[In the following essay, Floyd places both Foote and Bret Harte in the context of newer critical perspectives which question old stereotypes about the way writers have dealt with the tug-and-pull between East and West.]

The category “Western writing” is a slippery one, and the exercise of forming and reforming a Western canon has become relatively obscure in the larger context of recent critical considerations of regionalism. Yet, even against a background where Western writers' status is liable to shift, Bret Harte occupies a peculiarly insecure position not only in relation to the tradition of frontier narratives traced from Cooper but even within literary histories of Western literature, where his work is rarely described. Mary Hallock Foote has disappeared in a more complex way from “Western writing,” in a manner predictable to the feminist literary historian, only to reappear as a quite distinct figure within the various spheres of 1970s historical writing. Here she is constructed as a writer who is, in some absolute sense, in the wrong place. This is certainly the assumption of Rodman W. Paul, whose edition of Foote's unpublished reminiscences, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (1972), has played a major part, along with Caroll Smith-Rosenberg's “Female World of Love and Ritual” (1975), in recovering Foote as, if nothing else, a Victorian middle-class lady occupying the “separate sphere” of 1970s feminist historical and critical discourse. Paul's assumption is that Foote's experience of the West—and apparently, by the same token, her writing—is especially, if not exclusively, mediated through her class identity as it intersects with constraints upon her as a woman: hence, his use of the anachronistic term “gentlewomen,” encoding ideas of inappropriate refinement, blinkered vision, and undemocratic values.¹ This approach has been influential, not least because it matches one of the most common assumptions of writing about Anglo women in the West: that middle-class Eastern migrants were so much in the thrall of contemporary ideologies about womanhood as to be unable to take advantage of the relative flexibility of Western society. “No one,” as Richard W. Etulain puts it, “would have predicted she would have become a well-known Western writer.”² Yet such assumptions seem to me to have generated a persistent misrepresentation of Foote's writing, and especially of the mining fictions with which I shall primarily be concerned: “In Exile” (1881), The Led-Horse Claim (1883), and John Bodewin's Testimony (1886).

Interestingly, Foote's own impulse was to separate herself from a tradition she associated with Harte, though this was not an issue of gender difference. She was not, in my reading, much given to positioning herself in relation to other writers of the West. If anything, she seems to have wanted to link herself with British traditions of medievalism, especially Tennysonian Arthurianism and Victorian fantasy (as, for instance, in the underground fairy stories of George MacDonald); or to have wished to respond—this is true of her woodcuts especially—to the New England canon of her day.³ But this is what she has to say about Harte: “The East continually hears of the recklessness, the bad manners and the immorality of the West just as England hears of all our disgraces, social, financial and national; but who can tell the tale of those quiet lives which are the lifeblood of the country,—its present strength, and its hope for the future? The tourist sees the sensational side of California—its scenery and its society; but it is not all included in the Yo Semite guidebooks and the literature of Bret Harte.”⁴ Here, at least, in her restatement of the Howellsian realist project in the context of writing about the West, Mary Hallock Foote places herself at odds with Harte's melodramas of social dislocation and societal hypocrisy.

It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find critics of Harte's and Foote's work choosing to understand them in very similar terms, that is, by association with the activity that some of their most important work describes: mining. This association is very striking in Harte criticism: he is a “casual, clever, literary miner,” who “exposes” in order to “exploit,” who is “lacking in literary conscience” in his use of his surroundings in California, merely scratching at the surface of his subject to turn a quick profit on fictions of cheap “unearned effects.”⁵ This criticism represents the West as a literary gold mine that Harte exploits without reflection or pause, to turn a quick profit on fictions of “very little flavour of the soil” (Wyatt, xxiii). Aptly, Harte himself is read as soon “exhausted” as a writer. The association works in similar and different ways for Foote. We must, it seems, search underground to find her “hidden excellence”:⁶ her work must itself be mined conscientiously for value. Although the critical verdict on Foote's “mining” is less vituperative than that upon Harte, the evaluation of her fiction has also become caught up in the perception that—to her work's detriment—she too is engaged in “converting … frontier experiences into artistic and literary capital” (Johnson, 9).

