The Luck of Roaring Camp

“The Luck of Roaring Camp” is one of many popular Harte stories that portray events in a specific place and time: the 1850s California Gold Rush. Harte’s writing was known for his authenticity, his romantic sentimentality, his optimistic view of the possibility of human change, and his contempt for racism and injustice. In this story, he uses the influence of a Christlike infant to challenge commonly accepted gender-based family and childrearing duties. At the same time, he examines the relationship between humankind and nature, eventually portraying it as an unequal and unforgiving struggle.

The men of Roaring Camp are a rough bunch, as were many of those caught up in the gold rush. Living a hardscrabble life, they are unaccustomed to parental roles and don’t anticipate the changes that Tommy Luck’s birth will bring. But Tommy is no ordinary child. While he does not explicitly compare the boy to Christ, Harte uses suggestive words to set him apart. Donkey’s milk is “transmuted” (5) into appropriate nourishment. The mountain air is “ethereal” (7). A prospector describes the newly quiet and peaceful camp as “‘evingly” (heavingly) (7). Tommy himself appears to Kentuck one day as a “cherry-bum” (cherubim) (8).

Certainly, Tommy’s influence on the camp and its men is, like Christ’s, redemptive; the narrator describes their actions after Tommy’s birth as “the work of regeneration” (6). Much of their improvement is physical and behavioral, and the story only portrays their positive changes. The camp’s decrepit physical aspect before Tommy’s birth is not described; rather, the reader infers the camp’s former state by reading about the positive changes. Tommy’s cabin is now “scrupulously clean and whitewashed” (6), inviting the reader to imagine the grime that was scrubbed away. Even Kentuck’s obvious filthiness is never fully described, although the narrator says he regards clothing as “a second cuticle” (6) like a snakeskin, removed only when it decays. But Stumpy imposes cleanliness on those who interact with Tommy, and Kentuck thereafter appears daily with a fresh shirt and shining, clean face. This imagery characterizes Kentuck as someone paternal and tender below his rough exterior.

Tommy’s presence also infuses Christian values into the camp. This is first seen after his birth, which parallels Jesus’s birth (although Cherokee Sal, who dies in childbirth, is considered “sinful” in contrast to the biblical Mary’s virginity). With no crib, a candle box becomes his manger, and the camp’s men process and lay down offerings like the shepherds and wise men in the Bible. This sense of ceremony is replicated in Tommy’s christening, itself a nod to the church. The still-rough men plan a burlesque before a “mock altar” (5), but Stumpy objects, insisting that “this thing ain’t exactly on the squar” (6). When he concludes the resulting ceremony with “so help me God” (6), the narrator remarks that “It was the first time that the name of the Deity had been uttered otherwise than profanely in the camp” (6). The men have been changed by Tommy’s presence, their sinful behavior absolved.

Other Christian references and allusions are frequent. Tommy is nursed with milk from a donkey, aligning him further with Jesus; Mary rode to Bethlehem on a donkey when she was pregnant, and Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Sal, as the story’s only woman, bears traces of several female Bible characters. Her lonely childbed suffering is referred to as “the primal curse […] the punishment of the first transgression” (1), referring to the curse set on Eve as she is expelled from the Garden of Eden after the original sin. Despite this, the narrator refers to her labor as “martyrdom,” and implies that she ascended to heaven after her death: “Within an hour she had climbed, as it were, that rugged road that led to the stars, and so passed out of Roaring Camp, its sin and shame, forever” (2). This imagery echoes the Assumption of Mary, and with this, Harte subverts standard ideas about gender and purity. As with the camp’s rough inhabitants, Sal is cleansed and redeemed because of Tommy.

Cherokee Sal is also a lens through which Harte examines racism against Indigenous Americans. As mostly white prospectors descended on Indigenous American lands, inevitable and often violent conflicts arose. Harte wrote editorials decrying the massacres of Indigenous Americans, and he brings these values into this story. First, he characterizes Sal through the white men’s eyes: she is “coarse” and “sinful,” and the men are “half-contemptuous” of her. She is not only viewed as less-than, but the narrator dismisses her entirely: “Perhaps the less said of her the better” (1). Awaiting the birth, the men unfeelingly wager “Three to five that ‘Sal would get through with it’” (2) and gamble on the baby’s possible “complexion.” While Sal does not survive, she does get to go to heaven, undermining the men’s assertion that she is immoral. Her son is also Indigenous—he is referred to by outsiders as an “Ingin baby”—but Tommy transcends the men’s racist stereotypes, becoming a figure to be nurtured. Making an Indigenous American baby into a Christlike figure subverts Western ideas about indigeneity and asserts that redemption comes from coexistence and respect rather than violence.

The changes in the men’s behavior and morality are not only motivated by religion but by subverted gender roles. In the 1850s, middle- and upper-class society cherished the “cult of domesticity” in which women, and only women, were confined to managing the home and family. Men, by contrast, provided for their families and maintained social lives outside of the home. These roles were exhaustively explained in guides such as The American Woman’s Home by Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister, Catharine Beecher. The American West championed a rougher masculine extreme; men were solitary, dirty, and violent. Roaring Camp initially matches this description, and the men explicitly and adamantly remove women from the picture. With Tommy’s birth, however, the men face the challenge of playing both gender roles. They immediately begin curbing their most volatile characteristics, firing off “only a few revolvers” (2) rather than exploding a whole barrel of gunpowder to celebrate Tommy’s birth. They move in an orderly fashion through Stumpy’s cabin to view the infant, almost unconsciously removing their hats in respect. Further changes proceed, and the men’s new, feminine-coded values and attitudes combine with their masculine-coded labor of searching for gold. Kentuck is shown to be initially embarrassed by the “weaknesses of the nobler sex” (4) as he is moved by his interaction with Tommy. As his affection grows, however, he leaves his embarrassment behind and observes Tommy “in a breathless state of excitement” (8).

Harte’s expansive view of masculinity offers the possibility of redemption. Men can elevate themselves from a low, rough existence to a higher one by absorbing what were seen at the time as strictly feminine roles and values. While the flood destroying Roaring Camp and killing Tommy, Stumpy, and Kentuck could be considered a counterpoint to these ideas, Kentuck is elated as he nears death, believing that he is following Tommy into paradise. Through caring for Tommy, Kentuck achieves Christian salvation, and with this, Harte champions subverting traditional gender roles.