married in London. Returning to America alone, he was arrested, imprisoned, and then released in 1865. According to Louis Sigaud's
Belle Boyd, Confederate Spy,
Hardinge was eager to rejoin his wife in England, but he never did. Sigaud insists that he must have died in the attempt, thus paving the way for his widow to marry again, which she did several times. In fact, Hardinge was in San Francisco about this time.
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The impression he made on Stoddard's persona, Paul Clitheroe, matches the account of Miss Boyd. This dashing stranger is "swarthily handsome, with the physique of a trained athlete." He is "possessed of strong personal magnetism; there was no manner of doubt about that." Foxlair's air of mystery is enhanced by ''all kinds of romantic rumors . . . that he had been a Rebel Spy, or the husband of a Rebel Spy, and a privateersman in the Spanish Main, etc., etc. Of all these he could speak most entertainingly."
5
In the novel Paul yields to the impulses of his heart and falls in love with this charmer, with whom he drinks, dines, carouses, and sleeps. In real life, Hardinge apparently left the Bay Area as mysteriously as he had arrived. After an exposé was printed in one of the dailies, the "Prince of Frauds" vanished, taking with him a piece of Stoddard's heartand some of his clothes as well!
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While the details of the Wylde Hardinge affair remain obscure, Stoddard's career as "Boy Poet" can be charted clearly. He made his poetic debut in book form with the publication of
Outcroppings,
the first anthology of California verse. A small quarto in gilt and purple, the book was edited by Bret Harte and published in December 1865, in time for the Christmas trade. Of the forty-two poems in the volume, four were Stoddard's, and these received mixed reviews in the local press. The Sacramento
Union
praised Stoddard's "Keats-like" quality, while, contrarily, the Virginia City
Territorial Enterprise
found that his verses were "frequently constructed without skill." A spirited controversy soon erupted over the book as a whole, along the lines that divided the "redskins" from the "palefaces," who dominated the anthology. The book smacked of a "mutual admiration society," complained the
Parajo Times.
6
The Gold Hill
Daily News,
according to George Stewart's
Bret Harte,
"called the whole collection effeminate, unworthy of the virile West, and epitomized it as 'purp-stuff,' an epithet which thirty years later still stuck in Harte's memory."
7
Franklin Walker has noted that the "he-men among Pacific Coast poets were outraged." Where, they asked, was John Swett's "In the Mines"? And they sniggered at the
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