The poetical works of Joaquin Miller,
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Sherman, Ph.D. Professor of English in the University of Illinois <<K G.P. Putnam’s Sons IS^ewYork & London tElje 'Knickerbocker Press X923 Copyright, 1923 by Abbie Leland Miller Made in the United States of America PREFACE The justification of this edition, undertaken with the ap¬ proval of Mrs. Miller, is that for the first time it exhibits the full range of Joaquin Miller’s poetical works in a single volume. The Bear edition in six volumes, which he had prepared in his later years, must be regarded as an interesting but somewhat chaotic personal repository rather than as a definitive popular edition. Following his text and his general plan, yet with numer¬ ous rearrangements and additions, I have reprinted here all the poems which he gathered into that storehouse ; but in the interests of condensation and coherence have omitted his shredded memoirs, his four plays in prose, his essays and his sheaf of press notices, and have greatly abridged his copious running commen¬ tary. In compensation I have added more than fifty poems which he discarded or overlooked but which are either of intrinsic merit or of value to the student of his development. The whole of the rare Portland volume, Joaquin , Et Al., is reprinted from the orig¬ inal text, except “Joaquin” and “Benoni,” which Miller had revised and incorporated in Songs of the Sierras. The “Fallen Leaves” series is restored from the American edition of Songs of the Sun-Lands , 1873, except in the case of “Thomas of Tigre,” “Yosemite,” and “Dead in the Sierras,” where the text of the Bear edition is followed. The other principal additions are the series from Shadows of Shasta and from The Building of the City Beautiful; and “Light of the Southern Cross,” printed from a pamphlet supplied by Mrs. Miller, to whom and to her daughter Juanita I am indebted for various information contained in the Introduction. S. P. S. The Ideal and the Real A Dove of St. Mark Como .... Sunrise in Venice Vale! America. Rome .... Attila’s Throne, Torcello Venice A Hailstorm in Venice Santa Maria: Torcello In a Gondola The Capucin of Rome • 311 • 3i3 • 323 • 330 • 332 • 333 • 339 ' 339 • 34i • 342 • 343 • 344 • 345 FROM SHADOWS OF SHASTA, 1881 . 347 Mount Shasta . . * • 349 A Land That Man Has Newly Trod .... 349 The Mountains . 349 For the Right . 350 viii Contents; PAGE 0, the Mockery of Pity „ • • • 350 0 Tranquil Moon • • • 350 LOG CABIN LINES .... 35i The Soldier’s Home, Washington 353 Olive ...... 356 The Battle Flag at Shenandoah 356 The Lost Regiment. 357 Newport News .... 359 The Coming of Spring 359 Summer Moons at Mount Vernon 360 The Poem by the Potomac 360 Washington by the Delaware. 360 The Bravest Battle 361 THE ULTIMATE WEST. 363 To Juanita .... 365 California’s Resurrection. 366 Pleasant to the Sight 366 The Trees ..... 367 A Hard Row for Stumps. 367 The Gold That Grew by Shasta Town 368 The Sioux Chief’s Daughter 370 A Shasta Tale of Love 373 Love in the Sierras. 374 Old Gib at Castle Rocks. 375 Comanche ..... 377 Montara ..... 378 The Larger College 378 To the Pioneers 379 49 ...... 380 San Diego. 380 Pioneers to the Great Emerald Land 381 Alaska. • 382 Contents IX The American Ocean Twilight at the Hights Arbor Day California's Cup of Gold. By the Balboa Seas. Magnolia Blossoms. California’s Christmas The Men of Forty-Nine. Custer. The Heroes of America “The Fourth” in Oregon. An Answer Karnak FROM THE BUILDING OF THE CITY BEAUTIFUL, 1893 Feed My Sheep. Under the Syrian Stars. The Growing of a Soul. How Beautiful are the Feet The Sermon on the Mount In the Sweat of Thy Face The Christ in Egypt Awaiting the Resurrection at The Voice of Toil The Foundation Stones The First Law of God Lo! On the Plains of Bethel How Shall Man Surely Save His Soul Under the Olive Trees From Out the Golden Doors of Dawn The Sun Lay Molten in the Sea He Walked the World With Bended Heai The Day Sat by With Banner Furled The Toil of God .... The Blessed Bees .... D PAGE . 382 • 383 • 383 • 383 • 384 • 384 • 384 • 385 . 386 . 386 • 387 • 389 • 391 • 393 • 393 • 393 • 394 • 394 • 395 . 395 • 396 • 397 . 397 • 398 • 398 • 399 . 400 . 400 . 401 . 401 . 401 • 403 . 403 x Contents Man’s Books .... The Truly Brave What If We All Lay Dead Below Put Up Thy Sword. Why, Know You Not Soul Speaks to Sou The Voice of the Dove ENGLISH THEMES .... England. St. Paul’s. Westminster Abbey. Oh, for England’s Old Time Thunder! At Lord Byron’s Tomb Dead in the Long, Strong Grass The Passing of Tennyson. Riel, the Rebel Mother Egypt .... Africa ..... Boston to the Boers MORE SONGS FROM THE HIGHTS The Poet. And Oh, the Voices I Have Heard The World Is a Better World The Fortunate Isles To Save a Soul The Light of Christ’s Face Good Buddha Said “Be Clean, Be Clean True Greatness On the Firing Line. Mothers of Men After the Battle Our Heroes of To-day ft PAGE 403 404 404 405 405 405 407 409 409 410 410 410 412 412 413 413 414 415 4W 419 419 419 420 420 421 421 422 422 423 423 424 Contents XI PAGE A Dead Carpenter ........ 425 Question? . 425 Don’t Stop at the Station Despair . 426 For Those Who Fail . 426 The River of Rest . 427 Death Is Delightful ....... 427 The Song of the Silence ....... 428 Tomorrow . 428 Finale . 428 MISCELLANEOUS LINES . 431 The Missouri ......... 433 Down the Mississippi at Night ..... 433 By the Lower Mississippi ....... 434 Her Picture ......... 434 Christmas by the Great River ..... 435 He Loves and Rides Away ...... 435 The Queen of My Dreams ...... 437 Those Perilous Spanish Eyes ...... 438 Montgomery at Quebec . . 439 The Defence of the Alamo ...... 439 A Nubian Face on the Nile . . 440 Peter Cooper ......... 440 The Dead Millionaire ....... 440 Garfield . . 441 To Andrew Carnegie . 441 Lincoln Park . 442 v'Resurgo San Francisco ....... 442 Cuba Libre ......... 444 The Dead Czar . . 445 The Little Brown Man . 446 Chilkoot Pass . 447 The Fourth in Hawaiian Waters . 447 Light of the Southern Cross ...... 448 xn Contents PAGE SEMI-HUMOROUS SONGS. In Classic Shades That Gentle Man From Boston William Brown of Oregon Horace Greeley’s Drive. That Faithful Wife of Idaho Saratoga and the Psalmist A Turkey Hunt in Texas. USLAND .... That Ussian of Usland Says Plato Welcome to the Great American Oc Two Wise Old Men of Omar’s Land SONGS OF THE AMERICAN SEAS Columbus .... A Song of Creation. With Love to You and Yours Adios .... NOTES INDEX OF FIRST LINES. EAN • • • • * » 453 455 456 458 460 462 463 464 466 466 467 468 469 473 475 476 540 564 567 581 585 INDEX OF TITLES INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Joaquin Miller was a picturesque figure on the American scene for more than forty years. The romantic life which he had conceived and which he had, in considerable measure, enacted, he recorded in both verse and prose, with due regard for the at¬ tention of posterity. Though much of his poetry is a genuine conquest, he wrote too easily and he wrote too much. In the summer of 1921, only eight years after his death, though occa¬ sional curious pilgrims visited his home on The Hights above San Francisco Bay, and carried off a stone from his monument to Moses The Law-Giver, booksellers of a dozen shops in the cities that fringe the bay looked up with surprise when one en¬ quired for a copy of his works, and replied that they had none. It is not strange that popular interest refuses to float a six-volume edition of Miller. But our literature is not so rich in distinctive national types that we can afford to let this poetical pioneer fade, as he is now in danger of fading, into a colorless shadow like the once famous scouts who accompanied Fremont into the West. He is, to be sure, difficult to fix for an adequate portrait, be¬ cause in his time he played several parts ; and he himself was never quite sure in which of his various costumes and poses he would most adorn the national gallery. An emigrant from the Middle Border, a gold-hunter of the Far West, an Indian fighter, a fron¬ tier judge, he first rose above the horizon, in 1871, with assist¬ ance and cheers from England, as the long-haired top-booted ‘ ‘ poet of the Sierras. ’ 5 Even at the outset of his career, he was not quite satisfied with that role. His own early aspiration was rather to be known as “the American Byron” ; and, in keeping with that 3 4 Sntrobuction high calling, he shook off the dust of his native land, wandered for a time in “exile,” and bore through Italy and the Mge&n Isles the pageant of his bleeding heart. Following his personal contact with the Pre-Raphaelites in London, this impressionable mountaineer discipled himself for a brief period in the early ’seventies to Swinburne and the Rossettis, was intensely “aesthe¬ tic,” and contemplated devoting himself to the Orient. Return¬ ing to America about 1875, he made through his middle years numerous ventures in prose fiction and drama, ranging all the way from the Forty-Niners and the Indians of the Pacific slope to fast life in New York and to the more or less autobiographical affairs of the artist Alphonso Murietta in Italy ( The One Fair Woman ) . In what we may call his final period, after his return to California in the middle ’eighties, there grew strong in him a sense that he was the leader of a native poetical movement, a spiritual seer with Messianic or at least prophetic mission ; and in the flow¬ ing hair and beard of his last years, stalking majestically under the trees which he had planted by his monuments on The Hights, and gazing dreamily out over the Pacific, he looked the part. Now, whatever one may think of Miller’s actual contribution to poetry or to prose fiction, this evolution of an Indian fighter into the Moses of the Golden Gate is an extraordinary phe¬ nomenon. Considered merely as a detached individual, he is abundantly interesting to the biographer. But he repays sympathetic curiosity most generously perhaps when one re¬ gards and studies him as a register of the power exerted upon the individual by the American environment and the na¬ tional culture, even at their thinnest and crudest. To study him in this fashion the first requisite is a more coherent account of his career than has been hitherto available. Joaquin Miller was his own principal hero, but by a singular fatality his adventures have never been adequately written. Certain scenes and events he himself sketched repeatedly ; but concerning many passages of his history he was extremely reticent. What is more serious, he had Sntrobuctton 5 no steady narrative power. Lifelong an adventurous rover, in love with action, he finds it next to impossible to stick to the thread of his story. As soon as he grasps the pen, he overflows with sentiment and moralization and he riots in description. Consequently his longer poems frequently produce the effect of panorama; and the feeling which they present remains obscure till the shifting pictures are connected and explained by the events of his own life. To the student of American culture, the case of Joaquin Miller is the more valuable from the fact that he did not — like Bret Harte, for example — put on the frontier as a literary gar¬ ment, after an eastern upbringing. By birth and ancestry he belonged in the great migration which settled the Middle Border and the Far West. He was born in 1841, in a covered wagon, “at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio.” His mother, Margaret Witt of Dutch stock from North Carolina, and his father, Hulings Miller of Scotch stock from Kentucky, were married in Indiana; and after some oscillation between Indiana and Ohio, gravitated slowly westward for a decade through the Miami Reservation and up along the banks of the Wabash and the Tippecanoe rivers, before they heard a clear call to follow the overland trail to the coast. Meanwhile they made various cabin homes for their young family. The mother cooked and sewed and wove and spun. The father worked his little clearings, failed as storekeeper, served as magistrate, and kept school for the children of the wilderness. It was a rough life, but every reference of Miller to his childhood indicates that it was in many respects a good and a happy life; and every reference to his parents is marked by a tenderness without con¬ descension. These simple people were impecunious, restless, and not very shrewd — rather sentimental and visionary. But they were honest and pious, with the pacificism of the Quaker discipline and the abolitionism of Horace Greeley; they were loyal to one another and gentle and affectionate in all the family re- 6 Jfntrotmction lationships; they were kindly in their intercourse with the In¬ dians of the Reservation; and they were hospitable with their meagre shelter to wanderers less fortunately circumstanced. Most of the parents’ traits ultimately reappeared in the son, from their hospitality to their turn for roving. The migratory influences from his immediate family were reenforced by the spirit of the age. The Millers were not alone in finding it difficult to “settle down” in the eighteen-forties. It was an expansive and exploratory epoch in both the physical and the intellectual senses. The East was in a philosophical and social ferment. Descendants of the Puritans, corporally resident in Concord, were extending their mental frontiers to Greece and India; and in 1841 Emerson published the first series of his Essays, “striking up” for a new world. It is not clear that these expan¬ sive utterances promptly reached the Indiana settlement. But between 1842 and 1844 Fremont started a movement which was the material complement of Transcendentalism by his series of bold expeditions to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon, and Cali¬ fornia. Fremont’s account of these explorations Hulings Miller borrowed from an Indian agent and read in the evenings to his assembled family. “ I was never so fascinated,” says Joaquin, “ I never grew so fast in my life. Every scene and circumstance in the narrative was painted in my mind to last, and to last forever.” The hide of the “woolly white horse” celebrated in Fremont’s presidential campaign is exhibited to this day in Miller’s home in California; and it may be mentioned here that Fremont’s guide, the hunter and Indian fighter Kit Carson, is the hero of one of Miller’s most readable poems. In 1845 Texas was admitted to. the Union, and Sam Houston, another of the poet’s western he¬ roes, was elected to the United States Senate. At about this time the Mormons, whom he was to commemorate in The Danites, were drifting westward through Illinois and Missouri; and in 1847 Brigham Young led the faithful into the valley of the Great Salt Lake. In 1849 the cry, “Gold is discovered in California,” introduction 7 ran like prairie fire among our middle-borderers, and doubled the attraction of the full section of land offered to each settler in Oregon, in a bill introduced by Senator Linn of Missouri. By 1850 still another of Miller’s heroes, the enigmatic William Walker, was in California, soon to be preparing his filibustering excursions into Mexico and Nicaragua. To add the last attrac¬ tion General Joe Lane, once a pupil of Hulings Miller, in the sugar camps of Indiana, had been appointed governor of Oregon. The multiplied appeals of the Far West had become irresist¬ ible. As soon as they could equip themselves for the journey, three years after the discovery of gold, the Millers started fo: the promised land. With a presentiment on his father’s part that it would some day be a pleasure to go over the record, Joaquin, then in his eleventh year, kept a journal of -he great expedition. Though this unfortunately was lost, the poetic residuum of his impressions is preserved in “ Exodus for Oregon” and “The Ship in the Desert.” As he recalled their adventure many years later, they set out in wagons on the seventeenth of March, 1852; in May, they crossed the Missouri above St. Joe, where they found the banks for miles crowded with tents of the emigrants; followed the Platte River; threaded Fremont’s South Pass over the Rockies; rested at Salt Lake City; skirmished with the Indians in the desert; descended to the head waters of the Snake River; crossed the Cascade Mountains at the Dalles; and, after seven months and five days, ended their march of three thousand miles in Oregon, near the middle of the Willamette Valley, “the most poetic, gorgeous and glorious valley in flowers and snow-covered mountains on the globe.” Miller’s enthusiasm for the scenery of Oregon is only equalled by his enthusiasm for the new settlers : “The vast multitude,” he declares, that fought their way across the plains in the face of cholera, hostile Indians, famine, and drouth “was, as a rule, religious, and buried their dead with hymns and prayers, all along the dreary half year’s journey on which no 8 Sntrobuction coward ever ventured, and where the weak fell by the wayside, leaving a natural selection of good and great people, both in soul and body.” It was about two years after the establishment of the Millers in Oregon that Joaquin’s independent adventures began. They had cultivated a little land, bought a few cows and sheep and hens, and were running a tavern in a small way. The father and elder brother were now absent, teaching school, and Joaquin and his younger brother Jimmy were left with their mother to look after the place. Stories brought up from the mining camps of California by pedlars and itinerant preachers had for some time been making him restless; and it had been conceded, he says, that he was ultimately to be allowed to seek his fortune in the wicked and dangerous territory to the southward. In his four¬ teenth year, anticipating the parental consent, he ran away, and joining a party of miners who were opening a placer claim in a wooded gulch by the Klamath River, just below the border be¬ tween Oregon and California, he offered his services as cook and dishwasher. Joaquin was at this time small for his age, slender, pale, frail-looking, with hair of the color of “hammered gold,” reaching to his shoulders. The camp diet of bacon and beans did not agree with him, and his first mining experience was terminated by a serious attack of scurvy. He was nursed back to health in Yreka by Dr. Ream and a “kind little Chinaman” ; and then was taken by a mysterious stranger to ano' her camp for the winter by the forks of several little streams which flow into the Klamath River from the north of Mt. Shasta. “Here,” he says, “ I laid the scene Sntrobuctton 9 of ‘The Danites,’ my famous play, but have always been sorry I printed it, as it is unfair to the Mormons and the Chinese.” The tall stranger with whom he spent the winter is another of Miller’s heroes, whom at this period he seems to have regarded with un¬ qualified adoration. He figures so largely and mysteriously in his work that he requires identification. In the introduction to the collected poems he is described merely as “the Prince,” and is said to have gone “south,” in the spring of 1855. But in Life Among the Modocs , 1873, he is represented as a very handsome and romantic professional gambler of great courage and chival¬ rous nature who was generally understood to be a prince, but who, after fighting with Walker in Nicaragua, acknowledged himself to be only plain James Thompson, an American. In 1876, Miller dedicated his First Fam'lies of the Sierras as follows: “To my old companion in arms, Prince Jamie Tomas, of Leon, N icar agua . ” B ut that this ‘ ‘ Prince J amie T omas ’ ’ was the J ames Thompson of Life Among the Modocs and the mysterious stranger of the autobiographical sketch is made clear at last by a footnote to the poem called “ Thomas of Tigre,” in the fourth volume of the Bear edition. After the departure of “the Prince,” the