This issue extends beyond the accusation of a lack of literary ambition or even integrity. Paul begins his introduction to Foote's reminiscences by questioning whether Foote was “really a Westerner” (3), really the “authentic voice of the West” that her contemporaries believed (2). As with Harte, Foote's 1880s mining fictions are subject to a critique that finds her unable or unwilling to do justice to “the raw, new West” (Paul, 13): sometimes, as in Graulich's work on Foote, this shortcoming is not construed in terms of lack of artistry but rather as the result of her position as an alienated female in a literary space colonized by men; sometimes, as in James Maguire's argument, the problem lies as much in a predilection for literary fashion as in the “flaws of apprenticeship efforts.”⁷ Further, Foote's work, like Harte's, is regularly evaluated by reference to her interest in selling her work to an Eastern audience. Both are critiqued as Easterners commodifying the West, appropriating its treasures for a metropolitan audience interested in new places to discover.⁸ These writers are compromised, their critics seem to argue, by the same squalid economics as those driving the Western mining economy of the late nineteenth century.

The claim for a particular position occupied by Bret Harte and Mary Hallock Foote in relation to literary markets does not, of course, stand up. It is unusual nowadays to find the evaluation of the worth of artists' work conducted on grounds of greater or lesser complicity with the publishing marketplace; but it is, in any case, peculiarly difficult to make such a distinction in the context of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when the most lofty American editors and writers operated, whether they liked it or not, within a highly specialized and professionalized, not to say cutthroat, publishing scene in which “the written word was … a commodity, bought and sold like other articles of commerce.”⁹ Harte was an early beneficiary and victim of the system within which Howells and Twain, as well as Foote, worked at the height of their careers. His famous financial success of the 1870s certainly did not preclude his being welcomed with open arms by the high cultural establishment of his own day, nor did it prevent his being considered an important and influential figure in American letters, long after his annus mirabilis of 1879.¹⁰

Likewise, Foote's career need not be read primarily as structured by financial considerations. It may be that some of her writing can be understood as produced in response to financial need; Foote describes, in her reminiscences, the “remorseless practicality” that led her to a point where she “made capital out of her children's tears” (Paul, 298). However, this was certainly not always the case. Her writing evolved from and in tandem with a successful career in woodcut illustration of literary texts, well established when Foote went West. From the mid-1860s (more than ten years before first going to California), she was moving within high cultural circles, supported by her close friendship with Helena and Richard Watson Gilder. Almost all her work was published by the Century Magazine (where Gilder was de facto, then actual, editor) as a result. Though we may understand Richard Gilder's commissioning of a friend who could produce the type of regionalist writing that precisely reflected his editorial strategy and the magazine's identity during this period,¹¹ there is no evidence to suggest that either the Gilders or Foote regarded her work as produced with anything but serious literary ambition. And, in any case, Foote's mining fictions seem to have inaugurated a fashion for writing that dealt with the Far West and with mining (Johnson, 61).

Certainly, both Harte and Foote were apt to express an intense awareness of the relationship between their saleability and their subject matter, and of the currency of a certain kind of Western material for Eastern audiences. Harte is often quoted, albeit from a point later in his life, as bemoaning his need to “grind out the old tunes on the old organ and gather up the coppers.”¹² Foote wrote of the problem of producing a Western story with a realism consistent with contemporary genteel manners (Paul, 18). Lee Ann Johnson also quotes Foote's concern that the West was “too much for my pencil” (46). Plainly, both artists had reason to reflect on their effectiveness in working to publishers' demands: Harte because he could not sustain his success once in the East; Foote because, the need for money aside, she struggled to keep a career going during a migrant existence in the Far West. Still, the link that critics have made between their output and an exploitative process of mining seems scarcely consistent with the level of interest they actually express in the financial rewards of their work. More to the point, the connection itself is less than appropriate: it compares formulaic hackwork to a money-making venture that was wildly unpredictable in financial terms. The late-nineteenth-century mining economy was notoriously a gamble.¹³

Further, this critical use of “mining” is itself organized by an assumption that positions the West as an object for Eastern consumption. I shall argue later in this essay that Harte's and Foote's Western narratives do not grant their Eastern readers so complacent a position. But the point I want to make here is that Harte and Foote did not choose to identify themselves either as migrant Eastern writers “mining” the West or as Western writers uncovering rich new veins of experience for an Eastern audience. To read a text like Franklin Walker's San Francisco's Literary Frontier is to understand that Harte, though he subsequently regarded writing for Eastern journals such as the Atlantic Monthly as the pinnacle of a literary career, operated in California not as at a literary outpost but rather within a complex literary scene with its own preoccupations and stylistic preferences.¹⁴ It is true that Harte and many of his Californian literary contemporaries went east as depression hit San Francisco in the 1870s, but Harte actually spent only six years of his adulthood in the East, trying to establish a literary career, before settling for his last twenty-three years in Europe, where he moved within expatriate literary circles in England. This was not a writer necessarily disposed to work with a model of writing about California that locates that region at the margins of an Eastern American center.

Foote seems at first to follow the conventional strategy of identifying the West as a blank wilderness space, with her references to the West as a “historic vacuum” and her identification of herself as an exile (Paul, 11, 13). Though the publication of “regional” fiction such as Foote's is sometimes understood in terms of Eastern patronage of provincial outsiders of dubious literary ambitions,¹⁵ Foote's relationship with her publisher actually replicated another model of middle-class East-West relations: as her husband got his first professional post in California through relatives, so Foote herself produced her first Western work through the husband of her close friend. And, like her engineering husband's, Foote's working life was spent on the move—not the life of an exile but rather a typical pattern of working in what were, in some ways, colonial provinces in the West. Foote's East consisted of a rural home and a well-established circle of acquaintance to which she returned in 1878-1879, in 1880, and in 1882-1884 (that is, during the period when she wrote “In Exile” and The Led-Horse Claim). The West in which she settled was, on each occasion of her return during the same period of the late 1870s and early 1880s, a very different place. New Almaden, Leadville, and Boise occupied very different positions in relation to, say, the culture of San Francisco, the East, or the Midwest. No simple formula of East/West difference need be used here either.

The understanding of Foote as an exile from a highly cultured Victorian center needs, in any case, to be revised in the light of her understanding of that term. Johnson quotes her as arguing, very early in her career, for the artist's need for the freedom of “exile” from the city to develop a “free yet precise way of working” (20). Accordingly, in her early years as an illustrator, she moved backwards and forwards, in and out of the high cultural milieu of New York, in the pattern we recognize from the careers of Sarah Orne Jewett and her circle. When she wrote her mining fictions, Foote continued to operate in a similar way, moving between involvement in the social and professional world of the West and “retreat” to her early home. While writers such as Jewett and Celia Thaxter define the regional space to which they “retreated” by reference to particular states of mind, particular configurations of social behavior, Foote does not make the same kind of distinction. East and West are not, in novels such as The Led-Horse Claim and John Bodewin's Testimony, clearly differentiated but are simply physically distant from one another, two spaces between which her characters “[rush] back and forth, thousands of miles at a stretch.”¹⁶

Both Foote's and Harte's representations of the mining economy in the late nineteenth century problematize the very idea of the West as a different space. Certainly, we find both writers measuring the distance popularly imagined to exist between East and West in social and cultural terms. Bret Harte's insignia for the Overland Monthly, the grizzly standing on the railway line, snarling its hostility to the oncoming train, expresses a hostility to Eastern industrial capitalism as signified by machine technology; a hostility laced with irony, for such technology was making possible both the national distribution of this Western magazine and his own popularity. Meanwhile, Foote's arid West produces a condition of anomie from which her Eastern characters can barely recover. The deracinated hero and heroine in her early story, “In Exile,” mourn the loss of their links to the East of their birth: “The East concerns itself very little about us, I can tell you! It can spare us.”¹⁷ But if their profound depression is associated with the landscape, it derives, as Etulain points out, from the destructive presence of the works of Eastern investors in the West (11).

By moving back twenty years to the 1850s in his tales, Harte seems, in particular, to play to the nostalgia of his audience for a world where men might test their mettle against the tough challenges of “the frontier,” although it may be argued that the portrait of rootless miners and gamblers that he produces is not inaccurate, for the early gold rushes did indeed produce a highly unstructured society in California. Nevertheless, Harte's retrospective project can appear especially suspect when one considers that, by the late 1860s, when he was writing the stories collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories (1870), San Francisco was at the heart of a highly sophisticated economy operating in a global context, where miners and mining companies, although physically removed from the urban center, were actually locked into the operations of a city whose financial market rivaled that of New York. While the problems endemic within the mining communities of Harte's fiction are often resolved with a combination of some of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction's more threadbare techniques and the mechanics of Fate, Harte himself had experience (in his work in the Surveyor's Office and the Mint) of how and upon what grounds problems were actually solved in a multimillion-dollar industry.

