The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales

Boone Culpepper bought the apparently worthless salt marsh below Logport from the Government at less than a dollar an acre, went on buying it year after year until he held three leagues of the stuff, and only then discovered that his purchase carried the water frontage of a whole bay. He would neither sell nor lease; he blockaded a growing town for as long as he lived, and when the Kingfisher of Dedlow was found floating dead in his skiff with his own shot-gun at his feet, the marsh, the grudge and the neighbors' verdict of "served him right" passed to his son Jim and his daughter Maggie. On the first night of the story Maggie hands a starving Irish deserter from the Fort a glass of whiskey over the muzzle of her ducking-gun; the next morning the young lieutenant sent out to hunt him climbs the same steps, and she levels the gun at him too.

Three tales follow the title story. In "A Knight-Errant of the Foothills," Don Jose Sepulvida — a Spanish-Californian ranchero who learned English from a shipwrecked sailor, reads nothing now but American newspapers, and has resolved to adopt the institutions of the conquering republic wholesale — rides out with a hard-drinking vaquero for a squire to right whatever wrongs he can find, to the alarm of his priest and the bafflement of the gambler Jack Hamlin, who is too scrupulous to keep what the squire has staked against him. In "A Secret of Telegraph Hill," a young bank clerk takes lodgings in a San Francisco villa left stranded sixty feet above its own re-graded street, in the bedroom of the absent, faultless son against whom his mother and sister measure every other man. And in "Captain Jim's Friend," the shareholders of a hopeless claim at Eureka Gulch watch a generous, credulous man spend his money, his credit and at last a good deal more on his faith in a plausible stranger.

Bret Harte collected the four tales in 1889, published in Boston by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. He had left California in 1871 and never went back, and by then had been living in Europe for more than ten years: these marshes, mining camps and Spanish ranchos were written from memory, two decades after "The Luck of Roaring Camp" made his name.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text of all four tales, in their sixteen chapters.