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Bret Harte

Bret Harte (/hɑːrt/ HART, born Francis Brett Hart, August 25, 1836 – May 5, 1902) was an American short story writer and poet best remembered for short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he also wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches.

Harte moved from California to the eastern U.S. and later to Europe. He incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been those most often reprinted, adapted, and admired.

Harte was born in 1836 in Albany, New York. He was named after his great-grandfather, Francis Brett. When he was young, his father, Henry, changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte. Henry's father was Bernard Hart, an Orthodox Jewish immigrant who flourished as a merchant, becoming one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. Bret's mother, Elizabeth Rebecca Ostrander Hart, was from the English and Dutch culture and raised her child in a Dutch Reformed church. Later, Francis preferred to be known by his middle name, but he spelled it with only one "t", becoming Bret Harte. Harte was of French Huguenot and Dutch ancestry and descended from prominent New York landowner Francis Rombouts.

An avid reader as a boy, Harte published his first work at age 11, a satirical poem titled "Autumn Musings", now lost. Rather than attracting praise, the poem garnered ridicule from his family. As an adult, he recalled to a friend,[who?] "Such a shock was their ridicule to me that I wonder that I ever wrote another line of verse."

Harte's formal schooling[where?] ended when he was 13, in 1849.

Harte moved to California in 1853, later working there in a number of capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist; he was also secretary of the San Francisco Mint. He spent part of his life in the northern California coastal town of Union (now Arcata), a settlement on Humboldt Bay, as a tutor and school teacher, then a printer's devil on The Northern Californian, and went on to reporting news, writing poems, and occasionally, acting editor. He left after three years, due to receiving lynching threats for writing an editorial about the 26 February 1860 Wiyot massacre.

Union was established as a provisioning center for mining camps in the interior.[citation needed]

The Wells Fargo Messenger of July 1916 relates that after an unsuccessful attempt to make a living in the gold camps, Harte signed on as a messenger with Wells Fargo & Co. Express. He guarded treasure boxes on stagecoaches for a few months, then gave it up to become the schoolmaster at a school near the town of Sonora, in the Sierra foothills. He created his character Yuba Bill from his memory of an old stagecoach driver.

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American writer and poet (1836–1902)
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