A love song is usually a joyous gift for the beloved . . . unless the singer is a bullet.
Taking personification to absurd heights, Bret Harte—one-time editor of the Overland Monthly—once penned what amounted to be a proclamation of love by a deadly projectile.
O joy of creation,
To be!
O rapture, to fly
And be free!
Be the battle lost or won,
Though its smoke shall hide the sun,
I shall find my love—the one
Born for me!
I shall know him where he stands
All alone,
With the power in his hands
Not o'erthrown;
I shall know him by his face,
By his godlike front and grace;
I shall hold him for a space
All my own!
It is he—O my love!
So bold!
It is I—all thy love
Foretold!
It is I—O love, what bliss!
Dost thou answer to my kiss?
O sweetheart! what is this
Lieth there so cold?
Bret Harte was best known for his accounts of pioneer life in California. "What the Bullet Sang" can be found in the "Argonaut Edition" of The Works of Bret Harte, published in 1902.
Bret Harte, engraving by W. J. Linton, 1871. Larger.
It's almost human nature to ignore others' given names and out of affection, playfulness, and occasionally wisdom bestow upon them monikers of a more descriptive stripe.
Writer and editor Francis Bret Harte expounded on this principle in a short story set in California's gold country.
. . . at Sandy Bar in 1854 most men were christened anew.
Sometimes these appellatives were derived from some distinctiveness of dress, as in the case of "Dungaree Jack"; or from some peculiarity of habit, as shown in "Saleratus Bill," so called from an undue proportion of that chemical in his daily bread; or from some unlucky slip, as exhibited in "The Iron Pirate," a mild inoffensive man, who earned that baleful title by his unfortunate mispronunciation of the term "iron pyrites."
Perhaps this may have been the beginning of a rude heraldry; but I am constrained to think that it was because a man's real name in that day rested solely upon his own unsupported statement.
Bret Harte's short story "Tennessee's Partner" appeared in the Overland Monthly in 1869.
Artful sensitivity wasn't always a revered quality in the rough and tumble world of the West, so sometimes poets had to take it upon themselves to project a more "straight without sugar" image.
Bret Harte's comically ironic poem "Cicely" is set at Alkali Station, along the Oregon Trail. There, the narrator composes his own kind of verse for a fellow poet just passing through.
Cicely says you're a poet; maybe,—I ain't much on rhyme:
I reckon you'd give me a hundred, and beat me every time.
Poetry!—that's the way some chaps puts up an idee,
But I takes mine "straight without sugar," and that's what's the matter with me.
Poetry!—just look round you,—alkali, rock, and sage;
Sage-brush, rock, and alkali; ain't it a pretty page!
Sun in the east at mornin', sun in the west at night,
And the shadow of this 'yer station the on'y thing moves in sight.
"Mission at San Luis Rey," photograph by William Henry Jackson, c.1888. Larger.
From 1798 to 1846, thousands of California Indians were converted to Catholicism at Mission San Luis Rey. Yet how many of these converts came willingly?
The "King of the Missions," San Luis Rey now stands as a reminder of of California's early Catholic missionaries. Poet Francis Bret Harte mocks the execesses of some of these missionaries in his dark satire, "Friar Pedro's Ride."
Out of the mission of San Luis Rey,
All in that brisk, tumultuous spring weather,
Rode Father Pedro, in a pious way,
With six dragoons in cuirasses of leather,
Each armed alike for either prayer or fray,
Handcuffs and missals thy had slung together;
And as an aid the gospel truths to scatter
Each swung a lasso — alias a "riata."
In sooth, that year the harvest had been slack,
The crop of converts scarce worth computation;
Some souls were lost, whose owners had turned back
To save their bodies frequent flagellation,
And some preferred the songs of birds, alack,
To Latin matins and their soul's salvation,
And thought their own wild whoopings were less dreary
Than Father Pedro's droning miserere.
