Produced by David Schwan
Western Classics No. Three
Tennessee's Partner
"Both were fearless types of a civilization that in the seventeenthcentury would have been called heroic, but in the nineteenth simply'reckless.'"
Tennessee's Partner
By
Bret Harte,
Including An Introduction By William Dallam Armes.
The Introduction
When Marshall's discovery caused a sudden influx of thousands ofadventurers from all classes and almost all countries, the conditions ofgovernment in California were almost the worst possible. Though theMexican system was unpopular and the Mexican law practically unknown,until other provision was made by congress, they had to continue inforce. But the free and slave states were equal in number; Californiawould turn the scale; there was a battle royal as to which pan shoulddescend, a battle that the congresses of 1848 and 1849 left unsettled onadjourning.
Under these circumstances, it might be supposed that the worst elementswould get the upper hand, crime become common, and anarchy result.Precisely the opposite happened. The de facto government was accepted asa necessity, and under its direction "alcaldes" and "ayuntamientos" wereelected. But the mining-camps, which were in a part of the country thathad not been settled by the Mexicans and were occupied by men who knewnothing of their system or laws, were left to work out their ownsalvation. The preponderating element was the Anglo-Saxon, and itsgenius for law and order asserted itself. Each camp elected its ownofficers, recognized the customary laws and adopted special ones, andpunished lawbreakers. Naturally theft was considered a more seriouscrime than it is in ordinary communities. As there were no jails orjailors, flogging and expulsion were the usual punishment, but inaggravated cases it was death. Even after the state government had beenorganized, indeed, the law for a short while permitted a jury toprescribe the death penalty for grand larceny, and, in fact, severalnotorious thieves were legally executed.
The testimony of all observers is that the camps were surprisinglyorderly, that crime was infrequent, and that its punishment, thoughswift and certain, leaned to mercy rather than rigor. Bayard Taylor, forexample, who was in the mines in '50 and '51, writes: "In a region fivehundred miles long, inhabited by a hundred thousand people, who hadneither locks, bolts, regular laws of government, military or civilprotection, there was as much security to life and property as in anystate of the Union."
As these "miners' courts" were allowed after the organization of thestate to retain jurisdiction in all questions that concerned theappropriation of claims, the miners but slowly appreciated that they hadbeen shorn of their criminal jurisdiction. But that they did come torecognize that "the old order changeth, yielding place to new," is, infact, shown by the very incident on which Harte based his of a lynching.
Spite of the autobiographic method that leads the casual reader to thinkthat Harte was intimately connected with this early pioneer life andderived the material for his sketches from personal observation andexperience, his is, in truth, only hearsay evidence. The heroic age waswith 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 turnhis hand to many things, and naturally tried mining. But finding thereturns incommensurate with the labor, he soon gave it up and soughtmore congenial occupations, mainly in the towns of the valleys and theseacoast. Before he was twenty-three, he had been school-teacher,express-messenger, deputy tax-collector, and druggist's assistant; andhad risen from "printer's devil" to assistant editor of a countrynewspaper. In 1859 he was back in San Francisco, utilizing the trade hehad picked up, as a compositor on The Golden Era. To this he contributedpoems and local sketches that soon led to his appointment as assistanteditor. His writings made him friends, one of whom, Thomas Starr King,in 1864, obtained for him the position of secretary to thesuperintendent of the Mint. His duties were not arduous, and his roomsbecame the resort of his literary associates and of men from "thediggings," whose mines, like the meadows of Concord, yielded a two-foldcrop: gold-dust for the superintendent to turn into bullion, and storiesfor his young secretary later to turn into literature. By 1868 hisreputation was so great that when Mr. A. Roman established The OverlandMonthly, he was made its first editor.
Mr. Roman impressed upon him the literary possibilities of the life ofthe miners, and furnished him with incidents, tales, and pictures. "TheLuck of Roaring Camp," his first venture in this hitherto almostuntouched field, proved that Bret Harte had come into his own. His localsketches and Mexican legends had been imitative of Irving, his storiesof Dickens; but for this he had evolved a method and a style distinctlypersonal. His first success was followed up by "The Outcasts of PokerFlat" and (in October, 1869) by the tale here reprinted; and when, in1870, an Eastern house published his sketches in book form, his fame wassecure. In 1871 he left California, and after a few years in the Eastthat added little to his reputation as a writer, or as a man, secured aconsulate in Germany. In 1878 he left America forever. Till his death in1902 he wrote on, frequently recurring to the claim where he first "gotthe color," but never equaling his work during the year and a half thathe was editor of the Overland.
In 1866 Harte heard, from one who had been present, the incident thatinspired "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 hisguilt, and the cry arose, "Hang him!"' But "Old Man Chaffee" steppedforward, drew a bag of gold-dust from his bosom, and said that he wouldgive his "pile" rather than have a lynching occur in a camp that, spiteits name, had never been so disgraced. He begged the crowd to turn theprisoner over to the authorities and let the law take its course. Suchwas the fervor of his appeal and so great were the respect and affectionfor the old man that his proposal was adopted with a cheer for theadvocate of law and order, and the culprit taken to the jail atColumbia.
Chaffee's partner, Chamberlain, seems to have had no part in thisaffair; but the two were united by a love like that of his partner forTennessee. And long after the Second Garrote had become but a memory,the two octogenarians lived on in their little cabin, Chaffee seekingwith primitive pick, shovel, and pan the more and more elusive gold, andChamberlain contributing to the common purse by cultivating a small"ranch," the best crop of which was the campers who came to chat ofbygone days with "the original of Tennessee's Partner." At last, in1903, their partnership of fifty-four years was ended by the death ofChaffee. Within eight weeks he was followed by Chamberlain. Their lastdays were made easy by the bounty of Professor W. E. Magee, of the StateUniversity, to whom I am indebted for the authority for some of thesestatements,--Chamberlain's journal.
From this simple material the imagination of Bret Harte spun thecharacters, incidents, and motives that his genius wove into anexquisite fabric, an idyl of blind, unreasoning love of man for man. Hewas not writing history; and the complaint of those who were part of thelife he depicted, that he misstated the facts, rests on the same failureto appreciate his purpose and method that leads Eastern and Englishcritics to consider his realism reality and to mistake hisverisimilitude for the truth itself. The fact is that Bret Harte was aconsummate 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 'neaththe 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 itcertainly never gave us any social inconvenience, for at Sandy Bar in1854 most men were christened anew. Sometimes these appellatives werederived fro
m some distinctiveness of dress, as in the case of "DungareeJack"; 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 unfortunatemispronunciation of the term "iron pyrites." Perhaps this may have beenthe beginning of a rude heraldry; but I am constrained to think that itwas because a man's real name in that day rested solely upon his ownunsupported statement. "Call yourself Clifford, do you?" said Boston,addressing a timid newcomer with infinite scorn; "hell is full of suchCliffords!" He then introduced the unfortunate man, whose name happenedto be really Clifford, as