Roaring Camp

The settlement Roaring Camp sounds like a wild place to live in. I would think it would be fun to live there. When Harte writes about how the gamblers gamble all basally anything and all seem to drink freely almost every day. The character of Stumpy is the main character in this story. I found the name of Stumpy to be pretty ironic with him being a short squatty guy. But the whole story is based on a vile creature named Cherokee Sal.  At firs I thought Sal was 100% a man but the Indian ended up being a women. She didn’t have such a good reputation in the camp. When she died there was a formal meeting to determine what would happen to her baby. No one wanted this baby due to the fact Cherokee Sal was such a renegade. There were numerous ideas to decide what to do with his baby. They even suggested sending the baby away to another camp named Red Dog. The only reason they didn’t was because they thought the baby would be traded away. But this baby was something different.

 Everyone in town came to see this baby and give gifts to him. They gave gold, a revolver, and a tobacco box etc. etc. to this child. The baby even bit Kentuck on the finger in which he shouted some bad words at this baby. This baby got all different names because Cherokee Sal didn’t provide a name for this baby. Some names that he got were the kid, Stumpy’s boy, and or Coyote. The name they ended up was Luck: Tommy Luck. The town took this baby end and Roaring Camp’s culture totally changed during this boy’s life. The town grew and the rules changed to fit Luck’s life. Roaring Camp was known around the land as a loud, obnoxious community but they were now not allowed to scream or yell anywhere near Stumpy’s house where Luck lived. As soon as things seem to be going well things take a turn for the worst. At first the streams turned to rivers, the rivers turned to lakes, and gold filled the rivers near Roaring Camp. Luck was thought to have brought this luck to the land. But with this gold in these raging rivers brought a Flood that destroyed all of Roaring Camp. It even killed Knetuck with Luck in his arms. This was not “Lucky” for Roaring Camp. Seems a bit ironic of how the story ended.