The next two years of his life, despite the efforts of his biographers, are vague and conjectural. It was his wander period. He began as tutor in a private family in Humboldt County, then, according to Charles Warren Stoddard, "he was an express messenger in the mountains when the office was the target of every lawless rifle in the territory; he was glutted with adventurous experiences."[40] Not for long, however. He seems to have spent the rest of the two years--prosaic anticlimax!--as a type-setter on the _Humboldt Times_ and the _Northern California_, as a teacher in the town of Union, and as a drug clerk. That he ever was a miner is gravely to be doubted. He had small taste for roughing it and little sympathy with the typical California life of the times. He was a poet, rather, a man of the city, a reader of romance, how wide and attentive a reader we may judge from _Condensed Novels_ which he soon after began to contribute to the San Francisco press. The events in his life during the next fourteen years in San Francisco are quickly summarized. For the greater part of it he was connected with the _Golden Era_, first as a type-setter and later as an editor and contributor. In 1862 he was married. Two years later he was appointed Secretary of the California Mint, an office that allowed him abundant time for literary work. He was connected with Webb's brilliant and short-lived _Californian_, first as contributor and later as editor, and in 1868, when the _Overland Monthly_, which was to be the _Atlantic_ of Western America, was founded, he was made the editor. _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ in the second number and _Plain Language from Truthful James_ in the September, 1870, number, brought him a popularity that in suddenness and extent had had no precedent in America, save in the case of Mrs. Stowe and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. The enormous applause intoxicated him; California became too narrow and provincial; and in 1871 he left it, joyous as one who is returning home after long exile. II If we may trust Harte's own statement, made, it must be remembered, in the retrospect of later years, he set out deliberately to add a new province to American literature. During the period between 1862 and 1867, he wrote, according to his own statement, "_The Society upon the Stanislaus_ and _The Story of M'liss_--the first a dialectical poem, the second a California romance--his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility--a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages of the _Overland Monthly_, he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, and the poem of _The Heathen Chinee_."[41]