Throughout the story, it’s clear that the four outcasts are not saints, suggesting that perhaps the town was right to brand the four as immoral. Thus, through the tragic end that befalls the outcasts and the innocents alike, the story suggests that people can’t easily be pinned down as moral or immoral, and that punishment is not always deserved. Likewise, although Harte doesn’t exactly portray the outcasts as heroes, he also doesn’t show them to have done anything to deserve their deaths, either. While it may seem like justice has been served, the deaths of these two thoroughly innocent people (one of which, Tom, is literally nicknamed “The Innocent”) complicate notions of morality and punishment, as they clearly didn’t deserve to die.
And indeed, tragedy does strike: at least three of the four outcasts die in the mountains, as does an innocent couple that falls in with the group. Society firmly brands these four outcasts as immoral and thus deserving of whatever fate may befall them as the make the dangerous journey through the mountains to the next town over. In Bret Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” a committee of citizens from a struggling mining town in Gold Rush-era California banishes a group of undesirable residents: John Oakhurst (a gambler), Mother Shipton and the Duchess (prostitutes), and Uncle Billy (a drunk).
