To this he contributed
poems and local sketches that soon led to his appointment as assistant
editor. His writings made him friends, one of whom, Thomas Starr King,
in 1864, obtained for him the position of secretary to the
superintendent of the Mint. His duties were not arduous, and his rooms
became the resort of his literary associates and of men from "the
diggings," whose mines, like the meadows of Concord, yielded a two-fold
crop: gold-dust for the superintendent to turn into bullion, and stories
for his young secretary later to turn into literature. By 1868 his
reputation was so great that when Mr. A. Roman established The Overland
Monthly, he was made its first editor.
Mr. Roman impressed upon him the literary possibilities of the life of
the miners, and furnished him with incidents, tales, and pictures. "The
Luck of Roaring Camp," his first venture in this hitherto almost
untouched field, proved that Bret Harte had come into his own. His local
sketches and Mexican legends had been imitative of Irving, his stories
of Dickens; but for this he had evolved a method and a style distinctly
personal.
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