The point is an obvious one, and it lies at the crux of the critique of Harte's work. Even the figure around whom Harte organizes some of his best work, the gambler, seems simply to anticipate the obsessive individualism and the preoccupation with male identity that is played out in the “big country” of the Western gunslinger, with all the deceptions about the facts of Western history that are associated with the Western. Certainly, we can see, in such stories as “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1870) or “A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst” (1874), how the gambler seems able to do all the things that industrial capitalism denies its workers; untrapped by routine, with skills that mark him out from the rest, he works independently, he can make decisions. Harte's heavily ironic commentary on those who label gambling as a vice seems, on one level, simply to reinvent the fantasy of the West as guarded by that grizzly.

David Wyatt interprets gambling in Harte differently, arguing that it “sadly approximates the connection between effort, merit and success in the larger culture. … Its outcomes are mechanistic, largely a matter of luck” (xxv). This too seems apt. John Oakhurst fails, after all, to save the “outcasts” from the vagaries of the weather. The heroine of “A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's” (1893) experiences a brief sense of freedom under the gambler's auspices before finding herself deserted and desperate, the victim—albeit unintended—of the gambler's chivalry. But a reading of gambling in Harte's work that moves between the interpretative poles of escapist fantasy and the expression of the instability of the Gold Rush West misses the implications of Harte's choice of gambling as a metaphor around which to organize his representation of California.

As recent theoreticians of gambling have argued, the activity of gambling is neither “analytically distinct from the realm of work and production” nor does it operate according to universal patterns divorced from the specificities of its cultural context.¹⁸ I would argue that gambling in Harte can also be understood in just this way, as commenting very precisely on the assumptions underpinning the social actors of the California rush. Gambling, both in gaming and in speculation, was regarded from the first gold rushes as a Californian obsession, while the association between gambling and the working behavior of Californians was a matter of cliché, especially during the period in which Harte's fictions are set.¹⁹ Mining itself was notoriously—and with justification—perceived as gambling by absentee investors of the 1860s and 1870s as well as by the adventurers and the speculators of the prewar period (White, 260).

In Harte, the primacy of the relations of gambling in Californian culture is asserted in scenes such as in “Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands” (1873), where all conventional relations between husband and wife, father and son are erased in activity that is either explicitly or implicitly a gamble:

“Wot do you say,” said Johnson slowly, without looking at his companion, but abstractedly addressing himself to the landscape beyond,—“wot do you say to two straight games for one thousand dollars?”

“Make it five thousand,” replied Tommy reflectively also to the landscape, “and I'm in.”²⁰

Clearly, gambling is not to be considered merely as a vice or as a sign of entrapment. Harte's gambler heroes, in transferring the codes of the gambling table—grace under pressure, scrupulous adherence to established conventions—to their daily life, pursue a course they perceive to be honorable insofar as it operates independently of the rules of the community: Jack Hamlin, for example, protects a young woman threatened by disgrace as he would shield a greenhorn from the results of his inexperience at the gambling table. This, it seems, is the antecedent of the hero of the Western (the genre of which Harte is sometimes cited as progenitor). Yet a comparison of such behavior and its implications with the situation of the Western hero is instructive here. Although he may defy convention, this hero is carefully and delicately differentiated from the outlaw. He uses his skill to protect the whole community and is often subsequently assimilated (if not altogether comfortably) into the norms of modern society, specifically domesticity. Harte's gambler, by contrast, is neither effective in resisting the corrupt hypocrisies of the community nor is he in any sense “rewarded” by domestic happiness.

This is because gambling, as Harte's fictions make clear, does not actually constitute the escape from patterns of behavior dictated by convention that both the gambler and his critics imagine. Certainly, the community is repressive and without scruple in enforcing the bourgeois values of “civilization and refinement” (“Mliss,” Collected Works, 2:3). For the developing middle class of California, the gambler is condemned by his rejection of those Protestant virtues of self-denial, deferred gratification, and fiscal prudence on which they hypocritically insist that their success rests. For all his sense of his own special status, the gambler is actually reenacting the principles by which the wealth of those whom he rejects is actually created. His is American capitalism's special predilection for laissez-faire economics, its rigid categorization of activity, its ideology of separation between sexes, between leisure and work, home and “the world.”

As the husband and son of the invisible Mrs. Skaggs play their desultory game of chance against the scene of destruction outside—the father apparently hardly understanding what he is doing, the son trying to keep the old man occupied, both unaware of their relationship—the reader prepares for the obvious point about moral and emotional impoverishment, and the degrading scramble for cash on which gambling and mining rest. It never comes. Full of ironies, this scene has not actually been one of desultory activity, chance, and poor reward, for which the father has made very precise plans. He is merely keeping his cards close to his chest. Harte's fictional West is always in the process of being domesticated, always either becoming assimilated or already taken over by the community-builders, a process organized around Eastern urban values that are subject to Harte's most withering scorn. But Harte's gambler signifies the actual agenda of Western “development,” in all its focus on the accumulation of money as well as its self-deceiving sense of its own undomesticated heroism and unincorporated glamour.

The issue that Harte avoided, however, in writing a West defined by gambling and the hypocrisies around it, was the agency of big business in the creation of the West's mining economy. As Donald Worster argues, the East's West was “given birth by modern technology,” and that technology was designed and managed by engineers in the pay of large corporations, a scene rather different from that delineated by Harte.²¹ What is so particular about Mary Hallock Foote's West is that she makes this matrix of relationships between absentee investors, migrant speculators, and company engineers her subject. She defines the situation of the mining West not in terms of the world of the gambler posing as a social critic but in terms of the situation of the very figure whose responsibility it was to manage, by means of technological innovation and managerial know-how, the extraction of those resources for investors as likely to be Europeans as Easterners.

While Harte locates his discussion of the West in a scene that is only loosely historicized, Foote places her engineer hero in a very precise context. The role of the mining engineer in the 1870s, during which her mining fictions are set, was at a point of transition from a career for the well-educated, reputedly high-minded sons of the Eastern upper middle classes—the so-called “lace-boot brigade” described by Clark C. Spence—to a more specialized profession positioned within more complex organizational structures.²² This change provided ripe material for a plot organized around conflicts between opposing forces: pastoralism and technology, moral and practical understandings of the process of Western “development,” West and East; and Foote's engineers are indeed embroiled within situations of literally competing (mining) claims. But Foote does not choose to schematize her heroes' choices along such well-worn lines. Although the conventional view of engineers was, as Cecilia Tichi argues (98-99), to imagine them as the noble harbingers of rationalism and science, Foote represents them in terms of their actual function: as the agents of the investors, the people who made the mines run. As David F. Noble points out, the work of engineers was, in essence, to maximize profits by keeping down the cost of labor.²³ Foote shared the paternalist opposition of her lace-boot brigade husband and his fellow professionals to labor organizations, as her novel Coeur D'Alene (1894) makes clear.²⁴ She is, however, interested in imagining situations in which an engineer is caught in the complications of competing claims to the contents of the ground. The plots of The Led-Horse Claim and John Bodewin's Testimony are both organized around the attempt of one claimant to appropriate the most productive seam of a rival. In both cases, the rights and wrongs of the affair appear increasingly arbitrary, and victory is granted, in the end, to the inglorious (and, in the case of The Led-Horse Claim, disembodied) outside investor. In both cases, public and private duty are entangled in such a way as to make the process of finding justice (and especially the engineer's agency within that project) hopelessly problematic, and the incorporation of all the lives of the community within the business of making money very evident. So, for example, the plot of John Bodewin's Testimony turns upon the engineer-hero's refusal to assert the right of the claim of Mr. Newbold, a Kansas investor, to a piece of land that contains a rich vein, even though he knows that claim to be well founded. This is because Newbold's raffish rival, Colonel Harkins, has earlier protected his sister from the consequences of her husband's desertion. Bodewin cannot make up his mind to fulfill either his professional duty or his personal debt of gratitude.

Foote's compromised heroes are involved in activities that make their explicitly chivalric ideals irrelevant: the strong imperatives of their professional lives continually interrupt their attempts to come to any understanding of the women with whom they fall in love. The revelation at the end of John Bodewin's Testimony that the eponymous hero's middle name is Tristram is pointed not so much in its association between the novel's morally sensitive hero and Arthurian idealism, but rather in its Tennysonian reading of the irrelevance of such ideals to a modern imperial nation.

