The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 | Page 3

held at the log-cabin residence, which had "one large opening in
the wall to admit light." The "large opening" was not, in the first
intention, to admit light. Shirley says (post, p. 70),--
It has no window, all the light admitted entering through an aperture
where there will be a door when it becomes cold enough for such a
luxury.
Describing the service, the Doctor says, in part,--
After a long and wandering impromptu prayer by somebody, a prayer
which "Shirley" found disagreeable (since she herself was a
churchwoman, and missed the burial service), the procession,
containing twenty men and three women, set out.
Shirley was not, at that time, a churchwoman, and her account of the
prayer, etc., is,--
About twenty men, with the three women of the place, had assembled
at the funeral. An extempore prayer was made, filled with all the
peculiarities usual to that style of petition. Ah, how different from the
soothing verses of the glorious burial service of the church!
It may not be inappropriate here to note that the baby referred to in the
two immediately preceding pages is none other than the original of The
Luck in Bret Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp. How the funeral scene as
described by Shirley was adapted by this master of short-story writing,
and how skillfully he combined it with the birth of The Luck, may be
perceived in the two paragraphs following.

[Shirley, post, p. 70.] On a board, supported by two butter-tubs, was
extended the body of the dead woman, covered with a sheet. By its side
stood the coffin, of unstained pine, lined with white cambric.
[The Luck of Roaring Camp, Overland, vol. i, p. 184.] Beside the low
bunk or shelf, on which the figure of the mother was starkly outlined
below the blankets, stood a pine table. On this a candle-box was placed,
and within it, swathed in staring red flannel, lay the last arrival at
Roaring Camp.
Bancroft (History of California, vol. vii, p. 724), speaking of early
California literature, says,--
Mining life in California furnished inexhaustible material;... and almost
every book produced in the golden era gave specimens more or less
entertaining of the wit and humor developed by the struggle with
homelessness, physical suffering, and mental gloom. And when,
perchance, a writer had never heard original tales of the kind he felt
himself expected to relate, he took them at second-hand.... Even the
most powerful of Bret Harte's stories borrowed their incidents from the
letters of Mrs. Laura A. K. Clapp, who under the nom de plume of
'Shirley,' wrote a series of letters published in the Pioneer Magazine,
1851-2. The 'Luck of Roaring Camp' was suggested by incidents
related in Letter II., p. 174-6 of vol. i. of the Pioneer. In Letter XIX., p.
103-10 of vol. iv., is the suggestion of the 'Outcasts of Poker Flat.' Mrs.
Clapp's simple epistolary style narrates the facts, and Harte's exquisite
style imparts to them the glamour of imagination.
The temptation cannot be resisted, at this point, to pursue the history of
The Luck of Roaring Camp a little further. The reader will kindly
remember that no changes are made in printing extracts. Mr. T. Edgar
Pemberton, in his Bret Harte: A Treatise and a Tribute (London, 1900),
says, in referring to criticism of the story when it was first in type,--
Mr. Noah Brooks has recorded this strange incident as follows:--
'Perhaps I may be pardoned,' he says, 'for a brief reference to an odd
complication that arose while The Luck of Roaring Camp was being put

into type in the printing office where The Overland Monthly was
prepared for publication. A young lady who served as proof-reader in
the establishment had been somewhat shocked by the scant morals of
the mother of Luck, and when she came to the scene where Kentuck,
after reverently fondling the infant, said, "he wrastled with my finger,
the d----d little cuss," the indignant proof-reader was ready to throw up
her engagement rather than go any further with a story so wicked and
immoral. There was consternation throughout the establishment, and
the head of the concern went to the office of the publisher with the
virginal proof-reader's protest. Unluckily, Mr. Roman was absent from
the city. Harte, when notified of the obstacle raised in the way of The
Luck of Roaring Camp, manfully insisted that the story must be printed
as he wrote it, or not at all. Mr. Roman's locum tenens in despair
brought the objectionable manuscript around to my office and asked
my advice. When I had read the sentence that had caused all this
turmoil, having first listened to the tale of the much-bothered
temporary publisher, I surprised him by a burst of laughter. It seemed
to me incredible that such a