synopsis of the first story of THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP. Roaring Camp has been besieged with bad luck for years. Suddenly, things change with the birth of Cherokee Sal's son. She dies in childbirth; the camp names the boy Thomas Luck. After the camp members name Tommy, they raise the boy themselves because they see Tommy as their good luck charm. Before long, the miners decide that fighting and gambling will badly influence the child, and they change their ways. The miners start taking care of their shacks while their language and appearances improve.
The goal of regional realism was to tell the story of plain folks, the difficulties they faced, and how they rose above them. Bret Harte showcased gamblers, miners, cowboys, and other romantic characters. He specialized in the California Gold Rush. Harte was multitalented; he wrote book reviews, editorials, lectures, magazine articles, plays, and poetry. However, Harte concentrated on short stories. He became so popular that he was an international celebrity. However, Harte came to prominence through hard work. Hart's father died when Bret was young, and the widowed Mrs. Harte took the family to California. By age 11, Bret had published some poetry. He worked many jobs to help with the household income by being a miner, a school teacher (like his father), an express messenger, a printer, and finally, a journalist.
Each short story in this slender volume is a vignette of life in California miners' camps. To today's readers, these stories may seem idealized and romanticized. However, Harte wrote for his audience.
** Almost a century before, in Great Britain, publishers created "Penny Dreadfuls," which were cheap, serialized stories for the masses. SWEENEY TODD and FRANKENSTEIN were early examples of British weekly fiction booklets. In their heyday, they sold one million copies each week. Later, they emerged as dime novels in America.
Harte was hired to write more stories -- directly by Eastern publishers. Harte rode the wave of nostalgia taking hold of the country. The West was disappearing, and Easterners wanted to savor what made the West distinctive -- hard-working cowboys, brutal criminals, and harder lawmen. Dime Novels were (the common name for inexpensive novels with Western themes) and colorists (authors like Bret Harte, who wrote regional realism) captured people's imaginations.** These books flew off the store shelves and were read by dozens of readers before the booklets fell apart from heavy use. Reading a dime novel was a guilty pleasure.
What was regional realism? The easiest way to explain this is to give a synopsis of the first story of THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP. Roaring Camp has been besieged with bad luck for years. Suddenly, things change with the birth of Cherokee Sal's son. She dies in childbirth; the camp names the boy Thomas Luck. After the camp members name Tommy, they raise the boy themselves because they see Tommy as their good luck charm. Before long, the miners decide that fighting and gambling will badly influence the child, and they change their ways. The miners start taking care of their shacks while their language and appearances improve.
The goal of regional realism was to tell the story of plain folks, the difficulties they faced, and how they rose above them. Bret Harte showcased gamblers, miners, cowboys, and other romantic characters. He specialized in the California Gold Rush. Harte was multitalented; he wrote book reviews, editorials, lectures, magazine articles, plays, and poetry. However, Harte concentrated on short stories. He became so popular that he was an international celebrity. However, Harte came to prominence through hard work. Hart's father died when Bret was young, and the widowed Mrs. Harte took the family to California. By age 11, Bret had published some poetry. He worked many jobs to help with the household income by being a miner, a school teacher (like his father), an express messenger, a printer, and finally, a journalist.
Each short story in this slender volume is a vignette of life in California miners' camps. To today's readers, these stories may seem idealized and romanticized. However, Harte wrote for his audience.
** Almost a century before, in Great Britain, publishers created "Penny Dreadfuls," which were cheap, serialized stories for the masses. SWEENEY TODD and FRANKENSTEIN were early examples of British weekly fiction booklets. In their heyday, they sold one million copies each week. Later, they emerged as dime novels in America.
October 26, 2020
This is actually hard to rate.
There is some positive in the book. *Some* of the short stories are good.... Just not many of them.
There is a significant amount of vocabulary to learn in the book. I'm very glad for the kindle word definition highlight. Harte used many words that I *thought* I knew but his usage seemed strange ... except that it was correct. His particular usage meant that I couldn't gloss over words I only knew vaguely (or only thought I knew)
There are three problems with his short stories:
They end abruptly, frequently with a twist... but a twist that isn't satisfying. He is no O'Henry (For one his short stories are longer).
His characters are cardboard cutouts. They are interesting and complicated, but they aren't real human beings one can relate to.
But the *biggest* problem is that most of the short stories are very unpolished. Not in the sense that the grammar and spelling are bad, but in the sense that there isn't a flowing story. I didn't *care* what happened. They needed an editor. From a few paragraphs from ... I think the author? I got the impression that he didn't really write the stories for other people, but himself.
I did read the whole thing. The first few stories were good. After that only about 10% of them were worth it.
There is some positive in the book. *Some* of the short stories are good.... Just not many of them.
There is a significant amount of vocabulary to learn in the book. I'm very glad for the kindle word definition highlight. Harte used many words that I *thought* I knew but his usage seemed strange ... except that it was correct. His particular usage meant that I couldn't gloss over words I only knew vaguely (or only thought I knew)
There are three problems with his short stories:
They end abruptly, frequently with a twist... but a twist that isn't satisfying. He is no O'Henry (For one his short stories are longer).
His characters are cardboard cutouts. They are interesting and complicated, but they aren't real human beings one can relate to.
But the *biggest* problem is that most of the short stories are very unpolished. Not in the sense that the grammar and spelling are bad, but in the sense that there isn't a flowing story. I didn't *care* what happened. They needed an editor. From a few paragraphs from ... I think the author? I got the impression that he didn't really write the stories for other people, but himself.
I did read the whole thing. The first few stories were good. After that only about 10% of them were worth it.
March 26, 2019
A collection of short stories. Easy reads and very entertaining.
July 24, 2019
Classic 19th Century American fiction. Always worthy of a re-read. Harte captures the attitudes and values of his audience along with a whiplash ending.
October 20, 2021
Hart, like Mark Twain, wrote about life in 19th century California when Nature was a major difficulty to overcome.
Read
April 19, 2016A collection of stories which appeals to a wide audience, many I found interesting, a few I found boring, some had weird endings but on the whole, many had me wanting to read more. Some of the stories are recognisable so may well be extracts from draft versions of the actual book. I would recommend you read the book.
January 27, 2015
Difficult to read
Because of the nineteenth century language and style this is another on that is difficult to read and sometimes impossible to understand. Some of the stories are fun, some are sad and some just silly.
Because of the nineteenth century language and style this is another on that is difficult to read and sometimes impossible to understand. Some of the stories are fun, some are sad and some just silly.
March 29, 2017
Some very good short stories of gold miners in California. A good read.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews