Harte moved to California in 1853, later working there in a number of capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist; he was also secretary of the
San Francisco Mint. He spent part of his life in the northern California coastal town of Union (now
Arcata), a settlement on
Humboldt Bay, as a tutor and school teacher, then a
printer's devil on
The Northern Californian, and went on to reporting news, writing poems, and occasionally, acting editor. He left after three years, due to receiving lynching threats for writing an editorial about the
26 February 1860 Wiyot massacre. Union was established as a provisioning center for mining camps in the interior. The
Wells Fargo Messenger of July 1916 relates that after an unsuccessful attempt to make a living in the gold camps, Harte signed on as a messenger with
Wells Fargo & Co. Express. He guarded treasure boxes on
stagecoaches for a few months, then gave it up to become the
schoolmaster at a school near the town of
Sonora, in the
Sierra foothills. He created his character Yuba Bill from his memory of an old stagecoach driver. The
1860 massacre by white settlers of between 80 and 200
Wiyot Indians at the village of Tuluwat (near
Eureka in
Humboldt County, California) was reported by Harte in San Francisco and New York. While serving as assistant editor of the
Northern Californian, Harte was left in charge of the paper during the temporary absence of his boss,
Stephen G. Whipple. Harte published a detailed account condemning the slayings, writing: [A] more shocking and revolting spectacle was never exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people. Old women, wrinkled and decrepit, lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long gray hair. Infants scarce a span long, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds. Among Harte's first literary efforts was a poem published in
The Golden Era in 1857 and, in October of that same year, his first prose piece on "A Trip Up the Coast". When he escaped to San Francisco in the spring of 1860, he was hired as editor of
The Golden Era, which he attempted to make into a more literary publication. California journalist Bret Harte first wrote as "The Bohemian" in The Golden Era in 1861, with this persona taking part in many satirical doings. Harte described San Francisco as a sort of Bohemia of the West.
Mark Twain later recalled that, as an editor, Harte struck "a new and fresh and spirited note" which "rose above that orchestra's mumbling confusion and was recognizable as music". (1884) Harte married Anna Griswold on August 11, 1862, in
San Rafael, California. From the start, the marriage was rocky. Some suggested that she was consumed by extreme jealousy, while early Harte biographer Henry C. Merwin privately concluded that she was "almost impossible to live with". In 1864, Harte joined with
Charles Henry Webb in starting a new
literary journal called
The Californian. He became friends with and mentored poet
Ina Coolbrith. The
Overland Monthly was more in tune with the pioneering spirit of excitement in California. Harte's short story "
The Luck of Roaring Camp" appeared in the magazine's second issue, propelling him to fame nationwide and in Europe. The poem became better known by its alternate title "
The Heathen Chinee" after being republished in a Boston newspaper in 1871. It was also quickly republished in a number of other newspapers and journals, including the
New York Evening Post, the
New York Tribune, the
Boston Evening Transcript, the
Providence Journal, the
Hartford Courant,
Prairie Farmer, and
The Saturday Evening Post. The poem was a fictional representation of
attacks on Chinese immigrants and Harte intended to the reader to sympathize with the victim, the character Ah Sin. Instead, readers identified with the attacker, the character William Nye. Harte later referred to the piece as "the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote." Like "Plain Language from Truthful James", Harte's 1874 short story "Wan Lee, the Pagan" also sought to undermine stereotypes about Chinese immigrants and to portray white Americans as the true savages. (c. 1870). Housed at the
National Portrait Gallery (United States) ==Move east==