"Choking the Wheels of Material Progress": Bret Harte's Resistant Landscapes

Bret Harte is best known as the author of California Gold Rush romances such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” – romances in which uncouth miners, gamblers, and prostitutes are revealed to have softer sides.  With the emphasis of most critics on Harte’s characters or style, almost no serious attention has been given to Bret Harte’s environments. But Harte rarely lifted a pen without checking the weather and evoking a bit of landscape. When, as a young journalist from California, he corresponded with two eastern papers in the mid-1860s, as Gary Scharnhorst has noted, “Scarcely a letter appeared in either paper without Harte commenting on the geography or climate of the state” (BH’s California 4). The same comment could be made of Harte’s forty-year career in fiction: Scarcely a story appeared without Harte commenting on the geography or climate of his chosen scene. Harte’s frequent projection of human feeling and animation onto inanimate landscapes – his extensive use of the so-called pathetic fallacy – has rendered his environmental comments distasteful to many twentieth-century readers; and thus an early and sizeable body of nineteenth-century environmental criticism lies entombed in archives for lack of the proper taste or humor to appreciate it. Today I wish to share passages from Harte’s fiction – particularly his lesser-known tales – that make him an inviting subject for the twenty-first-century environmental critic. Brief scenic passages in his stories chastise miners and tourists for their selfish disregard of western landscapes, among other sidebar thematics in tales that quickly move on to more exclusively human subjects. As an environmental writer, Harte was a keen satirist of his country. For all his melodramatic technique, some of his insights about humans in Nature remain surprisingly timely and fresh today.