Western Fictioneers: Bret Harte

I’ve been an avid reader of western fiction for most of my life. My shelves sag with books by the usual suspect authors. (You know the names so I won’t bother listing them.) I would become enamored of one author’s prosey style, dripping with adjectives, for a while. Then I’d fall in love with another’s stark, restrained realism. I’m a sucker for a stylist and still appreciate any style that’s well-executed.

When I decided to write westerns rather than just read them, I approached it a little more scientifically. Just how did this genre evolve? Who spun the first yarns that led to a literary world of laconic cowboys, stage coach heists and arrows of flame raining down on covered wagons?

Of course, the experts disagree. The first dime western was supposedly Charles Frey’s MALAESKA, THE INDIAN WIFE OF THE WHITE HUNTER, published in 1860. Oh, but James Fennimore Cooper wrote his LEATHERSTOCKING TALES featuring protagonist Natty Bumppo beginning in the 1820’s. You know, back when the Appalachians constituted the Frontier. Throughout the latter 1800’s, there were stories of fictional adventures based on living “celebrities” like Buffalo Bill Cody, the James Brothers, Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp. Later came Wister, then Grey, eventually L’Amour. Then we lost count.

If I’d read and dissected every one of these, I would never have gotten around to writing anything of my own. I took the hummingbird approach, sampling a little of all.

One of the first accounts of the Old West that I decided to study was Bret Harte’s THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP, the story of a baby boy who is born to a mining camp’s resident prostitute, Cherokee Sal. Harte’s characters are so comically portrayed that it’s easy to overlook the grimness of the plot twists (a couple of the principals are killed off).

I also had fun reading Mark Twain’s ROUGHING IT, a travelogue – greatly embellished, no doubt – of his first trip to the West. The Twain humor is there, albeit less polished than in his later writings.

I discovered quite by accident that Bret Harte and Mark Twain were actually good friends in San Francisco. Harte was editor of the Overland Monthly and the freshly-pseudonymed Twain hit town in 1864 and found work as a freelance journalist. Ironically, Bret Harte became Twain’s mentor, guiding him through the writing of the INNOCENTS ABROAD manuscript.

In a letter to the editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Twain wrote: “Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.”

The admiration was mutual. Harte wrote of Twain: “I think I recognize a new star rising in this western horizon.”

They remained friends for several years but, alas, the bromance was not to last. As the two became more widely known, a rivalry developed, possibly because they had similar writing styles and audiences at the time. Twain became increasingly cranky in his discussions of Harte. They wrote a play together which was ultimately a commercial failure. Years later, Twain suggested that Harte owed him money.

By 1878, Mark Twain’s admiration for the man who was once his mentor had crossed into total disdain. He wrote to their mutual friend, William Dean Howells: “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth as if he considered it a disgrace.”

In my opinion, it would have been almost worth ticking off Twain just for the splendid insult that followed!

Mark Twain & Bret Harte at work on a play
at Hartford House, Connecticut

It’s hard to say why their great friendship fell apart. Maybe the things they held in common dwindled over time. Certainly when Bret Harte and Mark Twain met in the rowdy town of San Francisco, they were kindred souls. They were a couple of intellectual young satirists who lived in a remarkable time and world. Nothing escaped the stab of their sharp pens. They wrote of frogs and slaves and kings and cowboys, usually with some seed of political opinion buried within.

Wives and children, cross-country moves, career successes and flops – all may have contributed to their parting of ways. Maybe they were too much alike and could never have existed in the same spheres for long. That’s often true of highly creative types. Both might be amused – or not – if they knew there is a California town named for them (TwainHarte) located near where each of them lived.

So, an interesting thing happened on the way to my western writing career. I discovered that the talent pool is very old and VERY deep. I will never again stay up half the night talking with my rowdy friends at a writing conference without remembering guys like Bret Harte and Mark Twain. Oh, to stay young and full of fire. Oh, to have fine companions with the same flame in their souls.

I guess that’s what we’re doing here. Right, friends?

(That said, make plans to attend the first ever WESTERN FICTIONEERS CONVENTION in 2015! Details coming soon!)