The early career of Bret Harte points to a popular, humorous, often outrageous way of packaging and presenting region, a style which contrasted in many ways with that of more genteel, retiring public figures such as Sarah Orne Jewett, who is better known today. Harte's experiences underscore the important role that regional markets often played in the growth and circulation of local color. Furthermore, his road to success illustrates the crucial function that non-literary vehicles like newspapers played in the creation of celebrities who often found the pages of the genteel national monthlies open to them after they had become a sought-after public commodity. In addition to soliciting essays and eventually reprinting his short stories, the dailies were responsible for disseminating his wildly popular dialect verses and effectively making him a household name. Bret Harte, like James Whitcomb Riley twenty years later, used a regional market and ubiquitous newspapers to break into a high-brow market, negotiating the intricacies of what might pass as "authentic" and thus generate interest and value at each site.

   Latent expectations about Bret Harte--as an exotic frontier figure (boots, spurs, and generally rude, unkempt air)--point toward the desire of the reading public to see in local color a kind of spontaneous, organic outpouring of America's diverse regional types. After all, as William Dean Howells remarked in 1872, "Gradually, but pretty surely, the whole varied field of American life is coming into view in American fiction." 1 Significantly, when Bret Harte traveled the eastern lecture circuit in the early 1870s, he discovered that "his lecture audiences were hostile to him because he looked like a gentleman and not like their idea of a miner. . . ." 2 These kinds of public expectations were doubtless exacerbated by Joaquin Miller's antics in Britain; Miller was putting on a one-man Wild West Show for London's literary and social elite during the same period. 3 Meanwhile, Edward Eggleston, like Harte, was frustrated by the reading public's expectation that The Hoosier Schoolmaster was largely autobiographical, the writer being cast in the part of one of the poor, ragged provincial students.

   By the end of the century, Owen Wister, encouraged by the cult of the strenuous life, actually cultivated an image as a cowboy despite the fact that he was a Harvard man from an elite Philadelphia family, and had even studied classical piano with Listz. Wister thoroughly enjoyed wearing the western costume, clomping into the luxury hotel at Yellowstone in spurs and all, savoring the fact that the Eastern tourists wanted to take his picture as a souvenir of the Wild West. 4 Ultimately, the trick in Wister's case was his unchallenged ability to resume the garb of cosmopolitan civility at will--as he did with great pleasure in front of a group of astounded railroad workers in the mid-90s. An even more dramatic case was that of Mary Noailles Murfree, whose pen name, Charles Egbert Craddock, had conjured up for the Atlantic Monthly staff images of a "strapping six-foot [snuff-dipping] Tennessean." 5 As I argue elsewhere in this site, Murfree's career brought the gendering of regions and regional writing into the public spotlight in a sensational and destabilizing fashion. She, in effect, fashioned her strategic brand of inauthenticity into a highly marketable commodity.

   The representative qualities attributed local color texts and embodied in their authors, have seemed to persist despite all evidence to the contrary. Harte, like Wister and Murfree, was successful, in part because readers around the country wanted to believe that they were hearing the voice of the genuine article. For example, one of the first things Wallace Stegner had to do in his biography of Bret Harte, more than fifty years after the fact, is debunk the mythic western aura which still surrounds him: "Bret Harte was no Argonaut. He came to California from Albany, NY, in 1854 to join his mother, not to seek gold." 6 This serves as an important reminder that the dynamics of regional identification and culture-building on the frontier ("frontier" of course, representing an ever-shifting region) are complicated by extremely high mobility. The question of who qualifies as an "authentic" western writer is confounded by demographics, for in San Francisco from 1850-70, a large percentage of the population was more or less recently from somewhere else. 7 And while the subject of who might be considered an insider/expert (and conversely, who should be labeled as an outsider) was especially evident in new growth areas like the Gold Coast, it was invariably a subject of contention in battles over who could be regarded as an authentic representative of the South or the Midwest, or even New England.

