The name was easily had, and for
a sign manual on the cover some one drew a grizzly bear, that
formidable exemplar of Californian wildness. But the design did not
quite satisfy, until Bret Harte, with a felicitous stroke, drew two
parallel lines just before the feet of the halting brute. Now it
was the grizzly of the wilderness drawing back before the railway of
civilization, and the picture was complete as an emblem.
Bret Harte became, by the common urgency of his companions, the
first editor of the Overland, and at once his own tales and poems
began, and in the second number appeared "The Luck of Roaring Camp,"
which instantly brought him wide fame. In a few months he found
himself besought for poems and articles, sketches and stories, in
influential magazines, and in 1871 he turned away from the Pacific
coast, and took up his residence, first in New York, afterward in
Boston.
"No one," says his old friend, Mr. Stoddard, "who knows Mr. Harte,
and knew the California of his day, wonders that he left it as he
did. Eastern editors were crying for his work. Cities vied with one
another in the offer of tempting bait. When he turned his back on
San Francisco, and started for Boston, he began a tour that the
greatest author of any age might have been proud of. It was a
veritable ovation that swelled from sea to sea: the classic sheep
was sacrificed all along the route.
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