To bring them back to matins and prime,
To pious works and secular submission,
To prove to them that liberty was crime,
This was in fact the Padre's present mission;
To get new souls perchance at the same time
And bring them to a "sense of their condition" -
That easy phrase which in the past and present
Means making that condition most unpleasant.
Harte was the editor of Overland Monthly when "Friar Pedro's Ride" was published in the magazine in 1869.
There's nothing like a well-told story to hold an audience attentive, even when that audience is made up of the assorted hard cases that might inhabit a Sierra mining camp.
Little Nell (detail), illustration from The Curiosity ShopLarger.
And then, while round them shadow gathered faster, And as the firelight fell,
He read aloud the book wherein the Master Had writ of "little Nell."
Perhaps 't was boyish fancy—for the reader Was youngest of them all—
But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar A silence seemed to fall;
The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows, Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp with "Nell" on English meadows Wandered and lost their way.
And so in mountain solitudes—o'retaken As by some spell divine—
Their cares dropped from them like the needles shaken From out the gusty pine.
Lost is that camp and wasted all its fire, And he who wrought that spell?
Ah! Towering pine and stately Kentish spire, Ye have one tale to tell!
When Bret Harte left California for the east coast, he was one of the most popular writers of the time. Though he never returned to California, he continued to use it as setting in fiction and poetry.
Bret Harte, painting by John Pettie, 1884. Larger.
An old adage says the pen is mightier than the sword. May be, but you still better be careful with whom you cross quills.
Editor of an anthology of California verse called Outcroppings, Bret Harte took some heat from the disgruntled poets whose work he left out. His response, to review an imagined volume of rejected poems that might read like this one, "Sunrise on Mt. Davidson," which also lampoons a trio of local newspaper editors.
Lo! where the orient hills are tipped with snow,
The pregnant morn slow waddles o'er the plain,
Big with the coming day; the shameless child
Of Erebus and Nox, wrought in the slow
And sure gestation of the rolling hours.
How great is the fecundity of Time!
Methinks I see the swaddling clothes of mist
Roll down the bosky glens, and standing here
Note book in hand, I really seem to be
Accoucher of the Universe.
Oh, go
And bag your heads, ye shameless bards, whose weak
Conception are abortions! Let me hie
Where the soft strains of hurdy-gurdies call
And fair Teutonic maidens do invite
To shades of yonder cellar; there to con
From Holleck, Dunglison, and Matsell's sheet,
Chaste figures for my fancy, ere perchance
The printer call for copy
Bret Harte's published his review of the mythical Tailings: Being Rejections of California Verse in The Californian, Dec. 23, 1865.
Gold Rush society often included some pretty rough company, but even the coarsest miner could adopt a bit of civility for the sake of an innocent babe—at least, that's how the story goes.
After Bret Harte came to California, he tried teaching, working as a clerk, and mining before he began to publish stories and poems in the Overland Monthly. In "The Luck of Roaring Camp," Harte tells the tale of an orphaned infant, adopted by the uncouth miners of Roaring Camp, and nicknamed for the quality they all most needed. Here the miners of Roaring Camp get their first glimpse of "the Luck," as he was known, and they make contributions for his support.
As the procession filed in comments were audible: "Is that him?" "Mighty small specimen;" "Hasn't more 'n got the color;" "Ain't bigger nor a derringer." The contributions were as characteristic: A silver tobacco box; a doubloon; a navy revolver, silver mounted; a gold specimen; a very beautifully embroidered lady's handkerchief (from Oakhurst the gambler); a diamond breastpin; a diamond ring (suggested by the pin, with the remark from the giver that he "saw that pin and went two diamonds better"); a slung-shot; a Bible (contributor not detected); a golden spur; a silver teaspoon (the initials, I regret to say, were not the giver's); a pair of surgeon's shears; a lancet; a Bank of England note for 5 pounds; and about $200 in loose gold and silver coin.
"The Luck of Roaring Camp"—along with works like "Dickens in Camp" and "The Society Upon the Stanislaus"—helped establish Bret Harte's reputation as one of California's best known nineteenth century literary figures.
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