   The question of who might constitute an entertaining but believable regional spokesperson was inextricably bound up with the question of what visions constituted entertaining but "authentic" images of a given region. If Bret Harte was not an unkempt, sharp-shooting gambler, the San Francisco he discovered in 1860 was not a crude, raw frontier shanty-town. The Bay Area had already become a strong regional market for all kinds of cultural commodities. According to western literary historian Franklin Walker, during the period of Harte's residence "wages were higher than in any other spot in America, interest rates were good, money flowed freely, and the wealth per capita was the highest in the nation." Though the city had its share of poverty, everywhere one could see imported luxury items: fancy Parisian gowns, expensive coaches, and European crystal chandeliers. Proud of their achievements, supporters of the city more or less accurately "boasted that in the mid-fifties it published more newspapers than London, that in its first decade it published more books than did all the rest of the United States west of the Mississippi." The sophisticated environment in and around San Francisco during the years 1850-1870 supported half a dozen different literary journals which "could compare with the best Eastern journals," and Harte either edited or published in all of them. 8

   Harte's career benefited directly from the newly transplanted and thus hybridized nature of San Francisco culture, for his Golden Era writings brought him the patronage of Jessie Frémont, one of the city's cultural elite. 9 Fr*mont, like Thomas Starr King, were among the growing cadre of newly-arrived New Englanders who had come to identify first and foremost with their new California home. These Bay Area residents generated a healthy dose of civic boosterism which in turn directly benefited local writers like Harte. Mrs. Frémont supported Harte's application for various civil service appointments--jobs with a regular paycheck and few duties, giving him a hefty salary and plenty of time to devote to his writing. She also introduced him to San Francisco's recently-arrived Unitarian minister, Thomas Starr King, an extremely influential figure with extensive ties in the east. 10 During 1862-63, Frémont and King inundated James T. Fields (a personal friend of King's, editor of the Atlantic, and partner in the prestigious publishing firm Fields, Osgood and Company in Boston) with Harte's work. Sending Fields a manuscript of the Irvingesque "Legend of Monte del Diablo," King urged its publication at least in part because he felt that national exposure would encourage and stimulate the further development of local culture: "'I hope the editors will accept it if it is worthy,'" he wrote in his letter to Fields, "'for I am sure there is a great deal in Harte, & an acceptance of his piece would inspire him, & help literature on this coast where we raise bigger trees & squashes than literati and brains" 11 (31 Jan 1862).

   Ultimately, his words were prophetic, for national exposure did fuel the development of local culture, although the style and content of the requisite materials would prove to be less high-brow than he apparently had in mind. While Fields did publish "Legend," in 1863 Fields mailed back all Harte's remaining manuscripts with a curt note which said that his work "'fails to interest. He is not piquant enough for the readers of the Atlantic.'" Fields resolutely refused to accept anything further by Harte until they renewed their dealings under radically different circumstances in 1870, some eight years later, once Harte had proven his sales potential. 12

   In the short run, the popular periodical press and western regional periodicals, rather than the established, high-brow, national magazines, proved to be far more valuable to Harte. After issuing two volumes of poems through Bay Area publishers, Harte was solicited as a correspondent for the Christian Register, a Boston-based Unitarian paper. 13 Then he was recruited by the influential Springfield Republican while Samuel Bowles, its editor, was touring the West in 1865. Harte published 38 essays about California in these two newspapers in less than a year, while Bowles continued to sing his praises, enthusiastically reviewing any new publication. 14 They would soon play an important part in disseminating materials that Harte was about to produce for his west coast audience, and thus contributing to Harte's apparently meteoric explosion onto the national stage. Ultimately, the Overland Monthly , a western-based regional journal, provided the necessary platform for Harte to achieve the kind of notoriety he craved. As an emerging local colorist, Harte found a steady market for writing that highlighted the special, unique qualities of the community and its outlying districts; the genre need not always be produced for distant markets along the eastern seaboard, and thus, need not strictly cater to any given set of stereotypes.

