"He went with his widowed mother to California in 1854, and was thrown as a young man into the hurly-burly which he more than any other writer has made real to distant and later people. He was by turns a miner, school-teacher, express messenger, printer, and journalist. The types which live again in his pages are thus not only what he observed, but what he himself impersonated in his own experience." (from the BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH (introduction to) COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS By Bret Harte