Critics such as James Maguire have argued that Foote's use of romantic plots is at odds with her mining material, but in fact there is no suggestion of private triumph resolving the dissonances of public life.²⁵ The private space that provides the sanctuary to which the harassed heroes and heroines of romantic fiction routinely retreat does not exist in these narratives, certainly not in the imprisoning vacuum of Cecil's temporary home in The Led-Horse Claim or the lodgings where Frances, in “In Exile,” fades into despair. More characteristically, figures engage in encounters with one another in more exposed positions, where the destruction brought by mining of the landscape provides a metaphor for a more general context of their lives. Thus, Hilgard is to be found scratching the frozen ground for the ring his aristocratic lady has given him (Led-Horse Claim, 157), while John Bodewin's escape into domestic fulfillment—in the only apparently unincorporated space in the novel—takes place in a desert to the sound of the station telegraph machine.²⁶ In all of Foote's mining fictions, the personal and ecological terms of incorporating the West are intertwined. There is no question here, to use Donald Worster's terms anachronistically, of “calling a toxic dump the land of freedom” (15).

Foote's reading of the process of Western development through narratives of competing claims allows her to critique the rhetoric of progress that underpinned those involved, in every sense, in mining the West. Engineering itself, as a field, drew on the Spencerian social Darwinism of the era, with its assumption that what was destroyed was not useful anyway (Layton, 55). But the literary frame, national and British, within which Foote places her narratives of mining pulls her work away from the tropes of the American literature of Western development. The representation of underground mining as disruptive in The Led-Horse Claim, for example, echoes the Romantic critique of scientific rationalism that underpins, to use an example very familiar to Foote, Hawthorne's portrait of Roger Chillingworth in “The Leech and His Patient,” a portrait that makes constant reference to mining as devilish in all its dimensions.²⁷ The response of Cecil as she sits alone in the Led-Horse mine is informed by a Darwinism that sidelines progress in favor of the fear of decay and that concentrates on the terror of shifts and changes so massive and slow as to be impenetrable to human understanding and investigation: “What a mysterious, vast, whispering dome was this! … There were far-off, indistinct echoes of life, and sub-animate mutterings, the slow respirations of the rocks, drinking air, and oozing moisture through their sluggish pores, swelling and pushing against their straitening bonds of timber. … Left to their own work, the inevitable forces around her would crush together the sides of the dark galleries, and crumble the rough-hewn dome above her head” (Led-Horse Claim, 113-114). Here, the miners' work represents a backward, deadly impulse, a “subanimate” compulsion to delve into darkness that is reminiscent of the use of Norse mythology and the märchen tradition in the work of fantasists such as George MacDonald.

Foote's mining fictions take place in a desolate space that is endlessly disputed, the reverse of the regenerative pastoral dream; in losing no opportunity to destabilize literary conventions of East-West relations, Foote also seems to refuse the exceptionalist rhetoric that justified Western “expansion.” The plots of both The Led-Horse Claim and John Bodewin's Testimony are resolved by a West-East movement, the reverse of the convention. Both texts suggest the difficulty of marking out East and West: in the California of “In Exile,” “everything is East,” and the West itself is “pervaded by the subtle breath of the Orient” (330); the “Eastern” investor who precipitates the disastrous events of John Bodewin's Testimony is from Kansas. In this context, there can be no mapping of East and West in gender terms, no “Eastern sophisticate” or domestic “Western” woman of instinct. All are immigrants, and, in the arid culture of the mining settlement, the female characters are no happier, no more ruined, except perhaps in terms of physical beauty, than their male counterparts.

To return, finally, to the consideration of the question with which this essay began: How do we understand the relative obscurity, on the one hand, of Harte, one of the inventors of the Western, and, on the other, of Foote, the writer unable, in some sense, to write the West or even participate in her life there? Margaret Duckett has argued convincingly in Mark Twain and Bret Harte that it was Twain who invented Harte as a mere hack,²⁸ a reputation that has yet to pass out of conventional critical usage. Foote meanwhile remains the Eastern gentlewoman, neither recoverable as a forgotten Western writer nor available for appropriation into the feminist critical discourse of regionalism.

