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The Luck of Risring Camp and Other Stories
The Luck of Risring Camp and Other Stories Author:Bret Harte One Cherokee Sal, a prostitute, passes on in Roaring Camp - and leaves a new born son in the care of the settlement's toughest miners.... Expelled from Poker Flats, other hardened reprobates face starvation in a California snowstorm- to find, in their last agonies a similar chance to show human sympathy, human love... — The very names of characte... more »rs in places in "the luck of roaring Camp" and "the outcasts of poker flat" suggest the nature of Bret Harte's famous tales of gold mining days in the west. They are at once colorful melodramatic and sentimental. The infamous mother Shipton, drunken thief uncle Billy, the suave gambler John Oakhurst, all show on occasion hearts of gold; indeed they are the Proto types of heroes and heroines who later rodetheir way into viewers hearts in western movies. The west herein imagined probably did not exist even in Harte's day. Writing around 1870, he achieved enormous popularity by picturing the region in a manner that suited the preconceptions of easterners and Europeans who had never been there. But historically accurate or not, Harte's West still comes vividly alive today, and few readers will fail to find it in thrills, chuckles and - it may be - tears.« less