But that they did come to
recognize that "the old order changeth, yielding place to new," is, in
fact, shown by the very incident on which Harte based his of a lynching.
Spite of the autobiographic method that leads the casual reader to think
that Harte was intimately connected with this early pioneer life and
derived the material for his sketches from personal observation and
experience, his is, in truth, only hearsay evidence. The heroic age was
with Iram and all his rose ere he landed in 1854, a lad of eighteen.
With no especial equipment for battling with the world, he had to turn
his hand to many things, and naturally tried mining. But finding the
returns incommensurate with the labor, he soon gave it up and sought
more congenial occupations, mainly in the towns of the valleys and the
seacoast. Before he was twenty-three, he had been school-teacher,
express-messenger, deputy tax-collector, and druggist's assistant; and
had risen from "printer's devil" to assistant editor of a country
newspaper. In 1859 he was back in San Francisco, utilizing the trade he
had picked up, as a compositor on The Golden Era.
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