Tennessees Partner | Page 2

concerned the
appropriation of claims,the miners but slowly appreciated that they had
been shorn of their criminal jurisdiction. But that they did come to
recognize that "the old order changeth, yielding place to new," is, in
fact, shown by the very incident on which Harte based his of a
lynching.
Spite of the autobiographic method that leads the casual reader to think
that Harte was intimately connected with this early pioneer life and
derived the material for his sketches from personal observation and
experience, his is, in truth, only hearsay evidence. The heroic age was
with Iram and all his rose ere he landed in 1854, a lad of eighteen. With
no especial equipment for battling with the world, he had to turn his
hand to many things, and naturally tried mining. But finding the returns
incommensurate with the labor, he soon gave it up and sought more
congenial occupations, mainly in the towns of the valleys and the
seacoast. Before he was twenty-three, he had been school-teacher,
express-messenger, deputy tax-collector, and druggist's assistant; and
had risen from "printer's devil" to assistant editor of a country
newspaper. In 1859 he was back in San Francisco, utilizing the trade he
had picked up, as a compositor on The Golden Era. To this he
contributed poems and local sketches that soon led to his appointment
as assistant editor. His writings made him friends, one of whom,
Thomas Starr King, in 1864, obtained for him the position of secretary
to the superintendent of the Mint. His duties were not arduous, and his
rooms became the resort of his literary associates and of men from "the
diggings," whose mines, like the meadows of Concord, yielded a
two-fold crop: gold-dust for the superintendent to turn into bullion, and
stories for his young secretary later to turn into literature. By 1868 his
reputation was so great that when Mr. A. Roman established The
Overland Monthly, he was made its first editor.
Mr. Roman impressed upon him the literary possibilities of the life of
the miners, and furnished him with incidents, tales, and pictures. "The

Luck of Roaring Camp," his first venture in this hitherto almost
untouched field, proved that Bret Harte had come into his own. His
local sketches and Mexican legends had been imitative of Irving, his
stories of Dickens; but for this he had evolved a method and a style
distinctly personal. His first success was followed up by "The Outcasts
of Poker Flat" and (in October, 1869) by the tale here reprinted; and
when, in 1870, an Eastern house published his sketches in book form,
his fame was secure. In 1871 he left California, and after a few years in
the East that added little to his reputation as a writer, or as a man,
secured a consulate in Germany. In 1878 he left America forever. Till
his death in 1902 he wrote on, frequently recurring to the claim where
he first "got the color," but never equaling his work during the year and
a half that he was editor of the Overland.
In 1866 Harte heard, from one who had been present, the incident that
inspired "Tennessee's Partner." Eleven years before, at Second Garrote,
a newcomer had committed a capital crime. The miners organized a
court, appointed counsel, and gave the miscreant a trial. He confessed
his guilt, and the cry arose, "Hang him!"' But "Old Man Chaffee"
stepped forward, drew a bag of gold-dust from his bosom, and said that
he would give his "pile" rather than have a lynching occur in a camp
that, spite its name, had never been so disgraced. He begged the crowd
to turn the prisoner over to the authorities and let the law take its course.
Such was the fervor of his appeal and so great were the respect and
affection for the old man that his proposal was adopted with a cheer for
the advocate of law and order, and the culprit taken to the jail at
Columbia.
Chaffee's partner, Chamberlain, seems to have had no part in this affair;
but the two were united by a love like that of his partner for Tennessee.
And long after the Second Garrote had become but a memory, the two
octogenarians lived on in their little cabin, Chaffee seeking with
primitive pick, shovel, and pan the more and more elusive gold, and
Chamberlain contributing to the common purse by cultivating a small
"ranch," the best crop of which was the campers who came to chat of
bygone days with "the original of Tennessee's Partner." At last, in 1903,
their partnership of fifty-four years was ended by the death of Chaffee.
Within eight weeks he was followed by Chamberlain. Their last days
were made easy by the bounty of Professor W. E. Magee, of the State

University, to whom