The Luck of Roaring Camp

Cherokee Sal is described as “coarse” and “very sinful” and is characterized exclusively by the men’s perceptions of her. She is the lone woman at the camp, and she suffers as a result, laboring alone “without her sex’s intuitive tenderness and care” (1). As an Indigenous American woman, Sal’s existence brings the men’s racism and sexism to the fore, and they alternatively degrade and ignore her; the narrator introduces her by saying, “Perhaps the less said of her the better” (1). After she gives birth to Tommy, she is not mentioned again, though the narrator notes that “[w]ithin an hour she had climbed, as it were, that rugged road that led to the stars, and so passed out of Roaring Camp, its sin and shame, forever” (2), implying that Sal was redeemed from her sins in death.

With this, Sal mirrors two biblical women. The narrator mentions “the primal curse” and “the first transgression” (1) when describing her labor, aligning her with Eve. At the same time, she dies giving birth to Tommy, the story’s Christ figure, simultaneously aligning her with the Virgin Mary. With this, Harte subverts his era’s ideal feminine archetype, which elevated white, virginal women.