From this simple material the imagination of Bret Harte spun the characters, incidents, and motives that his genius wove into an exquisite fabric, an idyl of blind, unreasoning love of man for man.  He was not writing history; and the complaint of those who were part of the life he depicted, that he misstated the facts, rests on the same failure to appreciate his purpose and method that leads Eastern and English critics to consider his realism reality and to mistake his verisimilitude for the truth itself.  The fact is that Bret Harte was a consummate literary artist, who used facts with all an artist’s freedom.  His genius “imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life,” however, many an actual incident that otherwise would lie buried ’neath the poppy that the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth.

William Dallam Armes.

Tennessee’s Partner

I do not think that we ever knew his real name.  Our ignorance of it certainly never gave us any social inconvenience, for at Sandy Bar in 1854 most men were christened anew.  Sometimes these appellatives were derived from some distinctiveness of dress, as in the case of “Dungaree Jack”; or from some peculiarity of habit, as shown in “Saleratus Bill,” so called from an undue proportion of that chemical in his daily bread; or from some unlucky slip, as exhibited in “The Iron Pirate,” a mild, inoffensive man, who earned that baleful title by his unfortunate mispronunciation of the term “iron pyrites.”  Perhaps this may have been the beginning of a rude heraldry; but I am constrained to think that it was because a man’s real name in that day rested solely upon his own unsupported statement.  “Call yourself Clifford, do you?” said Boston, addressing a timid newcomer with infinite scorn; “hell is full of such Cliffords!  “He then introduced the unfortunate man, whose name happened to be really Clifford, as “Jaybird Charley,” — an unhallowed inspiration of the moment that clung to him ever after.

But to return to Tennessee’s Partner, whom we never knew by any other than this relative title; that he had ever existed as a separate and distinct individuality we only learned later.  It seems that in 1853 he left Poker Flat to go to San Francisco, ostensibly to procure a wife.  He never got any farther than Stockton.  At that place he was attracted by a young person who waited upon the table at the hotel where he took his meals.  One morning he said something to her which caused her to smile not unkindly, to somewhat coquettishly break a plate of toast over his upturned, serious, simple face, and to retreat to the kitchen.  He followed her, and emerged a few moments later, covered with more toast and victory.  That day week they were married by a Justice of the Peace, and returned to Poker Flat.  I am aware that something more might be made of this episode, but I prefer to tell it as it was current at Sandy Bar, - in the gulches and barrooms, — where all sentiment was modified by a strong sense of humor.