However much he romanticized and theatricalized it, Belasco had a feel for the West. His youth was spent in San Francisco, and he had some direct knowledge of the camp life, though that of a generation later than the one depicted in Girl (he was born in 1853). But the writer of Romantic Realist fiction most intimately connected to the stageworld of Fanciulla, and the one most of help to us in getting through the shameless sentimentalities of the opera’s long opening sequence, would be Bret Harte. I don’t know if his short stories of life in the camps are read much anymore. But they went a long way toward building up the legend of the Rush in the American imagination. Belasco must have known them. One, probably his best one and, along with The Outcast of Poker Flats, his best known, is worth attention—The Luck of Roaring Camp. In that story, a baby of unknown paternity is born to the only woman in Roaring Camp, Cherokee Sal, who dies giving birth. The miners, unversed in infant care, nonetheless christen it and take on its nurture, with the milk of an ass as its principal source of nourishment. Unaccountably, the baby thrives, and as the local gold sources prove productive, so does the town. The miners name the baby “Luck,”  or “The Luck,” and, their tenderness and sense of propriety awakened by The Luck’s presence, begin to double down on personal hygiene, decorate their slapped-up houses with vines and flowers, and otherwise spruce up the place. There’s talk of inviting “decent families,” and even of building a hotel.

But the flush times don’t last. The winter of ’51, Harte tells us, was a famously brutal one in the Sierras. With the thaw, a great torrent flashes down through Roaring Camp, sweeping all before it. The survivors search frantically for The Luck, but in vain, until, a couple of miles downstream, the baby is found amid splintered timbers and debris, in the arms of one of the miners, Kentuck. The baby is dead, and Kentuck nearly so. But he’s able to whisper “I’ve got The Luck with me,” as he drifts off down “that shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea.”

Harte’s stories, whatever their lasting literary standing, give us the sense of a roiling, fragile, and temporary life, reliant on luck, at the mercy of a beautiful but ever-menacing environment, and suffused with a loneliness and longing for anything soft, anything feminine, that is also the setting for Fanciulla. The few female inhabitants of the camps were generally “loose women,” like Cherokee Sal or the opera’s spoken-of but unseen Nina Micheltorena. But then, there’s The Girl, or, operatically speaking, Minnie. The critic William Winter, writing of Belasco’s play, catalogues the many beauties and virtues of the character and others similar, whose fascinations apparently ” . . . filled the countryside of California in the halcyon days of ’49. That fortunate State, according to the testimony of novelists and bards, was densely populated, at that time, by girls of this enchanting order; but this particular Girl seems to have transcended all rivals.” ^(I)