A Belle of Canada City
By Bret Harte
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About this ebook
Not surprisingly, a lot has been written about the West, and one of the best known writers about the West in the 19th century was Francis Bret Harte (1836-1902), who wrote poetry and short stories during his literary career. Harte was on the West Coast by the 1860s, placing himself in perfect position to document and depict frontier life.
Bret Harte
Francis Bret Harte (1836–1902) was an American short-story writer, poet, and humorist. Best remembered for his stories fiction stories concerning the California Gold Rush, featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures. He helped create the American local-colour writing style, which attempted to better represent the particularities of a place and its inhabitants through elements such as dialect, landscape, and folklore. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction.
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A Belle of Canada City - Bret Harte
A BELLE OF CANADA CITY
..................
Bret Harte
LASSO PRESS
Thank you for reading. In the event that you appreciate this book, please consider sharing the good word(s) by leaving a review, or connect with the author.
This book is a work of fiction; its contents are wholly imagined.
All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.
Copyright © 2015 by Bret Harte
Interior design by Pronoun
Distribution by Pronoun
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
A Belle Of Canada City
A Belle of Canada City
By
Bret Harte
A Belle of Canada City
Published by Lasso Press
New York City, NY
First published 1903
Copyright © Lasso Press, 2015
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
About Lasso Press
Lasso Press brings the Wild West back to life with the greatest Western classics ever put to paper.
INTRODUCTION
..................
AMERICA HAS ALWAYS HAD A fascination with the Wild West, and schoolchildren grow up learning about famous Westerners like Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hicock, as well as the infamous shootout at O.K. Corral. Pioneering and cowboys and Indians have been just as popular in Hollywood, with Westerners helping turn John Wayne and Clint Eastwood into legends on the silver screen. HBO’s Deadwood, about the historical 19th century mining town on the frontier was popular last decade.
Not surprisingly, a lot has been written about the west, and one of the best known writers about the west in the 19th century was Francis Bret Harte (1836-1902), who wrote poetry and short stories during his literary career. Harte was on the west coast by the 1860s, placing himself in perfect position to document and depict frontier life.
A BELLE OF CANADA CITY
..................
CISSY WAS TYING HER HAT under her round chin before a small glass at her window. The window gave upon a background of serrated mountain and olive-shadowed canyon, with a faint additional outline of a higher snow level—the only dreamy suggestion of the whole landscape. The foreground was a glaringly fresh and unpicturesque mining town, whose irregular attempts at regularity were set forth with all the cruel, uncompromising clearness of the Californian atmosphere. There was the straight Main Street with its new brick block of stores,
ending abruptly against a tangled bluff; there was the ruthless clearing in the sedate pines where the hideous spire of the new church imitated the soaring of the solemn shafts it had displaced with almost irreligious mockery. Yet this foreground was Cissy’s world—her life, her sole girlish experience. She did not, however, bother her pretty head with the view just then, but moved her cheek up and down before the glass, the better to examine by the merciless glare of the sunlight a few freckles that starred the hollows of her temples. Like others of her sex, she was a poor critic of what was her real beauty, and quarreled with that peculiar texture of her healthy skin which made her face as eloquent in her sun-kissed cheek as in her bright eyes and expression. Nevertheless, she was somewhat consoled by the ravishing effect of the bowknot she had just tied, and turned away not wholly dissatisfied. Indeed, as the acknowledged belle of Canada City and the daughter of its principal banker, small wonder that a certain frank vanity and childlike imperiousness were among her faults—and her attractions.
She