Drift from Two Shores

Francis Bret Harte wrote about gold rush California with such authority that it seemed he had been born and bred in the mining camps of the West. Actually, Harte's first hand experience of the life he would immortalize was almost non-existent. The Albany native arrived in California well after the initial gold rush, and visited mining camps only briefly; however, this didn't prevent short collections like Mrs. Skagg's Husbands (1873) and Tales of Argonauts (1875) from catapulting him to national acclaim.