TWO FOR TUESDAY - BRET HARTE & "M'LISS" I

'DEATH VALLEY DAYS'
"YEAR OF DESTINY"

From the IMDb:
The story of Bret Harte and his early time in 1850's California after moving there from the east. He became a stagecoach guard, newspaper editor which almost got him lynched, then a schoolteacher before finding fame as a western writer. 

From Wikipedia:
Francis Brett Hart, known as Bret Harte (August 25, 1836 – May 5, 1902), was an American short-storywriter and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been most often reprinted, adapted, and admired.

Harte moved to California in 1853, later working there in a number of capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist. He spent part of his life in the northern California coastal town of Union (now Arcata), a settlement on Humboldt Bay that was established as a provisioning center for mining camps in the interior.

The Wells Fargo Messenger of July 1916, relates that, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a living in the gold camps, Harte signed on as a messenger with Wells Fargo & Co. Express. He guarded treasure boxes on stagecoaches for a few months, then gave it up to become the schoolmaster at a school near the town of Sonora, in the Sierra foothills. He created his character Yuba Bill from his memory of an old stagecoach driver.

Among Harte's first literary efforts, a poem was published in The Golden Era in 1857, and, in October of that same year, his first prose piece on "A Trip Up the Coast".  He was hired as editor of The Golden Era in the spring of 1860, which he attempted to make into a more literary publication.  Mark Twain later recalled that, as an editor, Harte struck "a new and fresh and spirited note" which "rose above that orchestra's mumbling confusion and was recognizable as music".  Among his writings were parodies and satires of other writers, including “The Stolen Cigar-Case” featuring ace detective "Hemlock Jones", which Ellery Queen praised as "probably the best parody of Sherlock Holmes ever written".

For more on Bret Harte, click here.

Happy Trails!