Bret Harte

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...

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,...

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...

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....

"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."

Harte's protagonist, John Hale, is relieved of his cash by highway robbers while riding in a stagecoach. Hale decides to get together a group of men to catch the thieves, but as the story moves along, many of his co-conspirators seem to have their own, more malevolent, motives.

America has always had a fascination with the Wild West, and schoolchildren grow up learning about famous Westerners like Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hicock, as well as the infamous shootout at O.K. Corral. Pioneering and cowboys and Indians have been just as popular in Hollywood, with Westerners helping turn John Wayne and Clint Eastwood into legends on the silver screen. HBO's Deadwood, about the historical 19th century mining town on the...

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.

Ambrose Bierce called Harte "incomparable." In the 1888 title story, Harte plunges the refined and very British Mr. Mainwaring into the Wild West. Then, a miner is transformed by an encounter with Indians.

Bret Harte blazed new trails in fiction with his witty, heart-rending stories of California and the frontier. These yarns collected in 1896 include "Snow-Bound at Eagle's," "A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready," "A Drift from Redwood Camp," "Captain Jim's Friend," "The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh," and "A Knight-Errant of the Foothills."