Society has forgiven Jo Corbin for killing a man, but can he forgive himself? Will the postmistress lose all in a bid to help a friend escape justice? Will the new teaching assistant’s unorthodox ways tame the unruly pioneer children? These are just three of the nine wonderful short stories from Bret Harte, set in wild and woolly nineteenth-century California.
Bret Harte’s witty, sometimes heart-rending tales of frontier California earned him acclaim during the 1860s as the new prophet of American letters. His books-The Luck of Roaring Camp, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, and M’liss-helped establish the foundations of western American fiction. This book includes the following classic tales:
-“Colonel Starbottle’s Client”
-“The Postmistress of Laurel Run”
-“A Night at Hays”
-“Johnson’s Old Woman”
-“The New Assistant at Pine Clearing School”
-“In a Pioneer Restaurant”
-“A Treasure of the Galleon”
-“Out of a Pioneer’s Trunk”
-“The Ghosts of Stukeley Castle”

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 commonly found in most Christmas tales. This recording of How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar was recorded as part of Dreamscape’s Classic Christmas Stories: A Collection of Timeless Holiday Tales.

Although American author Bret Harte is most readily associated with stories about the West, it is his skill with characterization that distinguishes him from the hundreds of others who set fictional tales in the region. The miners, soldiers, gamblers, entrepreneurs, and lost souls who populate these pages are limned with Harte’s unique combination of dry wit and tender pathos.

This charming collection of Harte’s short stories focuses on life in old California and includes “Openings in the Old Trail,” “Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff,” “The Landlord of the Big Flume Hotel,” “A Buckeye Hollow Inheritance,” “The Reincarnation of Smith,” “Lanty Foster’s Mistake,” “An Ali Baba of the Sierras,” “Miss Peggy’s Proteges,” and “The Goddess of Excelsior.”

Bret Harte was an American short-story writer and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern US to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been the works most often reprinted, adapted, and admired. We offer now some samples of his diversity in a collection of his short stories.

“The Luck of Roaring Camp””The Outcasts of Poker Flats””Tennessee’s Partner””The Idyl of Red Gulch””Brown of Calaveras””Muck-A-Muck””The Ninety-Nine Guardsmen””Mr. Midshipman Breezy””John Jenkins””The Hoodlum Band””The Legend of Monte Del Diablo””The Legend of Devil’s Point”

More than 100 years after his first short stories began to appear in the late 1850s, Western writer Bret Harte remains thoroughly embedded in the American literary tradition-the creator of some of our most venerable literary traditions. Since Harte, Western gamblers must have some of the self-contained poise, readiness, and chivalry of Jack Hamlin. The schoolmarms owe much to Harte’s Miss Mary, created long before Molly Wood from The Virginian. A master of prose, economy and humor, Hart influenced the whole local color school, and while he did not invent the short story, he had an enormous influence in popularizing it through the expanding magazine trade. Explore Gold Rush California in these classic chronicles of the old West. Includes these short stories: The Luck of Roaring Camp, Tennessee’s Partner, The Idyl of Red Gulch, How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar, Brown of Calaveras, Miggles, A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst, and The Outcasts of Poker Flat.