Bret Harte
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The cautious reader will detect a lack of authenticity in the following pages. I am not a cautious reader myself, yet I confess with some concern to the absence of much documentary evidence in support of the singular incident I am about to relate. Disjointed memoranda, the proceedings of ayuntamientos and early departmental juntas, with other records of a primitive and superstitious people, have been my inadequate authorities. It is but just to state,...
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The Argonauts are the gold seekers of 1849 and the years immediately following. These adventurers came from all quarters of the globe and all ranks of society, and they had in common only the possession of the strength and determination necessary to reach the new Colchis. Here they lived, at first, wholly free from the conventional restraints imposed by an organized society, and each man showed himself for what he was. Many of these primitive social...
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If you can't get enough of action-adventure stories of pioneer life in the American West, dive into this tale from Bret Harte, one of the most renowned documenters of the era. In A Waif of the Plains, Harte recounts the story of an orphan traveling the Oregon Trail in the 1850s. As part of our mission to publish great works of literary fiction and nonfiction, Sheba Blake Publishing Corp. is extremely dedicated to bringing to the forefront the amazing...
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In San Francisco the rainy season had been making itself a reality to the wondering Eastern immigrant. There were short days of drifting clouds and flying sunshine, and long succeeding nights of incessant downpour, when the rain rattled on the thin shingles or drummed on the resounding zinc of pioneer roofs. The shifting sand-dunes on the outskirts were beaten motionless and sodden by the onslaught of consecutive storms; the southeast trades brought...
5) Clarence
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As Clarence Brant, President of the Robles Land Company, and husband of the rich widow of John Peyton, of the Robles Ranche, mingled with the outgoing audience of the Cosmopolitan Theatre, at San Francisco, he elicited the usual smiling nods and recognition due to his good looks and good fortune. But as he hurriedly slipped through the still lingering winter's rain into the smart coupe that was awaiting him, and gave the order Home, the word struck...
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There was no mistake this time: he had struck gold at last! It had lain there before him a moment ago-a misshapen piece of brown-stained quartz, interspersed with dull yellow metal; yielding enough to have allowed the points of his pick to penetrate its honeycombed recesses, yet heavy enough to drop from the point of his pick as he endeavored to lift it from the red earth.
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Originally published in Harte's 1875 short-story collection The Tales of the Argonauts, How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar is set in California in the early 1860s and, like the rest of the tales in that collection, features the gold-seeking Argonauts. In this tale, like many of Harte's others, the folly and grit of human existence balance any good intentions, good cheer, or hope, resulting in a more complicated and somewhat bleak ending than is...
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In 1870, the young San Francisco–based writer and editor Bret Harte (1836–1902) first compiled a single-volume edition of his rousing stories of life in the Wild West. Entitled The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches, the book propelled him almost overnight from local celebrity to American literary lion. Four of the most famous of those tales are included in this collection: the title story, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," "Tennessee's Partner,"...
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It was high hot noon on the Casket Ridge. Its very scant shade was restricted to a few dwarf Scotch firs, and was so perpendicularly cast that Leonidas Boone, seeking shelter from the heat, was obliged to draw himself up under one of them, as if it were an umbrella. Occasionally, with a boy's perversity, he permitted one bared foot to protrude beyond the sharply marked shadow until the burning sun forced him to draw it in again with a thrill of satisfaction....
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The story takes place in a small struggling mining town located in the foothills of the California mountains at the time of the gold rush. The camp is suffering from a long string of bad luck. With only one woman in their midst, it seems as though the miners have no future. However, the tide turns when a small boy is born. Thomas Luck is the first newborn the camp has seen in ages; things are looking up. The miners become cheerful, foliage begins...
11) Devil's Ford
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Two young women, the daughters of an engineer who has secretly squandered the family finances in ill-advised mining schemes in Devil's Ford, find themselves romanced by two stockholders, who seek to keep the women ignorant of their father's failure...and end up nearly destroying themselves in the process.
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This collection contains the most popular stories of Bret Harte, such as "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," "M'liss," and "An Ingénue of the Sierras." The title story of this book was almost not published because it contained a prostitute character and some profanity, however Harte was adamant in its publication, and as a result, he played a significant part in further realism in American literature.
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The sun was going down on the Black Spur Range. The red light it had kindled there was still eating its way along the serried crest, showing through gaps in the ranks of pines, etching out the interstices of broken boughs, fading away and then flashing suddenly out again like sparks in burnt-up paper. Then the night wind swept down the whole mountain side, and began its usual struggle with the shadows upclimbing from the valley, only to lose itself...
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This classic western novel begins on a dark night in the west. Three pioneers on horseback are on the trail to riches-the rush for gold and silver in the California mountains. Brett Harte's cowboy prose relates the story of this group of rough silver-seekers as they try to find the legendary treasure.
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As night crept up from the valley that stormy afternoon, Sawyer's Ledge was at first quite blotted out by wind and rain, but presently reappeared in little nebulous star-like points along the mountain side, as the straggling cabins of the settlement were one by one lit up by the miners returning from tunnel and claim.
17) Sally Dows
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"Sally Dows," a novella set in Georgia during the Reconstruction, was compared to "Mr. Henry James's analytical studies of conduct" in a contemporary review in the New York Times. In addition to the title work, this 1893 collection includes "The Conspiracy of Mrs. Bunker," "The Transformation of Buckeye Camp," and "Their Uncle from California."
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The story takes place in a Californian community known as Poker Flat, near the town of La Porte. Poker Flat is, in the opinions of many, on a downward slope. The town has lost thousands of dollars, and has experienced a moral decline. In an effort to save what is left of the town and reestablish it as a "virtuous" place, a secret society is created to decide whom to exile and whom to kill.