Star, and in the California Home Journal. As she grew into young womanhood, Coolbrith was renowned for her beauty; she was selected to open a ball with Pío Pico, the last Mexican governor of California. In April 1858, at the age of 17, Coolbrith married Robert Bruce Carsley, an iron worker and part-time actor. However, she experienced abuse at his hands, and suffered further emotional pain from the death of the couple's infant son. An altercation between Pickett and Carsley resulted in a bullet mutilating Carsley's hand, requiring amputation. Carsley accused Coolbrith of infidelity, and she divorced him in a sensational public trial; the dissolution was finalized on December 30, 1861. Her later poem, "The Mother's Grief", was a eulogy to her lost son, but she never publicly explained its meaning; it was only upon Coolbrith's death that her literary friends discovered that she had ever been a mother. In 1862, Coolbrith moved with her mother, stepfather and twin half-brothers to San Francisco to ward off depression. She also changed her name from Josephine Donna Carsley to Ina Coolbrith. In San Francisco she found employment as an English teacher. Poet Coolbrith soon met Bret Harte and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, in San Francisco. She published poems in the Californian, a new literary newspaper formed in 1864 and edited by Harte and Charles Henry Webb. In 1867, four of Coolbrith's poems appeared in The Galaxy. In July 1868, Coolbrith supplied a poem, "Longing", for the first issue of the Overland Monthly, and served unofficially as co-editor with Harte in selecting poems, articles and stories for the periodical. She became a friend of actress and poet Adah Menken, adding to Menken's credibility as an intellectual, but was unable to impress Harte of Menken's worth. Coolbrith also worked as a schoolteacher for extra income. For a decade, Coolbrith supplied one poem for each new issue of the Overland Monthly. After the 1866 publication of four of her poems in an anthology edited by Harte, Coolbrith's "The Mother's Grief" was positively reviewed in The New York Times. Another poem, "When the Grass Shall Cover Me", appeared unattributed in an anthology of John Greenleaf Whittier's favorite works by other poets, entitled Songs of Three Centuries (1875); Coolbrith's poem was judged the best of that group. In 1867, recently widowed Josephine Clifford arrived at the Overland Monthly to take a position as secretary.