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"The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (1869) is a short story written by author of the American West Bret Harte. An example of naturalism and local color of California during the first half of the nineteenth century, the story was first published in January 1869 in the magazine Overland Monthly .
A group of armed men, meant specifically to intimidate Oakhurst, marches the outcasts out of Poker Flat. There are four outcasts in the group: a young lady who is “familiarly known as ‘ The Duchess,’” a man called Uncle Billy who is drunkard and “suspected sluice-robber,” and woman who has somehow earned the nickname Mother Shipton.
The Outcasts of Poker Flat is about a vigilante committee which sets out to save the town from its moral decline by rounding up "undesirables." It is one of Harte's best known stories about the West, first published in January 1869 in the magazine Overland Monthly .
‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat’ is a short story by the American writer Bret Harte (1836-1902), published in 1869 in the Overland Monthly magazine. The story helped to confirm Harte’s reputation as an exciting new talent, and by 1871 he was the highest-paid writer in the country.
By Bret Harte. A S MR. JOHN Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker Flat on the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850, he was conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. Two or three men, conversing earnestly together, ceased as he approached, and exchanged significant glances.
The core story of “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”—a group of travelers get stranded in the snowy mountains, rations run low, and nearly everyone dies—feels reminiscent of the story of the Donner Party, a group of American pioneers who made the long trek to California from the Midwest via a wagon train.
On the morning of November 23, 1850, a gambler named John Oakhurst walks through Poker Flat, a small mining town in the American West. The town’s “moral atmosphere” has changed, and Oakhurst knows that the town is “after somebody.”. He reflects calmly that he’s probably the one the town is after—a suspicion that soon proves correct.
The Outcasts of Poker Flat, short story by Bret Harte, first published in the magazine Overland Monthly in 1869 and later published in the collection The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870). It has become a minor classic of American literature.
Read expert analysis on The Outcasts of Poker Flat including character analysis, facts, historical context, literary devices, and rhetorical devices at Owl Eyes.
The Outcasts of Poker Flat Summary. "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" by Bret Harte is an 1869 story about four troublemakers who are banished from the California...
