HARTE FOR THE WIYOTS
Journalism can be a dangerous business. In 2018, according to the International Federation of Journalists, 94 reporters were killed in the line of work. That is far from a modern-day phenomenon. As then apprentice newspaperman and later Western literary star Bret Harte discovered, telling it straight about the unspeakably murderous reality of 19th-century California made you a target.
Harte’s trial by fire took place in the northern coastal town of Union (presentday Arcata), some 80 miles south of the Oregon border. Union flourished after its 1850 founding on Arcata Bay as a provisioning port for gold mines in the mountainous backcountry. But as redwood timber operations eclipsed mining, cross-bay rival Eureka surpassed Union and supplanted it as the Humboldt County seat. In 1857 a 20-year-old Harte arrived in the slowly fading settlement to visit half-sister Maggie.
Harte had ventured west a few years earlier from his hometown of Albany, N.Y., to join his widowed and recently remarried mother in Oakland. He soon struck out on his own, later claiming he’d panned streams in the Sierra Nevada goldfields and rode shotgun on stagecoaches. In truth, he spent little if any time at either pursuit, making his frontier living as a schoolteacher and tutor while entertaining the dream of becoming a famous writer. Hoping to stay on in Union, Harte found work tutoring the two teenage sons of a prosperous farmer. A soft-spoken and small but wiry man, he hunted the bay and estuaries for birds after lessons and established a reputation as a good whist player.
A year after Harte’s arrival in Union, to Eureka. The jilted settlement’s citizens got behind the efforts of Albert H. Murdock and Stephen G. Whipple to fill the journalistic void with , a four-page weekly under Whipple’s editorship. It was to this modest news organization that Harte, ready to move on from tutoring, came looking for a job.
