In his time Bret Harte made California real and vivid to his readers. He was one of the founders of the local-color school of writing, and if you can imagine a stereotypical gruff gold miner, or a strong but silent cowboy chances are your imagination is more like Bret Harte's characters than actual cowboys and gold miners.

He tried to explain to his audience that Chinese immigrants were human, and failed horribly with "Plain Language from Truthful James". Harte wrote it as a poem about racial equality. When it turned out that literally no one understood that he called it "the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote." Perhaps he wrote "Wan Lee the Pagan" to make his point clearer. It is rarely read these days precisely because the point he was making became widely accepted in decent society.

More importantly, Bret Harte was one of the first to report on indiscriminate slaughter of Native Americans. For his article on the Wiyot slaughter Harte received so many death threat that he had to abandon his job at the Northern Californian newspaper and flee to San Francisco.

Here he met and supported many young writers - Ambrose Bierce, Ina Coolbrith, and Mark Twain. Twain later said that "Harte had trained and schooled him so patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." Later he said many other, crueler things, but, even after all friendship was lost, Twain admitted that Harte's "pen pictures of California camps and mountain scenery has seldom been equalled and never surpassed."

Here he became, with help of Thomas Starr King, editor of Overland Monthly and wrote Luck of the Roaring Camp. This short story of rough gold miners redeemed by a helpless newborn made Harte an international sensation, leading him to write many others in the same vein.
These made Bret Harte so famous that The Atlantic Monthly lured him East with $10,000 for 12 stories a year, the highest figure offered an American writer up to that time. Harte went on to represent USA as Consul in Germany and Scotland. There was talk of a consulate in China, but Mark Twain used family connections to stop it. Finally Harte settled in London and never returned to California again.


I leave you with the ending of Bret Harte's "Concepcion Arguello", another great San Francisco story:

"Far and near the people gathered to the costly banquet set,
And exchanged congratulations with the English baronet;

Till, the formal speeches ended, and amidst the laugh and wine,
Some one spoke of Concha's lover,--heedless of the warning sign.

Quickly then cried Sir George Simpson: "Speak no ill of him, I pray!
He is dead. He died, poor fellow, forty years ago this day,--

"Died while speeding home to Russia, falling from a fractious horse.
Left a sweetheart, too, they tell me. Married, I suppose, of course!

"Lives she yet?" A deathlike silence fell on banquet, guests, and
hall,
And a trembling figure rising fixed the awestruck gaze of all.

Two black eyes in darkened orbits gleamed beneath the nun's white hood;
Black serge hid the wasted figure, bowed and stricken where it stood.

"Lives she yet?" Sir George repeated. All were hushed as Concha drew
Closer yet her nun's attire. "Senor, pardon, she died, too!" "
https://allpoetry.com/Concepcion-De-Arguello