SOURCE: “Mary Hallock Foote: How the Pump Stopped at the Morning Watch,” in Selected American Prose, 1841-1900: The Realistic Movement, edited by Wallace Stegner, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958, pp. 116-19.

In the following essay from his collection of American realistic stories, Stegner provides an introduction to Foote's short story, “How the Pump Stopped at the Morning Watch,” with particular attention to Foote's sources.

Editor's Note: Mary Hallock Foote was both writer and illustrator, and the fact that her husband, Arthur Foote, was a mining engineer gave her unprecedented opportunities to observe at first hand the life of a series of mining camps in the West: New Almaden, in California; Leadville, in Colorado; Boise and Coeur d'Alene, in Idaho; and finally Grass Valley, in the Sierra Nevada. Her writings reflect all of them—the only serious writing after Bret Harte to deal with mining-camp society, and virtually the only...