In his poems in dialect we find the same variety of types and nationalities characteristic of the Pacific coast:  the little Mexican maiden, Pachita, in the old mission garden; the wicked Bill Nye, who tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee at eucher and to rob Injin Dick of his winning lottery ticket; the geological society on the Stanislaw who settle their scientific debates with chunks of old red sandstone and the skulls of mammoths; the unlucky Mr. Dow, who finally strikes gold while digging a well, and builds a house with a “coopilow;” and Flynn, of Virginia, who saves his “pard’s” life, at the sacrifice of his own, by holding up the timbers in the caving tunnel.  These poems are mostly in monologue, like Browning’s dramatic lyrics, exclamatory and abrupt in style, and with a good deal of indicated action, as in Jim, where a miner comes into a bar-room, looking for his old chum, learns that he is dead, and is just turning away to hide his emotion when he recognizes Jim in his informant: 

  “Well, thar—­Good-bye—­
  No more, sir—­I—­
        Eh? 
  What’s that you say?—­
  Why, dern it!—­sho!—­
  No?  Yea!  By Jo! 
        Sold! 
  Sold!  Why, you limb! 
  You ornery,
        Derned old
  Long-legged Jim!”

Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did our newspaper poetry for a number of years abound in the properties of Californian life, such as gulches, placers, divides, etc., but writers further east applied his method to other conditions.  Of these by far the most successful was John Hay, a native of Indiana and private secretary to President Lincoln, whose Little Breeches, Jim Bludso, and Mystery of Gilgal have rivaled Bret Harte’s own verses in popularity.  In the last-named piece the reader is given to feel that there is something rather cheerful and humorous in a bar-room fight which results in “the gals that winter, as a rule,” going “alone to singing school.”  In the two former we have heroes of the Bret Harte type, the same combination of superficial wickedness with inherent loyalty and tenderness.  The profane farmer of the South-west, who “doesn’t pan out on the prophets,” and who had taught his little son “to chaw terbacker, just to keep his milk-teeth white,” but who believes in God and the angels ever since the miraculous recovery of the same little son when lost on the prairie in a blizzard; and the unsaintly and bigamistic captain of the Prairie Belle, who died like a hero, holding the nozzle of his burning boat against the bank

  “Till the last galoot’s ashore.”