![bret who wrote gold rush series bret who wrote gold rush series](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/23/f5/b4/23f5b45bb8091a25e08fab65386bcdc6.jpg)
This section will illuminate some of Harte’s personal feelings about Europe, displacement, and what it means to be an American. They are also valuable artifacts because they represent a distinctly American perspective of living abroad. Both of these stories were critically rejected (Scharnhorst, Bret Harte, 72, 74, 76). The first section of this essay examines his character representations and themes in two of his German stories, “Peter Schroeder” (1879) and “A Legend Sammtstadt” (1878). The specific dilemma this essay addresses is how Harte was able to represent these outsider figures apart from the western genre during his isolation from hearth and home. In fact, it was during his residence in Europe that Harte experimented with genres other than the western, adapting his sympathetic representations of outsider characters (misfits such as gamblers, ramblers, and miners) in new ways. However, the critical accusation that these later stories merely reproduce familiar plot lines is an oversimplification. Historically, critics have attacked these later writings as inferior reproductions of his earlier stories. Yet, the irony of Harte’s voluminous western writings is that the majority of them were written while he lived abroad in Europe from 1878 to 1902.
This population growth came mainly from Anglo-American settlers after the discovery of gold in Sutter’s Mill, 1848, also coinciding with the end of Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. He lived in San Francisco and wrote most of his early stories and poems when California was experiencing a substantial rise in its population. Bret Harte earned his livelihood by writing exotic stories of mid-nineteenth century California such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868) and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1869).