   In 1868, San Francisco bookseller Anton Roman decided to launch a magazine intended to make money (which it did), boost California's national image, and provide the West's answer to the Atlantic Monthly. Hired as the editor of Roman's new Overland Monthly, Harte enthusiastically undertook the project. Writing to a friend in New York that he wished "to build up a taste on the Pacific slope," Harte decided that the periodical needed something distinctively local. 15 To address this need, Harte included in his story, "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (August 1868), the first of a series of tales which would help generate the relationship to the eastern markets he had long been seeking. Locally--at least in and around San Francisco--this scandalous tale received lukewarm notices of commendation when not mildly criticized as corrupting or improper. On the other coast, however, the Springfield Republican reprinted it with high praise. From there it was reprinted liberally in other newspapers, causing quite a stir everywhere it appeared. Before long, Fields would unknowingly reverse his earlier verdict and write to solicit contributions by the anonymous creator of "Luck." Harte was able to follow up this initial success with other similar efforts (four "colorful" California stories in 1869 and three more in 1870).

   While his racy short stories were steadily attracting him readers, Harte's satiric poem, "The Plain Language from Truthful James," (also soon to be commonly known as "The Heathen Chinee") helped establish him as a household name. This bit of verse, along with John Hay's vernacular poems "Little Breeches" and "Jim Bludsoe," together became a fad of national proportions. 15 All three poems were reprinted from one end of the country to the other, issued with illustrations, and put to music: "Heathen Chinee" was quoted in no less than three Horatio Alger novels. 16 An anonymous reviewer for the Galaxy complained that Harte's poem was being "read on benefit nights at the theatres, and recited in good faith at Sunday-school picnics . . . pinned up on the walls of gin-ships, and carried furtively in the portemonnaies of Doctors of Divinity." 17 He adds that "among that large class who take their ideas, and especially their liveliness, ready made from the press, the 'Heathen Chinee' has had no rest for a single hour since it appeared in the pages of the 'Overland Monthly.'" 18

   Mark Twain, at what would be a temporary low in his career, was disgruntled by the success of Harte's poem. In the months following the poem's reception, Twain had received requests from "several publishers" for "a volume of poetry in the style of "The Heathen Chinee"--letters he reportedly burned. Both he and Hay fumed over allegations that they had each imitated his style: Thomas Bailey Aldrich publicly accusation of Twain in the pages of Every Saturday. Twain responded with great heat that he did not write the poem that Aldrich had trashed as "a feeble imitation"; the whole affair generated quite a sensation when Aldrich printed Twain's letter with the headline "Mark Twain Says He Didn't Do It." 19 These "western poems" grumbled a critic in the Galaxy, "have been received as the fresh, original, untutored utterance of a new civilization," which they are not, being instead the "recreations of cultivated men." 20 And worse still, he continues, the success of these poems was encouraging a whole flood of bad "rustic" verse.

   On the basis of the combined momentum created by the poem and the short stories, Bret Harte was suddenly inundated with job offers: Harper Brothers offered him $100-$150 each for any poem he cared to submit; Parke Godwin offered him the editorship of Putnam's; Frank P. Church solicited a series of contributions for the Galaxy; the publishers of Lakeside Magazine in Chicago (the Midwest's answer to the Atlantic Monthly) offered him the editor's chair; the University of California offered him a patronage appointment; and John Carmany, having recently bought The Overland from Roman, promised to raise Harte's salary, give him exclusive control over the contents of the magazine, and provide him with a private office. All these proposals fell by the wayside when Fields, Osgood and Company, after publishing The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories for him in April of 1870, offered Harte $10,000 for the exclusive rights to anything else he might produce over a twelve-month period. One reason that Fields and Osgood were so willing to outbid their competitors for Harte's work was that they had lost as many as 10,000 subscribers over their publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's controversial article defending Lady Byron the previous year; they were sorely in need of a recognizable, popular writer to boost their sales. 21 Even without the offending Stowe article, the Atlantic Monthly was experiencing a gradual decline in its circulation throughout the 1870s as a result of the dramatic increase in competition from new magazines. Their solicitation of Harte is particularly important because critics tend to characterize the Atlantic as a kind of utopic aesthetic and intellectual space, one which struggled valiantly to remain above the marketplace and righteously transcend the vicissitudes of public opinion. James T. Fields, who had been the driving force behind the publishing house for nearly a decade, is frequently characterized as a model of the genteel, paternalistic editor, but he was also a shrewd, energetic pioneer in the area of promotional campaigns for literature. Fields knew exactly what he was buying, for at this juncture in his career Harte represented precisely the kind of drawing card his company was seeking.