most influential friend of the strange boyhood days on Mt. Shasta was another rather mysterious figure, Joseph De Bloney, whom Miller had met in the spring of 1 855. In an apparently serious sketch of him, included in Memorie And Rime , De Bloney is described as “a California John Brown in a small way.” According to this ac¬ count, he was of an old and noble Swiss family, and had probably crossed the plains with Fremont under an impulse similar to that which animated Brigham Young in Utah and Walker in Nicara¬ gua — an impulse to found a new state. “His ambition was to unite the Indians about the base of Mount Shasta and establish a sor,; of Indian republic, the prime and principal object of which was to set these Indians entirely apart from the approach of the white man, draw an impassable line, in fact, behind which the IO 3Jntrobuctton Indian would be ecure in his lands, his simple life, his integrity, and his purity. ... It was a hard undertaking at best, peril¬ ous, almost as much as a man’s life was worth to befriend an Indian in those stormy days on the border, when every gold- hunter . . . counted it his privilege, to shoot an Indian on sight. An Indian sympathizer was more hated in those days, is still, than ever was an abolitionist. . . . De Bloney gradually gathered about twenty-five men around him in the mountains, took up homes, situated his men around him, planted, dug gold, did what he could to civilize the people and subdue the savages. . . . But he had tough elements to deal with. The most sav¬ age men were the white men. The Indians, the friendly ones, were the tamest of his people. These white men would come and go; now they would marry the Indian women and now join a pros¬ pecting party and disappear for months, even years. At one time they nearly all went off to join Walker in Nicaragua.” Under the influence of this odd character, young Joaquin seems for the time to have forgotten the Oregon homestead, and to have embraced the dream of a little Indian republic on Mt. Shasta. Between 1855 and 1859 he represents himself as living in the shadow of the mountains with De Bloney and the Indians and “Indian Joe,” a scout and horsetrader of German birth, who had been with Fremont, and who furnished Miller some of the materials for his poems. He was also on intimate terms with the Indian chief Blackbeard, who, he remarks in Memorie And Rime , had “a very beautiful daughter,” and gave him a “beautiful little valley,” where he built a cabin, and “first began to write.” According to Life Among the Modocs, a romance with a biographi¬ cal core, he married the chief’s daughter and became eventuallv the leader in the movement to unite the tribes in an Indian re¬ public. These stories of his Indian bride and of his fighting de¬ fiance of the white men seem rather more plausible when one forgets that he was but fourteen when he remarked the beauty of the girl and only seventeen when he assumed the responsibilities Jfntrobuctton ii for which, according to Memorie And Rime, De Bloney’s growing inebriety disqualified him. Viewed from within by a romantic poet, this colony of ad¬ venturers and Indians was a noble enterprise for the preservation of an oppressed race; viewed from without it probably seemed more like a nest of horse-thieves. Its importance for Miller was partly in its development of his romantic sympathy with the outlaw. In a paper on “How I Came to be a Writer of Books,” contributed to Lippincotts in 1886, he illustrates this point, and, at the same time, explains the origin of his pen-name “Joaquin.” His parents had called him Cincinnatus Heine (or Hiner) ; but, during his sojourn on Mt. Shasta, his friends had already begun to call him by his now familiar name. According to this account, he had made several trips with Mexican horse and mule drivers down into Arizona and northern Mexico, and on these expedi¬ tions, “These Mexicans were most kind to me.” They, on the contrary, were treated by the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of Cali¬ fornia wi:h a brutality which was “monstrous.” “It was this,” says Miller “that had driven Joaquin Murietta, while yet a youth, to become the most terrible and bloody outlaw our land has ever known. A reward of many thousands had been offered for hi i head, he had been captured, killed, and his head was in spirits and on exhibition in San Francisco, when I took up my pen for the first time and wrote a public letter in defence of the Mexi¬ cans.” In consequence of this letter he was bante ingly identified by a Sacramento paper with ihe bandit. His friends continued the banter. The name was revived when he returned to Oregon, and was employed to twit him when he became an editor. And so he finally accepted it and used it in the title of his first book. In the chapter of his relations with the Indians there are mani¬ fold obscurr ies and contradictions. He adhered pretty consist¬ ently throughout his life to the