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Miners In Bret Harte's Roaring Camp

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“One or two of theses were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless”, stated Bret Harte as he portrayed a picture of all the miners in Roaring Camp (pg. 1483). Before the birth of the baby, the miners in the community did not care to what happened to both, their own community and the people living in it. Most of the miners had incredibly un-reputable backgrounds and all of them were just working in the mining town to become rich, which further helps explain their lack of care for themselves, each other and their community. The birth of the baby or as stated in the book the “lucky baby” brought a sudden change in the miners and the community. The birth of the baby changed Roaring Camp from being just a mining town to an actual caring community. “Almost imperceptibly a change came over the settlement”, “stricter habits of personal cleanliness” and “”rehabilitation of the cabin became a necessity” are some ways in which the miners started to change the community in order for the good of the lucky baby; the miners were willing to work together as a community in order to care for that baby. …show more content…

He portrayed the miners as criminals and people of bad backgrounds who were just trying to make a living or make themselves richer by working in a very unclean camp. However, with the birth of “the luck” or the baby and the miners’ attempt to improve the community, Bret Harte did romanticize it. Phrases such as: “They were flush times, and the luck was with them”, “They’ve got vines and flowers round their houses, and they wash themselves twice a day”, “ They’ve a street up there in ‘Roaring’ that would lay over any street in Red Dog” help the camp seem as a camp that anyone would like to work in even though some of these phrases are over

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