Liz Swain 4:24 p.m., May 24 Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy, from a
historical point of view, was, in fact, the first representative
Californian novel. In Gabriel Conroy, as well as in Harte’s
stories and poems, California resembles a new land, as well as
an old one, emerging from the fringe of an overland empire
extending from the greater United States. The scramble of
individuals from all parts of the world to search for gold in
California, a period known as “the Gold Rush,” provided a
catalyst for California’s sharp rise in population in the middle
of the nineteenth century. Bret Harte is the most important
American writer to apply the transitional setting of the Gold
Rush in fiction. The fact that California underwent change as a
land that had already been Native American, then Spanish, and
then Mexican before being annexed by the United States certainly
indicates a variety of claims of identity. As an observer of
these regional claims, Harte has been underrepresented as a true
literary pioneer. Especially re