Bret Harte is a fondly remembered western writer who spent only eighteen of his sixty-six years in the American west -- in fact, he went on, in 1878, to get work as an American consul in Germany, and as far as we can tell, never came back to the United States. He died in 1902, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Peter's Church, in Frimley, Surrey, England.

Even so, the American west was in his heart, and that was what he wrote about -- here, in On the Frontier, including stories like "At the Mission of San Carmel," "A Blue Grass Penelope," and "Left Out on Lone Star Mountain."