Publisher's Synopsis
WHY do these personalities have such enduring appeal? Why does that too theatrical tragedy in the hills above Poker Flat, with its stagy reformations and contrasts between the black sinner and the white innocent, still retain your attention thirty years later? Bret Harte reportedly thought his reality was what made it happen. He had written about the Western miner exactly as he was, which is why there was applause. In order to approximate the truth and avoid the mistake of the cartoon, where the dissolute miner was so dissolute that it was claimed, "They've merely placed the keerds on that fellow from the start," he had combined his good and bad characters as in real life.
