Golden Era

SAN FRANCISCO'S LITERARY FRONTIER--Franklin Walker--Knopf ($5).

In 1848 San Francisco was a jerry-built village with two hotels, two half-finished wharves, 800 inhabitants. That year James W. Marshall, a wheelwright, discovered gold in the tailrace of James Augustus Suiter's sawmill at Coloma. Twenty-one years later San Francisco had shot up to a polyglot giant of 149,473 inhabitants, a challenger of New York's financial might, a cultural threat to Boston. That year San Francisco went on a three-day spree. Officially it celebrated completion of the transcontinental railroad--"Uncle Sam's Waistband--He would burst without it." Historically it celebrated the end of a unique frontier society, an equally unique frontier literature.

This week that teeming literature is celebrated in a 425-page volume called San Francisco's Literary Frontier. An absorbing book, it contains a big cast, centring on Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller. But at least a dozen of its 45 secondary and minor characters are as interesting if not as important as these. They shuttle in & out of a narrative brightened by anecdote, distinguished by excellent writing, weighted by a shrewd understanding of frontier social forces. The six-year work of a 37-year-old professor of English at San Diego State College, San Francisco's Literary Frontier is almost a Western counterpart of Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England, looks like a promising Pulitzer Prize contender.

After 1850 Western mines produced an average $50,000,000 a year in gold and silver. That golden figure is the key to the uneven lives and works of San Francisco's frontier writers. With few exceptions, gold brought them West. Gold brought the sophisticated, cosmopolitan population, the wealth and leisure that make readers, writers and publishers. Because gold was elusive, restlessness and skepticism became a familiar literary tradition. Because male Argonauts outnumbered female twelve to one, traditions of rough-&-ready humor and violence grew apace.

California gold and Nevada silver built the mansions on Nob Hill (where Mark Twain dreamed of living some day), bought the elegant, satin-lined carriages that rolled over San Francisco's plank streets. They paid for San Franciscans' one-pound gold watches, their champagne (seven bottles to Bostonians' one), their imported building stone from China, accounted as well for San Francisco's 1,000 yearly suicides.

Gold gave San Francisco 13 dailies, several times as many weeklies, literary journals which flourished without advertising. These combined serious poems with miners' correspondence, frontier burlesque and tall tales with such polished articles as "An Epitome of Goethe's Faust," pirated novels such as Bleak House with condensed news columns called "Eastern intelligence." ("One of the pioneers of Washoe, James A. Rogers, blew his brains out, September 2nd. Cause: discouraged.")

Editors of the Pioneer, the Golden Era, the Overland Monthly, the Californian were such resourceful amateurs as Sam Brannon, wildcat Mormon leader who got rich collecting tithes from gold prospectors; Ferdinand C. Ewer, tall, goateed, atheist Harvardman who later became an Episcopal rector; Charles Henry Webb, lisping, redheaded ex-sailor and miner, wit and lady-killer, who fled to California to escape the Civil War. (In the second year of the war, 100,000 army deserters and pacifists rolled into California. Among them was a slouchy ex-river pilot named Samuel Clemens.)

Plump Adah Isaacs Menken, whose strip-tease opera, Mazeppa, had the town on its ear, wrote daring poems in the tradition of her good friend Walt Whitman. Henry George, tiny, tenacious, hopeful ex-sailor-prospector-typesetter and future author of Progress and Poverty, wrote on spiritualism and phrenology as well as political economy. Yellow Bird (John Rollin Ridge), half-Cherokee son of a Georgia plantation owner, contributed the West's most famous folk tale in The Life & Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit. Most talented woman writer was tall, dark-eyed Ina Donna Coolbrith, sweetheart of the writing colony, who kept her past a dark secret because she was the niece of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith.

The frontier was far more tolerant of Bret Harte, according to Author Walker's records, than Harte ever admitted. A slender, curly-haired, sickly New York boy, who had read Shakespeare at six, Bret (whose friends sometimes called him Fanny) was a self-conscious literary man, who prospected in patent-leather shoes, drove a stagecoach only long enough to get his literary stake. He wrote his frontier successes when he had long been sitting comfortably behind a desk. Far from being unappreciated, when the Atlantic Monthly offered him $10,000 a year, the frontier went the limit to hold him. He was offered $5,000 a year, plus $100 for each poem and story, a quarter interest in the Overland Monthly. The University of California offered him an additional sinecure of $300 a month. But he turned it all down, preferred his congenial brief fame in the East, and after that an Anglophile old age among the British aristocrats.

When Ambrose Bierce landed in San Francisco in 1866, a tall, blue-eyed ex-Civil War officer, he showed few signs of the savage misanthropy which marked his later work. According to Author Walker's researches, Bitter Bierce's misanthropy began two years after his arrival, when he became Town Crier for the satirical News Letter. Author Walker thinks Bierce enjoyed himself almost as much as did his readers. At any rate he was never sued for libel, shot at, even taken a poke at, in a country where editors' duels were commonplace. Bierce wrote the first realistic descriptions of war, was one of the few who did not sell out in the Gilded Age. But he came home from the inevitable English visit twice the Anglophile of any of the others. He dressed for dinner, execrated split infinitives and democracy. What prompted him to walk across the Mexican border into mysterious oblivion, Author Walker does not venture to say.

The one writer who might have complained most of frontier neglect complained not at all. That was yellow-haired Joaquin Miller (christened Cincinnatus Hiner Miller), a "delicate, effeminate, useless" romantic who had a daughter by an Indian woman, became a judge ("with one lawbook and two six-shooters," said oldtimers), married a romantic Oregon girl-poet named Minnie Myrtle whom he divorced because "Lord Byron separated from his wife, and some of my friends think I am a second Lord Byron." From San Francisco editors Poet Miller got rejection slips until his famous junket to England. Armed with a laurel wreath for Byron's grave, the manuscript of Songs of the Sierras, a pair of cowhide boots and a sombrero, he was taken up by Pre-Raphaelites, became the rage of Mayfair in no time. He whooped as he entered drawing rooms, smoked two cigars at once, picked his teeth with ostentation. Once he scuttled quickly across the floor, bit his hostess' pretty daughter on the leg.

While his fellow writers fled San Francisco to die in obscurity and in exile, found religions in New Jersey swamps, become monks, build roads, brood bitterly over their frustration, Poet Miller went back to the frontier, settled on a pleasant 100-acre Oakland hilltop, where he erected statues of Fremont, Moses, Browning, charmed club women with demonstrations of rainmaking, which consisted of chanting gibberish and turning on a concealed sprinkler on the roof. In general Joaquin Miller's career suggests that of the whole caboodle; he was perhaps the only one who really belonged there.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.