| Sumario: | These erasures are not a shortcoming of the poet's imagination but rather a function of how the poet deploys the conventions of the labor poem to particular colonial ends, representing the environment as a foreign threat, elevating the activities of the Anglo laborer, and justifying the forms of settlement about which the homesick mining poem appears so ambivalent. These poems frequently participated in a larger vogue for homesickness verse, poems gazing wistfully back on lost homesteads, families, loves, and climates or poems looking hopefully toward a future of wealthy returns to eastern hearths. In this two-stanza landscape poem within a poem, Harte presents these connections more visibly and, in doing so, suggests that the poet's "Brown foundling", his "Babe of primeval wildernesses", could be a Native child just as easily as it could be a pine cone. The poem's representation of different sightlines emphasizes the poet's projections and imaginings, suggesting that Mount Shasta and the valley and plains in the poem are productions of the conventions of landscape poetics.
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