Nicknames
If this story cannot be affirmatively situated as the first example of a new genre which came to be known as “local color” fiction, it is almost certainly beyond argument that it was the first such story to make an impact upon the consciousness of the American reading public. One of the defining characteristics of both local color and “local color stories” is the subversion of naming conventions for its characters. While it is certainly true that characters in fiction had long been referred to by colorful nicknames rather than their proper names, this was a device strictly limited in use precisely to make it stand out. By contrast, local color fiction thrives on avoiding adherence to such stodgy avoidance of everyday realism as having characters constantly address each other by names that reveal little if anything of their regional peculiarities. One thing is for sure, you aren’t like to confuse the names of characters in a Jane Austen novel with the names mentioned here: French Pete, Kentuck, Cherokee Sal or Stumpy. Likewise, the story would certainly lose much of its power and perhaps all of its charm if those characters were instead referred to as Pierre, Mr. Davis, Sally and Thomas.
A Woman Among Miners
Notably, only one of nicknames mentioned in the story belongs to a woman. The only woman known to probably every man in the camp is Cherokee Sal, of course, and in a story with such a stark gender gap there are really only two possible ways her character is ever going to be presented. On the one hand, this woman among hardscrabble exiles from polite society might be there doing the “Lord’s work” as a chaste missionary with a hellish evangelical zeal. Then there’s the other track and that is the one which author chooses to pursue here in his presentation of a woman whom goes from being pregnant to being dead in record time for the reader. Still, it is vital that the camp prostitute not be presented entirely in opposition to what she might have been and very early on the author uses the power of imagery to intimate and suggest. He is every bit as reluctant to directly attribute positive qualities to her character as he is to explicitly identify her profession:
“Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness.”
Geography
The geography associated with Roaring Camp turns out to be of unexpectedly huge significance. Harte mastery of the power of imagery to control a narrative is nowhere more demonstrably efficient than in the economy of words used to carefully set the stage for the tragedy to come. The topography of the camp’s location affords it great protection under all the most disastrous of circumstances. The protection offered will eventually be instrumental in helping to sustain the camp’s “luck” while also being singularly responsible for the sudden departure of that good fortune. Rather than belaboring the point, Harte astonishingly expends just 30 words in conveying the single most important image in the story to the reader.
“The camp lay in a triangular valley between two hills and a river. The only outlet was a steep trail over the summit of a hill that faced the cabin”
The "Roughs"
Another important aspect of “local color” stories is their use as propaganda either to contribute to misinformation about a particular regional culture or to educate readers on the value of not believing stereotypes. To his readership back East, the populace of the western frontier were rubes at best and dangerous outcasts not fit for polite society at best. Notably, Harte is far more verbose when engaging the power of imagery to do a little educating of the readers back home. From allusions to Renaissance geniuses to the precision semantics of distinguishing between “distinction” and “definition” it appears that Harte was on a mission on behalf of the actual miners upon which he’d based his characters to create a more enlightened understanding of them among his readers.
“One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless. Physically they exhibited no indication of their past lives and character. The greatest scamp had a Raphael face, with a profusion of blonde hair; Oakhurst, a gambler, had the melancholy air and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet; the coolest and most courageous man was scarcely over five feet in height, with a soft voice and an embarrassed, timid manner. The term `roughs’ applied to them was a distinction rather than a definition. Perhaps in the minor details of fingers, toes, ears, etc., the camp may have been deficient, but these slight omissions did not detract from their aggregate force. The strongest man had but three fingers on his right hand; the best shot had but one eye.”
While this passage is the most extreme example of his use of imagery to subtly impact the perception of frontier culture by those back East, it is important to note that it is pervasive throughout the story.
