LITERARY LANDMARKS ON 

 THE PACIFIC COAST 



BY S. S. SEWARD, JR. 



Assistant Professor of English, 

 Stanford University 



WHEN we prosaicalljr count the years, the 

 space of California's literary history is 

 absurdly short. But when we set foot on 

 a literary pilgrimage, the earlier scenes we would 

 recall seem to retire to a surprisingly remote dis- 

 tance. A few years, and a swarming mining camp 

 is deserted; but its empty houses and abandoned 

 diggings seem older than the scarred hills them- 

 selves. American occupation soon sweeps away the 

 hacienda life of Spanish days; but the memory, 

 after that brief time, gropes back as if to an almost 

 legendary past. And when a whole city burns — . 



Perhaps the most distinctive of California's 

 literary traditions are linked with the section that 

 we think of as the Bret Harte country. It lies along 

 the slopes of the Sierra sixty miles or so south 

 of the railroad route across the mountains, and is 

 penetrated by a branch line that runs up the valley. 

 Hither Bret Harte came, about the middle fifties, to 

 Sonora, the county seat, and then to the hamlet at 

 Tuttletown, where'^ he is said to have taught in the 

 little country school. But it was the whole district 

 that he knew, — not only the mining camps that 

 straggled up the valley of the Stanislaus, but those 

 that lay in the canons farther north, — a half-open 

 country of oaks and cedars and magnificent sugar 

 pines, with roads scratched roughly in the red soil. 

 The names of the camps in Bret Harte's stories are 

 those that he found : Poverty Hill, Whisky Diggings, 

 Rough and Ready, Red Dog, Poker Flat, Gouge-eye, 

 and so on; but he owned no obligation to geo- 

 graphical accuracy. Some of the names remain, 

 and the region still shows the scars from the primi- 

 tive placer mining that a later law has abolished. 

 But Jimtown has now become resi>ectable as James- 

 town, and the important mines today are the deep 

 shafts that penetrate the hills about Angels. We have 

 cause to remember one of the men for whom Jim- 

 town was named, for it was Jim Gillis, "Truthful 

 James of Table Mountain," who, tradition has it, 

 first told Bret Harte the story of the Heathen Chinee, 

 and from whom Mark Twain, during a later visit, 

 heard the diverting episode of the Jumping Frog. 



But it was not in the mountains that these tales 



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