Francis Bret Harte, story-teller of the Forty-Niners, author of the immortal Heathen Chinee, The Luck of Roaring Camp, and scores of other charming pictures of the Gold Rush and the years that followed in California, actually lived many of the scenes which he describes so well. He was born in Albany, N.Y. Anglo-Saxon and Jewish on the paternal side, his mother was of English-Dutch parentage. 

Bret Harte saw his first poem published in a New York newspaper when he was eleven, and he was only eighteen when he went to the still raw country of California in 1854, traveling by sea save when he crossed Nicaragua by river-boat and on muleback. 

In California he was by turns drugstore clerk, mining camp schoolteacher (at nineteen), miner, stagecoach express messenger, small-town newspaper editor, typesetter in a San Francisco printing shop, and magazine editor, finally becoming editor of the Overland Monthly, the most famous magazine ever published in the West. When he went East in 1871, all literary Boston thronged around him and did him homage. 

Bret Harte served as United States Consul at Crefeld, Germany from 1878 to 1880, and at Glasgow, Scotland from 1880 to 1885, giving excellent service at both places. 

This book is a true picture of a unique talent, and a gay and fascinating narrative. 

From the dust jacket