Both critical fates are interesting, in their different ways, to the student of canon formation, gendered or not. More to the point here, perhaps, is to consider how far critical discussions of Harte's and Foote's work are still locked within readings of Western writing that deal in longstanding assumptions about the West as a special space where behavior is under negotiation—in essence, with the West in its role as the object of fantasy for Eastern Americans. Harte and Foote, who do not engage with this web of discussion, have become largely invisible within this field. Meanwhile, the “new” Western history that is producing an increasingly dominant historical narrative about the West speaks to understandings of the process and context of “development” and of the deceptions located in the terms “frontier” and “West” that are comparable to those that can be read in Harte's and Foote's work. Interestingly, mining is, in many ways, central to their interpretation of the West as industrial, urban, and ecologically in turmoil; Patricia Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest, a founding text of new Western history, begins with an arid landscape and the business of mining.²⁹ Far from “mining” the West for a quick profit and a quiescent audience of armchair tourists, Harte and Foote seem rather to have written a West that we thought we ourselves had uncovered.

Notes

1. Rodman W. Paul, ed., A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1972); Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1 (1975): 1-29.

2. Richard W. Etulain, Re-Imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History and Art (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 10. For discussions of women in the West, see, for example, Lillian Schlissel's “Frontier Families: Crisis in Ideology,” in The American Self, Myth, Ideology and Popular Culture, ed. Sam Girgus (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 155-164. More recent studies of Anglo women in the West, such as Sarah Deutsch's No Separate Refuge, Culture, Class and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American South-West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Peggy Pascoe's Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), have been less sanguine about the opportunities for any social class but still tend to assert a particularly restricted range, in terms of thought and behavior, among middle-class women.

3. During her early career, Foote illustrated a number of New England texts, such as giftbook editions for Fields, Osgood and Co. of Longfellow's The Hanging of the Crane (1874) and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1878), and editions of Whittier's Hazel-Blossoms (1875) and Mabel Martin (1876).

4. Foote, cited in Helena de Kay Gilder, “Author Illustrators II: Mary Hallock Foote,” Book Buyer 11 (August 1894): 339-340.

5. These references are found, respectively, in Stanley T. Williams, The Spanish Background of American Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 211; David Wyatt, introduction to Selected Stories and Sketches, by Bret Harte (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), xvi; John Milton, The Novel of the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 14; Joseph H. Gardner, “Bret Harte and the Dickensian Mode in America,” Canadian Review of American Studies 2.2 (1971): 91; Wyatt, xiii.

6. Lee Ann Johnson, preface to Mary Hallock Foote (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 9.

7. Melody Graulich, “Mary Hallock Foote 1847-1938,” Legacy 3.2 (1986): 46-48; Graulich, “‘O Beautiful for Spacious Guys’: An Essay on the ‘Legitimate Inclinations of the Sexes,’” in The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature, ed. David Mogen et al. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989), 192; James H. Maguire, “Fictions of the West,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 438.

8. The argument is cast in its most sympathetic form in Graulich, “‘O Beautiful’”; she argues that Foote was attempting to delineate a female West for an Eastern female audience. But, in essence, this is the same point as Paul's when he argues that her “continued reliance on the Gilders in artistic and professional terms made Foote subject to Eastern tastes” (9).

9. Daniel H. Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 24.

10. Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 70-71, 330-332.

11. Arthur John, The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner's Monthly and the Century Magazine, 1870-1909 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 63-65.

12. Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte (New York: Twayne, 1992), ix.

13. Richard White, “It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 260.

14. Franklin Walker, San Francisco's Literary Frontier, 2d ed. (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1969).

15. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 118.

16. Mary Hallock Foote, The Led-Horse Claim: A Romance of the Mining-Camps (Boston: Osgood, 1883), 271.

17. Mary Hallock Foote, “In Exile: A Story in Two Parts,” Atlantic Monthly 48 (August and September, 1881): 326. The full story encompasses 184-192 and 322-330.

18. Jan McMillen, “Understanding Gambling: History, Concepts, and Theories,” in Gambling Cultures: Studies in History and Interpretation, ed. McMillen (London: Routledge, 1996), 11.

19. John Findlay, People of Chance: Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 80-86.

20. Francis Bret Harte, The Complete Writings of Bret Harte, Collected and Revised by the Author (London: Chatto and Windus, 1914), 3:30.

21. Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14; Edwin Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1971), 2-4.

22. Clark C. Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West: The Lace-Boot Brigade, 1849-1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).

23. Cecilia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, and Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 98-99; David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 34.

24. Foote, Coeur D'Alene (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894).

25. James Maguire, Mary Hallock Foote (Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1972), 11, 14.

26. Foote, John Bodewin's Testimony (1886; reprint, London: Frederick Warne, 1887), 188.

27. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 6:184.

28. Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964).

29. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987).