Harris lived his life in the realm of extravagant promises, fabulous plans, spectacular gestures, and dramatic poses. His friends and acquaintances generally reacted to him in equally extreme manners; it was apparently difficult for him to have anything other than admirers or enemies, with quite a few people shifting from one category to the other. He was a gifted listener and storyteller, with a tendency to relate incidents in others' lives with himself as the protagonist. In the second volume of his autobiography he describes the actions of his memory: "It began to color incidents dramatically. For example, I had been told a story by someone, it lay dormant in me for years; suddenly some striking fact called back the tale and I told it as if I had been present and it was fulfilled with dramatic effects, far beyond the first narration." He was not, for example, a ranch hand, as he claimed, but he probably picked up the stories that make up On the Trail from the cowhands he met when he was a young man working in his family's butcher business and while traveling across the United States by train.
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