232 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900Poker Flat,” are typical, in that they illustrate Harte’s tendency to find innocence
flowering in inhospitable frontier circumstances and miners, gamblers, and whores
revealing they have hearts of gold. Thomas Luck, in “The Luck of Roaring Camp,”
for instance, is an orphan, the son of a prostitute in a California goldmining settle-
ment who dies after giving birth to him. The tough, blaspheming miners of the
settlement, called Roaring Camp, then adopt him; and their spirits are miracu-
lously transformed, as a result, to a touching if awkward sympathy. Next year, when
the river rises, Roaring Camp is submerged and one of the miners is drowned with
“The Luck,” as he is called, in his arms. Like even the best of Harte’s tales, the story
flirts dangerously with sentimentality, but it is saved by the wit of the narration
and the author’s careful attention to detail, the local color and the course texture
of life on the frontier. In the same year as his most famous collection of tales
appeared, Harte also published his most famous poem, “Plain Language from
Truthful James.” Set, like so much of his work, in a western mining camp, it tells the
story of a wily “heathen Chinee,” who claims not to understand a card game then
is revealed as an astute cheat. “For ways that are dark, / And for tricks that are
vain, /” the narrator of the poem, “truthful James” concludes, “The heathen Chinee
is peculiar, – / Which the same I am free to maintain.” Inadvertently, the poem
reveals the racial tensions at work in the supposed freedom of the frontier West
and, in particular, the fear and distrust of Chinese immigrants, which was to lead
not long after to their virtual exclusion.
“Plain Language from Truthful James” is also a mix of the vernacular and the
more formal and rhetorical. What the narrator calls his “plain” language is not
always that; and it is, in any event, set, frozen almost in an elaborate stanzaic pattern,
with regular rhymes and repetitive rhythms. In this, it was not untypical of poems
of the time about the West. Bayard Taylor (1825–1878), for example, wrote poems
like “The Bison Track” (1875) and “On Leaving California” (1875) that show a simi-
lar obedience to poetic traditions, and an equally close observation of the rhetorical
roles, while celebrating frontier freedom. And Taylor’s poems, in turn, are typical to
the extent that they endorse the contemporary belief in Manifest Destiny – the
divinely ordained, historically necessary mission of white Americans to settle and
civilize the West. “Thy human children shall restore the grace / Gone with thy fallen
pines,” the poet declares in “On Leaving California,” addressing the “fair young land”
of the frontier directly; “The wild, barbaric beauty of thy face / Shall round to classic
lines.” “Hesper, as he trims his silver beam, /” he concludes, “No happier land shall
see, / And Earth shall find her old Arcadian dream / Restored again in thee!” A similar
triumphalism, couched in formal rhetoric and carefully molded verse, is to be found
in the work of Joaquin Miller (1841?–1913), who became known during his lifetime
as the Byron of Oregon. “What strength! what strife! what rude unrest! / What
shocks! what half-shaped armies met!” Miller announces in Westward Ho! (1897), a
poem that shouts aloud its allegiance to the westward movement in its title as well as
every one of its lines; “A mighty nation moving west, / With all its steely sinews set /
Against the living forests.” For Miller, as for Harte and Taylor, there could be no
doubts as to the justice as well as the necessity of white settlement. The movementGGray_c03.indd 232ray_c 03 .indd 232 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM