The Eastern Appeal Imbedded in “The Luck of Roaring Camp” In the mid to late 19th century, the land in the west of the United States became a new destination of many, prompted by the beginning of the California Gold Rush in 1848; however, due to the lack to communication at this time, Easterners often viewed the settlers in the new parts of the West as sinful savages. Bret Harte’s short story, “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” adequately depicts the actions of these men within this camp as relatable and appealing to those in the East, displayed continually through examples in how they took care of the new baby, The Luck. After the birth of The Luck, the men “entered in single file,” with each providing a gift, such as, “a doubloon,” “a gold specimen,” …show more content…
and even “a very beautifully embroidered lady’s handkerchief” (Harte 300).
Instead of being people who plunder and hoard, these men create a baby shower for the new infant, known as a common practice in the East. Once the Luck was about one month old, the group chose a day to “set apart for the christening,” and the child “was christened as seriously as he would have been under a Christian roof” (302-303). With religion, and in particular the Christian religion, still playing a dominant role in the United States in the 1800’s, the christening appealed to the Easterners, as the men attempt to raise the child in the correct fashion of this era in time. The “shouting and yelling,” “profanity,” and the phrases, “D—n the luck,” and “Curse the luck,” have now been abandoned from the vocabulary of the men at the camp (303). The men understand that this would not be appropriate language for a child to hear, which holds to the same opinion of the Easterners. In the last paragraph, one of the men, Kentuck, is holding the now dead Luck, and as he is also succumbing to the same fate, he tells the man from the relief boat: “Tell the boys I’ve got The Luck with me now” (305). In this line, one can note the compassion and love expressed for this youngster by all the men of Roaring Camp, comparable to
the same emotions an Easterner would also feel for a child. Throughout Harte’s story, the actions of the men at Roaring Camp regarding the care of The Luck clearly depicts how all humans share the same emotions, rather it be from the East or the West, providing an excellent appeal to the readers in the East.
When Spaniards colonized California, they invaded the native Indians with foreign worldviews, weapons, and diseases. The distinct regional culture that resulted from this union in turn found itself invaded by Anglo-Americans with their peculiar social, legal, and economic ideals. Claiming that differences among these cultures could not be reconciled, Douglas Monroy traces the historical interaction among them in Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Beginning with the missions and ending in the late 1800s, he employs relations of production and labor demands as a framework to explain the domination of some groups and the decay of others and concludes with the notion that ?California would have been, and would be today, a different place indeed if people had done more of their own work.?(276) While this supposition may be true, its economic determinism undermines other important factors on which he eloquently elaborates, such as religion and law. Ironically, in his description of native Californian culture, Monroy becomes victim of the same creation of the ?other? for which he chastises Spanish and Anglo cultures. His unconvincing arguments about Indian life and his reductive adherence to labor analysis ultimately detract from his work; however, he successfully provokes the reader to explore the complexities and contradictions of a particular historical era.
Considering the idea that the Pope is associated to the Christian faith and the discussion of how the native culture has been abused, it is clear that the speaker is expressing on behalf of the effects resulting from the residential schools. There is not only a reference to the Pope but as well as many Christian beliefs and traditions. The speaker goes into more detail of the Christian traditions, where as those of the native culture are only named. The author mentions “fastin” (41) and “drink[ing] his [God’s] blood,” (49) but only briefly names “sweatlodge[s] and sundance[s]” (6) that correspond to the natives. It is stated in the poem that the cultural customs were taken from “nohkom and nimosom” (5), which are grandmother and grandfather in the speaker’s language. Consequently, this can prove how a later generat...
In the 1700’s the Puritans left England for the fear of being persecuted. They moved to America for religious freedom. The Puritans lived from God’s laws. They did not depend as much on material things, and they had a simpler and conservative life. More than a hundred years later, the Puritan’s belief toward their church started to fade away. Some Puritans were not able to recognize their religion any longer, they felt that their congregations had grown too self-satisfied. They left their congregations, and their devotion to God gradually faded away. To rekindle the fervor that the early Puritans had, Jonathan Edwards and other Puritan ministers led a religious revival through New England. Edwards preached intense sermons that awakened his congregation to an awareness of their sins. With Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” he persuades the Puritans to convert back to Puritanism, by utilizing rhetorical strategies such as, imagery, loaded diction, and a threatening and fearful tone.
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
“California is a story. California is many stories.” But whose story is heard? What stories are forgotten? In the memoir, Bad Indians, Native American writer and poet Deborah A. Miranda constructs meaning about the untold experiences of indigenous people under the colonial period of American history. Her memoir disrupts a “coherent narrative” and takes us on a detour that deviates from the alleged facts presented in our high school history books. Despite her emphasis on the brutalization of the Indigenous people in California during the colonization period, Miranda’s use of the Christian Novena, “Novena to Bad Indians,” illustrates an ‘absurd’ ironic stance amidst cruelty and violence. The elocution of the Novena itself, and the Christian
In “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” Mary Rowlandson, a Puritan mother from Lancaster, Massachusetts, recounts the invasion of her town by Indians in 1676 during “King Philip’s War,” when the Indians attempted to regain their tribal lands. She describes the period of time where she is held under captivity by the Indians, and the dire circumstances under which she lives. During these terrible weeks, Mary Rowlandson deals with the death of her youngest child, the absence of her Christian family and friends, the terrible conditions that she must survive, and her struggle to maintain her faith in God. She also learns how to cope with the Indians amongst whom she lives, which causes her attitude towards them to undergo several changes. At first, she is utterly appalled by their lifestyle and actions, but as time passes she grows dependent upon them, and by the end of her captivity, she almost admires their ability to survive the harshest times with a very minimal amount of possessions and resources. Despite her growing awe of the Indian lifestyle, her attitude towards them always maintains a view that they are the “enemy.”
One example to depict Los Angeles as a frontier town is how “Other sidewalk booths, like those ordinarily used as dispensaries of hot doughnuts and coffee, offered wild-cat mining shares, oil stock and real estate in some highly speculative suburb” (29). This shows the developmental activity in Los Angeles due to the real estate, the oil stock, and the wild-cat mining shares. Many people come to Los Angeles hoping to become rich and strike gold. Los Angeles is a frontier town that has a plethora of oil. In Adamic’s “Laughing in the Jungle,” he characterizes some of LA’s citizens as seeing “a tremendous opportunity to enrich themselves beyond anything they could have hoped for ten or even five years ago, and they mean to make the most of it” (52). This characterization of LA’s citizens is another way of Adamic depicting LA as a frontier town due to the exploitative activity that he describes. Another example of how Adamic portrays LA as a frontier town is because “Los Angeles is America. A jungle. Los Angeles grew up, suddenly, planlessly, under the stimuli of the adventurous spirit of millions of people and the profit motive” (54). Adamic clearly depicts the exploitative activity associated with LA as a frontier town. Another author who illustrates the exploitative activity to establish LA as a frontier town is Upton Sinclair. In
As history cascades through an hourglass, the changing, developmental hands of time are shrouded throughout American history. This ever-changing hourglass of time is reflected in the process of maturation undertaken by western America in the late nineteenth century. Change, as defined by Oxford’s Dictionary, is “To make or become different through alteration or modification.” The notion of change is essential when attempting to unwind the economic make-up of Kansas in the 1880’s and 1890’s. Popular culture often reveres the American cowboy, which has led him to become the predominate figure in America’s “westering” experience (Savage, p3). However, by 1880 the cowboy had become a mythical figure rather than a presence in western life. The era of the cowboy roaming the Great Plains had past and farmers now sought to become the culturally dominant figure and force in the American West. Unlike the cowboys, farmers were able to evolved, organizing and establishing the Populist Party. The farmers’ newly formed political organization provided them with a voice, which mandated western reform. Furthermore, the populist ideas spread quickly and dominated western thought in the 1880’s and 1890’s. The period of the 1880’s and 1890’s marked the end of the American cowboy and gave farmers a political stronghold that would forever impact the modernization of the West.
Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust tells the story of people who have come to California in search
The West: From Lewis and Clark and Wounded Knee: The Turbulent Story of the Settling of Frontier America.
[1] The silent film, With Daniel Boone Thru the Wilderness, was produced in 1926: a time of prosperity, an era without the skepticism of the modern American mind. People were not yet questioning the stories and histories they had been taught as children. The entertaining story told in this Robert North Bradbury film is loosely based on the life of an American hero. However, the presence of several insidiously inaccurate historical representations demonstrates how an entertaining film might not be as innocent as it initially seems. This film fails to question certain key issues concerning the Daniel Boone legend. In fact, it does quite the opposite. The creators of this film wholeheartedly bought into the many warped myths and distorted “facts” surrounding the story of Daniel Boone. Amazingly, the ethnocentric (read racist and colonial) ideals found in 19th century whites apparently still existed in 1926, and, to a certain extent, still do today. This essay will explore the factors that contributed to the twisted representations found in With Daniel Boone Thru the Wilderness. Hopefully, the work of this essay and many others like it will help the next generation of Americans (and filmmakers) to avoid the same injustices and societal pitfalls that have plagued mankind for ages.
Gregory, James N. American exodus: the Dust Bowl migration and Okie culture in California . New
The Sovereignty and Goodness of God is a primary source document written in the 17th century, by a well-respected, Puritan woman. This book, written in cahoots with Cotton and Increase Mather, puritan ministers, tells the story of her capture by Indians during King Phillip’s War (1675-1676). For three months, Mary Rowlandson, daughter of a rich landowner, mother of three children, wife of a minister, and a pillar of her community lived among “savage” Indians. This document is important for several reasons. First, it gives us insight into the attitudes, extremes, personalities and “norms” of the Puritan people we learn about in terms of their beliefs, and John Calvin’s “house on a hill”. Beyond that, despite the inevitable exaggerations, this book gives us insight into Indian communities, and how they were run and operated during this time.
Over the years, the idea of the western frontier of American history has been unjustly and falsely romanticized by the movie, novel, and television industries. People now believe the west to have been populated by gun-slinging cowboys wearing ten gallon hats who rode off on capricious, idealistic adventures. Not only is this perception of the west far from the truth, but no mention of the atrocities of Indian massacre, avarice, and ill-advised, often deceptive, government programs is even present in the average citizen’s understanding of the frontier. This misunderstanding of the west is epitomized by the statement, “Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis was as real as the myth of the west. The development of the west was, in fact, A Century of Dishonor.” The frontier thesis, which Turner proposed in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition, viewed the frontier as the sole preserver of the American psyche of democracy and republicanism by compelling Americans to conquer and to settle new areas. This thesis gives a somewhat quixotic explanation of expansion, as opposed to Helen Hunt Jackson’s book, A Century of Dishonor, which truly portrays the settlement of the west as a pattern of cruelty and conceit. Thus, the frontier thesis, offered first in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, is, in fact, false, like the myth of the west. Many historians, however, have attempted to debunk the mythology of the west. Specifically, these historians have refuted the common beliefs that cattle ranging was accepted as legal by the government, that the said business was profitable, that cattle herders were completely independent from any outside influence, and that anyone could become a cattle herder.
It was the night of the big revival, and Langston, a young boy going on the age of thirteen, was brought to his Aunt Reed’s church to see Jesus and be saved from sin. His aunt told him, “when you were saved from sin you saw a light, and something happened to you inside” (219). He believed her. When he was brought to church, his aunt directed him to the front row, where he sat calmly and patiently in the heat, waiting for the preacher to begin the service. The Preacher welcomed the “young lambs” (219) and started his sermon. Towards the end of his speech he invited the young children to the altar to be saved. At this point, Langston was confused because he was not seeing Jesus before him. All the young boys and girls sprang to their feet except Langston and another boy named Westley. They were the only two left on, what the parishioners of the church called, the “mourners’ bench” (218). Finally, Westley became very restless and decided that he was not going to sit on this bench anymore. Langston was left there all alone until