By Jackie Tse
The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat, by Francis Bret Harte, portrayed the simple lives of Westerners in North America during the 1800’s. The Luck of Roaring Camp is about allowing a new member, a new born, to become part of a classless society in the early 1800‘s. The Outcasts of Poker Flat is about the survival of a few “gamblers” in a treacherous blizzard, trapped inside a hut in the mid-1800’s. In the 1800’s, many gold rushes took place in the U.S, especially in the California region. Where there’s gold, there’s money and people who are willing to give up their reputation to just have a chance to have all of the money to themselves. Whether it be legally or illegally, having more money than everyone else was the main objective of life. Gambling was spoken of in the periods of the gold rushes in California, hence it changed the lives of Westerners in the U.S in the 1800’s.
A child’s life and a man’s sanity were the results of the changes in Roaring Camp. The child was taken care of and named “The Luck” (p. 5 para. 16) by the customers in Roaring Camp. Roaring Camp was a place for Westerners to have fun, drink beer and gamble with cards every so often. A man named Kentucky had taken the child into his own custody and wanted to raise him as he pleased, but as the child grew towards being a month old, he saw challenges for the child. Oakhurst, one of the “gamblers” claimed that the child “had brought ‘the luck’ to Roaring Camp” (p.4 para. 15). Aside from this claim to being the main cause for the naming of the child, the child was only kept alive for its superstitious use. “It was proposed to build a hotel in the following spring, and to invite one or two decent families to reside there for the sake of ‘The Luck‘,” (p. 6 para. 19) The influence of Hotels were to direct and extreme for the child, believed Kentucky. The need for further economic improvement and land development brought out the instincts of a man’s sanity. Kentucky took the child away from the others and decide to die with the child, believing that the child should never be used for the better of money once again. In a way, gambling and the continuation of gambling in the 1800’s allowed the world to flourish, but also allowed a man to decide the fate of two lives. Kentucky betrayed his ways of living the life of a gambler in order to “save” another life.
The devilish intentions of a poor gambler and the advice of a wise care taker collided. In the Outcasts of Poker Flats lives a soul, as a whole, of torment that is waiting to become the very source of its end. Tommy is a poor gambler in Poker Flats and has considered himself as one of the usual gamblers in Poker Flats but Oakhursts says otherwise. One major factor in gambling is the amount of luck a person has or is willing to accept according to his own free will. Oakhursts warned Tommy throughout the entire story to save him from the horrors of gambling, but in reality he should have saved himself because he was on his way to a “streak of bad luck” (p. 7 para. 33). Knowing what to do with his money was Oakhurst’s only way of surviving Poker Flats, but everything changed when he and Tommy were stranded beneath a giant blizzard. The only things the two were able to talk about were topics concerning luck, that had most likely to have come from gambling practically everyday. Oakhurst was drowned in his own pure self-reliance on the thought of “luck”. He wasn’t thinking for himself, but for the good of superstitious luck. At the cost of two lives, gambling has taken its toll and flourished for the better of the economy.
During the 1800’s, gambling was large asset of life in the West of the U.S. Gold was rumored to appear about the mountains and sudden “boom towns” occurred, benefiting primarily from the success of commerce in bars, tailor shops, and other westernized 19th century stores. Even though gambling was only a portion of the contributions to “boom towns”, it became an activity throughout the day for Westerners.
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