SOURCE: Nissen, Axel. “The Feminization of Roaring Camp: Bret Harte and The American Woman's Home.” Studies in Short Fiction 34, no. 3 (summer 1997): 379-88.

In the following essay, Nissen determines the influence of Catherine E. Beecher's The American Woman's Home on Harte's “The Luck of Roaring Camp.”

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More than any other author, Bret Harte was responsible for literary representation of the Gold Rush and for putting California on the world's literary map. The challenge he faced was how to represent a lawless and uncivilized phase of American history in a way that would not only capture the imagination of the middle-class, magazine-buying public, but also be socially acceptable. His solution was to import romantic situations and plot structures into a hitherto unmapped fictional landscape. His Californian mythology was founded on symbols and emplotments taken from the Bible, from Greek legend, from Cervantes, Washington Irving, Walter Scott, Cooper, Dumas, and Dickens...