It makes some sense that Bret Harte’s “The Luck of the Roaring Camp” is the sixth story in this collection. Published in 1868 this is the oldest story included so far, though Harte’s tale of “the West” takes the ideals embedded in stories like “The Two-Gun Man” and cuts through them with more than a bit of irony. “Luck” is perhaps the most passionate but least sentimental story so far. Couple quick contextualizing remarks: The story was first published in Overland, a journal co-founded by Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard and Ina Coolbrith. Based in California, Overland had the gracious support of that American bard on the east coast, Mark Twain. The journal was a labor of love for Harte.
The publication of Harte’s story in an early issue of Overland, brought with it by controversy due to subject matter and its rather bleak vision of the gold rush. In his book The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature Ben Tarnoff suggests that it was not until critics on the east coast praised the story that Harte was lauded as one of the country’s most important voices.1 Praise from the outside fed love from neighbors, a painful truth that seems in line with Harte’s own vision of community in America, at least as articulated in this tale.
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| The front page for the 2nd issue of Overland Monthly (August 1868) |
“The Luck of the Roaring Camp” with its punning and acerbic title (more on this later) establishes a peculiar tone, one which is both empathetic and lambastic. Set in 1850 on the gold-marked land of the west coast, Harte probes the violence and viciousness of the supposedly masculine figure of the frontiersman. His tale is filled with men that are missing limbs; they have cracked jaws, severed fingers and mangled lives. Whatever work they do, their bodies remain deteriorating.
Rather than heroize these archetypal figure of American expansionism, Harte situates them and keeps some distance. In “The Luck of the Roaring Camp” the narrator regards the action, inflecting it with wry asides.
But this is the first volume of Overton’s collection. Action is important and adventure is the name of the game. This story opens with a version of adventure: “There was a commotion in Roaring Camp,” Harte writes. The opening disturbance is not a brawl, as the narrator explains, fights are common. Instead the commotion surrounds “Cherokee Sal,” a native woman (and the only woman in the camp), giving birth.
In all of its titular ferocity, Roaring Camp is described as a place of refuge for men on the run. With the birth of this new child the camp folk grow excited and worried. When the mother dies the men, including the aptly named Kentuck and Stumpy, find themselves confounded and unequipped to raise the child. As Harte writes: “There was some conjecture as to fitness, but the experiment was tried. It was less problematical, than the ancient treatment of Romulus and Remus, and apparently as successful.”
From the aligning of birth with an experiment to the twisting conclusion of the sentence around the word “apparently,” Harte offers a bleak view. This is a world of violence and misogyny. It is a world of colonial violence and imperialist subjection. It is hard not to read this and think about the use of Native women and black women as economic breeders, stripped of rights. “Cherokee Sal” is figured as a “prostitute,” by the camp folk. This is signaled through her supposedly “sinful” condition. In Roaring Camp to not be a white man is to be a vessel for capital.
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| Bret Harte with leg bent in a way that mirrors how his sentences turn |
What separates Harte from other writers in the collection is the counter-pose that he uses to open the narrative up. The world he linguistically beckons is one where the very foundations of the camp’s culture dictate a gross wielding of power that would do nothing but condemn an indigenous woman as “sinful.” And Harte slides in, out, and through that world.
In other words, the narrator is not interested in the propagation of such views. Rather, Harte critiques the ideology predicated on such views. His narrator does not provide cool distance that works with a winking-eye and a silent proclamation of irony. Harte seems, at least in this story, to be cutting into the general functioning of a certain form of American expansionism driven by a gold stained avarice.
When the child is born he is named “Luck” (with the name “Tommy” appendaged as a prefix), since the camp believes that he will bring some. The title of the tale becomes clearer now. The camp folk bring this new child gifts that are entirely inappropriate. Luck is given, among other things, “a diamond breastpin,” “a navy revolver,” and “a silver tobacco box.”
The narrator is befuddled. In a litany of absurd items, Harte writes that one gift was “a silver spoon (the initials, I regret to say, were not the giver’s).” This parenthetical reveals the distance Harte takes, leaving me to ask: who is giving us his account? The relationship between Harte, the narrator, the world of Roaring Camp, and the reader is slippery. The author/narrator’s presence and voice is felt. He makes judgements on the gifts provided. Yet, he doesn’t appear to be in the story; he isn’t actually there. Or is he?
I’ve spent too long on trying to set the story up but it is precisely the off-kilter tone Harte establishes that entangled me. Characters have specific tics and unique identifying marks and yet many of the figures found in the Roaring Camp are stand-ins for the banal, broken and living folks that Harte knew as a miner-teacher-journalist in California.
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| Yet another story adapted! Here is a lobby card for the 1937 version of Harte's tale |
Whatever Harte’s experience was the rest of the story tracks how those in the Roaring Camp adjust to Luck’s presence. As in so many stories, films, and novels a new child suggests a new world. And Luck’s birth changes the sensibility of the camp. The callous and boisterous shouting matches and the routine fights which once defined the culture being to dissolve. Nobody wants to disturb the little child that might bring good fortune.
Working together the men raise Luck. The bro-like communal parenting is couched in the language of heroism and challenge: “There was something original, independent, and heroic about the plan that pleased the camp.” Luck grows and his growth mirrors the development of the people. “And so the work of regeneration began,” Harte notes. But the regeneration is short lived.
Life here is tentative. Though some version of love seems thread its way across the inhabitants of the Roaring Camp the narrator is never so sure. This is clear in a sentence that describes the world around the young infant: “Surrounded by playthings such as never [a] child out of fairyland had before, it is to be hoped that Tommy was content.” Again, the concluding phrase bends the possibilities of uncertainty. One can only hope. Affection and individual attachment is never guaranteed. You can’t tell someone how to feel.
The bravado of previous stories, whether in Stewart Edward White’s writing or the effusive confidence evident in Richard Connell or Robert Louis Stevenson’s story is purposefully denied. Harte dashes left as those authors move right. Of course, there needs to be a twist and Harte’s final move is one which rejects a desire for the camp to grow, learn, and explore their string-cheese layers of sensitivity. As the winter of 1851 arrives, life comes and life goes. Just as water has brought the financial security of gold, water storms through, smashing the camp. Luck, it appears, will die.
Where does that leave us? This is not quite the O. Henry Twist discussed before. This is not a simple twist of fate. Nature appears to respond to the disheveled men of Harte’s west.. “The Luck of the Roaring Camp” may be the most insightful and incisive story read so far. In less than fifteen pages Harte provides a striated world that reads as both realistic and imaginary. While some authors offer us a new future through imaginary visions that reconfigure the world in its unfolding, Harte provides a sharp look at the fundamental failures of contemporaneous society. Of course, much of what he castigates is still at play; it does not take much to connect many in political office to those in Harte’s story. (Though I doubt any politician has such an on-the-nose-name as “Stumpy”)
Still, through peculiar details Harte refracts the frontier narrative through a critical lens. In this sculpted world there is no place for the hero’s quest of saving “the West.” And maybe this is where there is some optimism. For those that participate in such a project, for those that argue for Manifest Destiny or the right of America’s exceptional power to destroy, for those who want to occupy the role of savior, even as they deny such a moniker, Harte suggests time will come. And with it will be water. It may bring gold; but that would mean it would bring death as well.
You can read “The Luck of Roaring Camp” at the Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6373
You can listen to “The Luck of Roaring Camp” included in this collection of stories by Bret Harte at Librivox: https://librivox.org/the-luck-of-roaring-camp-and-other-sketches-by-bret-harte/
1 Ben Tarnoff, The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature (New York: Penguin Books, 2014)
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