The mark of a truly timeless piece of writing is that its meaning and themes can adapt to changing times. For much of its existence, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” was primarily seen as being first and foremost a story about the potential for redemption of even the most seemingly lost and hopeless souls. Doubtlessly, the author intended this as such because the allegorical symbolism of attaining redemption through the worship of a child with complicated paternity is obvious if not overbearing. Another reason that the spiritual themes of the story have lingered so long as its foremost thematic construct is that it was written and attained popularity during a period when faith was a substantially larger part of the daily life of readers than it is today.
If American readers of the 21st century are not quite so rigidly bound to Victorian-era displays of worship and trust in Christianity as those of the 19th century, they are certainly every bit as concerned about the implications of immigrant influence on traditional values and values of immigrant traditions. While the debate over immigration dominated by the symbol of a thousand-mile wall may seem uniquely tied to millennial American concerns, the inescapable fact is the very first attempt to impose a central federal governing authority over America’s immigration policy occurred just four years before Harte’s story was first published. Just seven years after the story of a prostitute giving birth to an illegitimate baby raised collectively by at least a few men wanted by the law first appeared in print did that governing authority impose the first federal regulation of immigration in American history. That legislation directly targeted entry over American borders for prohibition: prostitutes and convicted criminals.
While it is fairly obvious that Harte wrote his story with a specific intent toward creating a religious allegory that the dominant percentage of his readership would recognize and appreciate, evidence also exists in the story—perhaps not as explicitly—that going on somewhere in his mind, whether consciously or not, was the now-predictably regular historical pattern of anti-immigrant passions being stoked for political purposes. The same fervor which seems to have almost predictable ebb and flow resulting in a peak every twenty years or thirty years which recurred in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century was just beginning to rise in temperature for the first time when Harte wrote his story.
This story that has for so long been seen primarily as one about redemption of past sins is, however, first and foremost a story that could equally well have been titled “It Takes a Village to Raise a Motherless Baby. The first paragraph of the story refers to three different individuals who called Roaring Camp home: Cherokee Sal, French Pete and Kanaka Joe. Or, put another way a Native American, a (likely) Canadian and (most probably) a Hawaiian island native. In addition to all three being representatives of marginalized “immigrants” not considered American citizens, all three characters are also dead by the time the baby is actually adopted by the miners.
This unifying fact would seem to indicate either a conscious or unconscious determination by the author that immigrants are an impurity of some kind, perhaps, that need to be exterminated so that the baby can be raised right. On the other hand, while the paternity of the father is unknown one thing is inescapably clear: the resulting baby is of mixed-race heritage and yet he is still universally adopted and loved. But then again, he is at least half-white (or should that be half-right?).
The luck of Roaring Camp is expressed in definitively American terms: previously poor and struggling workers enjoy financial gain which grants them greater status and power. And so what is the almost predictable consequence of this turn of fortune?
“The camp was jealous of its privileges and looked suspiciously on strangers. No encouragement was given to immigration, and, to make their seclusion more perfect, the land on either side of the mountain wall that surrounded the camp they duly preempted.”
They built a wall! Metaphorically speaking, of course, but the intent is the same nevertheless. At this point, one might well assume that Harte was definitely operating with some sort of intent to create not just a religious allegory, but a political parable. The non-Americans are dead and gone and the child can be raised by transplanted Kentuckians and Bostonians in a truly Protestant Christian atmosphere purified from the poison of both papists and pagans. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” would seem to be very manifestly a story espousing anti-immigrant sentiments in a strong and powerful voice. Right?
Except that Roaring Camp falls victim to a deluge of Biblical proportions that takes the life of the baby and the Kentuckian and in the process utterly decimates the cabin of a man whose very presence there is the result of escaping prosecution for bigamy. So, while the story does seem to be very much "about" immigration and the American melting pot ideal, the argument that it is specifically against immigrants is less solidly grounded. It does make it more accessible to a population far more attuned to such issues than to spiritual redemption, however.