assertion that he was in three Indian battles or campaigns, the Battle of Castle Rocks, the 12 Jfntrobuctton “ Pitt River War,” and a later campaign in Oregon. But according to one set of stories he figures as a renegade fighting with the Indians against the whites; while according to the other set of stories he is fighting with the whites against the Indians. The chief prose sources of the renegade story are Life Among the Modocs and Memorie And Rime ; but he still calls himself a ‘ ‘ renegade’ ’ in the introduction to the Bear edition. On the other hand, there is in existence among the papers preserved by the Miller family a petition for damages, never presented, in which Miller represents himself as the victim of Indian depredations; and in his annotations of the poem “Old Gib At Castle Rocks” he establishes by a sworn affidavit that this first battle was against the “Modocs and Other Renegades,” and that his wound in the head was received while he was fighting at Judge Gibson’s side. In Memorie And Rime , however, he declares that the battle of Castle Rocks was fought under the leadership of De Bloney, to punish unfriendly Indians for burning his camp. But in the introduction to the Bear edition, he says nothing of De Bloney; the leader of Miller’s party is there represented as Mountain Joe, who in the battle unites forces with Judge Gibson, the alcalde of the district. The discrepancies in his various accounts may be explained in three ways. First, Miller did in his poems and prose narratives deliberately adulterate his facts with imaginary elements in the interest of romance, and like his early model Lord Byron, he enjoyed and encouraged identification of himself with all his hard-riding, hard-fighting, and amorous heroes. Secondly, he tells us that as a result of his arrow wound in the head and neck at the Battle of Castle Rocks, “on the 15th day of June, 1855,” he lost his memory for months, was “nearly a year” in recovering, and was somewhat feeble minded for sometime after. Thirdly, if he ever actually became a renegade and participated in outlaw raids, when he returned to “civilization” he indulged in wise “lapses of memory.” Stitrobuctton i3 With a consciousness, then, that we are treading the uncertain border between fact and fiction, we pull the arrow from Joaquin’s neck in the summer of 1855, and commit him to the care of an Indian woman, who treats him as her son. Late in the fah, re¬ stored at last to his senses and beginning to recover his strength, he teaches school in a mining camp near Shasta City at night and tries to mine by day — rather strenuous activities for a feeble¬ minded convalescent ! But in the following spring, 1856, he again joins the red men on the mountain. “When the Modocs rose up one night and massacred eighteen men, every man in Pitt River Valley, I alone was spared”; — thus runs the introduction to the Bear edition — “and spared only because I was Los bobo , the fool. Then more battles and two more wounds. My mind was as the mind of a child and my memory is uncertain here.” But accord¬ ing to Memorie And Rime , news of the Pitt River massacre came to Joaquin in the spring of 1857, when he was encamped on the spurs of Mt. Shasta, “ sixty miles distant" ; so that it must have been in a later stage of the * 1 war ’ ’ that he got his ‘ ‘ bullet through the right arm.” Had he complicity in the massacre? He raises the question. He says that he knew in advance that it had been planned, and he sympathized with its perpetrators years later. Following it, he made an expedition to Shasta City for ammuni¬ tion to arm De Bloney’s Indians “against the brutal and aggres¬ sive white men”; had a horse shot under him by the pursuing whites, stole another horse, was overtaken, threatened with hanging, lodged in Shasta City jail, “and my part in the wild attempt to found an Indian republic was rewarded with a prompt indictment for stealing horses.” This, he says, was in 1859. After long confinement, he was delivered from jail by the Indians on the night of the 4th of July, thrown upon a horse, “and such a ride for freedom and fresh air was never seen before.” (See Memorie And Rime , pp. 234-235, Life Among the Modocs , chap, xxx, and The Tale of the Tall Alcalde.) Miller hints, in Memorie And Rime, at one more disastrous 14 Sntrobuctton attempt to carry out De Bloney’s plan for the republic, followed by separation from his leader, and flight to Washington Territory. But in the introduction to the Bear edition, he interposes at this point in his career, though without dates and vaguely and briefly , his connection with the filibuster William Walker. “I, being a renegade,” he says, “descended to San Francisco and set sail for Boston, but stopped at Nicaragua with Walker.” In his poem “With Walker in Nicaragua,” he represents him¬ self as riding side by side with the filibuster in his campaigns and as treated by him like a son ; and he always encouraged the com¬ mon belief that this poem had a substantial autobiographical core. There is a good deal of evidence for concluding that it had none. Walker sailed from San Francisco in May and landed in Nica¬ ragua on June 16, 1855. On the previous day, Miller was wounded at Castle Rocks in northern California. In May, 1857, Walker left Nicaragua and was a paroled prisoner in the United States till August, i860, when he landed in Honduras, where he was executed on the 12th of September in the same year. Miller later associated himself with his hero by publishing the last words of Walker, obtained from the priest who attended the execution; but Miller says in his notes on the poem in the Bear edition: “I was not with him on this last expedition.” Of course the intended implication is that he was with Walker on a pre¬ vious expedition. Recruits from California sailed down to join the filibuster at frequent intervals, it is true; but, if any credit is to be given 'to Miller’s Indian stories, he was recovering from his Castle Rocks wound from June, 1855, till the spring of 1856, when he joined the red men on the mountains; he spends the winter on the spurs of Mt. Shasta, and in the spring of 1857 he becomes impli¬ cated in the Pitt River Valley War, in which he is again seriously wounded ; and his connections with this affair are not terminated till 1859. He might then have set out in time to join Walker’s fatal expedition in Honduras; but he tells us that he did not. Walker, in his account of The War in Nicaragua , published in Ilntrotmction 15 i860, nowhere mentions the boy whom he is alleged to have fathered. One’s final impression is that the poem is pure fiction, colored by the tales and published narratives of the filibusters and perhaps by Miller’s subsequent acquaintance with Central America. And this impression is strengthened by Miller’s reply to one who asked him point blank whether he was ever with Walker in Nicaragua: “Was Milton ever in Hell?”1 The fiasco of De Bloney’s and Joaquin’s Mt. Shasta “repub¬ lic” fell, according to the legend, in the year of John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, and two years after the ejection of Walker from Nicaragua. In Miller’s mind these three curious attempts to escape from the jurisdiction of the United States became closely associated memories of forlorn hopes, with a singular appeal to his imagination. Writing at Harper’s Ferry in 1883 ( Memorie And Rime , 228 ff.), he gives this account of his movements and sentiments following his alleged connection with Walker and De Bloney: “I made my way to Washington Territory, sold my pistols, and settled down on the banks of the Columbia, near Lewis River, and taught school. And here it was that the story of John Brown, his raid, his fight, his capture, and his execution, all came to me. Do you wonder that my heart went out to him and remained with him? I, too, had been in jail. Death and disgrace were on my track, and might find me any day hiding there under the trees in the hearts of the happy children. And so, sympathizing, ! told these children over and over again the story of old John Brown there.” From i860 to 1870 Miller was chiefly an Oregonian, though he made many excursions from his base. We shall have to notice one more interesting inconsistency which casts a suspicion over his account of his life with the Indians. In the introduction to the Bear edition, he says in his baffling summary fashion, without dates, that on his return from being “with Walker,” he “went home, went to college some, taught school some, studied law at 1 This reply was related to me by Mrs. Miller. i6 Sntroiiuctton home some.” Now, in a note to the Bear edition (vol. n., p. 185) he speaks of teaching school in 1858 below Fort Vancouver, “ dur¬ ing vacation at Columbia College, the forerunner of the Oregon University”; and, in another note (vol. 1, p. 170), he says that he wrote, “the valedictory class poem” for Columbia College in 1859. It thus appears that his attendance at “Columbia College” falls in the period when, according to his other stories, he was engaged in his last desperate efforts to establish De Bloney’s “ Mt. Shasta republic” ; and his valedictory poem was apparently delivered in the year in which he fled from Californian justice to hide in Washington Territory. If one thinks of Miller as having taken a regular college course ending in 1859, then one must be prepared to dismiss most of the Mt. Shasta stories as mythical; and doubtless there is a large element of fiction in them. They are not, however, quite so in¬ consistent with the “college” course as at first sight they appear. Eugene City, in which the “college” was located, was not settled till 1854; and the institution, with its “pleasant campus,” in which the poem was perhaps delivered five years later was noth¬ ing more than a small town high school or seminary. And Miller, returning from California in 1858, or even as late as 1859^ might, after very brief instruction, have appeared as class poet in 1859. It is, moreover, unfortunately necessary to regard the statements about his own life made towards the close of his literary career with almost as much skepticism as those which he made near its outset; and for an interesting reason. In his last period as the seer on The Hights, Miller desired to be regarded as an authorita¬ tive man of letters; consequently he minimized his frontier up¬ bringing and magnified his education and general culture. Fur¬ thermore, he ultimately desired to be regarded as devoutly American and intensely pacifistic ; consequently he touched very lightly in later years the period when he was a secessionist, he skilfully hinted here and there that the stories of his outlawry were mythical, and he worked over his poems, making great ex- 3fntrotiuctton i7 cisions and adding new passages, with the purpose of harmonizing them with his declaration that he would rather starve than be celebrated as the poetic glorifier of war. 1 This was obviously a difficult task in the case of the bloody and imperialistic career of Walker. In the summer of 1861 Miller began other interesting adven¬ tures which are better attested. At this time he was riding Moss- man and Miller’s pony express; carrying letters and gold dust between Walla Walla, Washington, and the newly opened mines at Millersburg in Idaho. Attracted by certain contributions of “Minnie Myrtle” appearing in the newspapers of his pack, he wrote to her and had replies. His mining ventures yielded him enough to enable him to build a “beautiful new home” for his parents, and also to buy a newspaper. In 1863 he began to edit The Democratic Register in Eugene, Oregon, and he avowed south¬ ern sympathies which aroused the community. Though he had been brought up an ardent abolitionist and his elder brother John had entered the northern army, he himself had imbibed, in his “college,” which was tainted with disloyalty, or from the friends of Walker, who was a pro-slavery man, or elsewhere — principles and sentiments obnoxious to the aroused Unionist spirit of Oregon. As he explained it in Memorie And Rime , “when the war came, 1 “ ‘ The Tale of the Alcalde,”’ he says in his note in the Bear edition, “has been a fat source of feeding for grimly humorous and sensational writers, who long ago claimed to have found in it the story of my early life; and strangely enough I^was glad when they did so, and read their stories with wild delight. I don’t know why I alwTays encouraged this idea of having been an outlaw, but I recall that when Trelawny told me that Byron was more ambitious to be thought the hero of his wildest poems than even to be King of Greece I could not help saying to myself, as Napoleon said to the thunders preceding Water¬ loo, ‘We are of accord.’ The only serious trouble about the claim that I made the fight of life up the ugly steeps from a hole in an adobe prison-wTall to the foothills of Olympus instead of over the pleasant campus of a college is the fact that ‘our friends the enemy’ fixed the date at about the same time in which I am on record as reading my class poem in another land.” i8 Sntroliuctton and the armies went down desolating the South, then with that fatality that has always followed me for getting on the wrong side, siding with the weak, I forgot my pity for the one in my larger pity for the other.” His entrance into journalism brought him again to the atten¬ tion of his unknown correspondent, “Minnie Myrtle,” who was then living in a mining and lumber camp at Port Orford by the sea, not far from the southern boundary of Oregon. Twenty years later, when this lady died in New York, in May, 1883, Miller told in his own fashion the story of his brief unhappy re¬ lations with her. Since they made a turning point in his career and introduced into his poetry additional “Byronic” notes, let us have an abridgment of his own version of the affair as set forth in Memorie And Rime. “When I came down from the mountains and embarked in journalism, she wrote to me, and her letters grew ardent and full of affection. Then I mounted my horse and rode hundreds of miles through the valleys and over the mountains, till I came to the sea, at Port Orford, then a flourishing mining town, and there first saw ‘ Minnie Myrtle.’ Tall, dark, and striking in every re¬ spect, this first Saxon woman I had ever addressed had it all her own way at once. She knew nothing at all of my life, except that I was an expressman and country editor. I knew nothing at all of hers, but I found her with kind, good parents, surrounded by brothers and sisters, and the pet and spoiled child of the mining and lumber camp. . . . The heart of the bright and merry girl was brimming full of romance, hope, and happiness. I arrived on Thursday. On Sunday next we were married! Oh, to what else but ruin and regret could such romantic folly lead?” “Procuring a horse for her” — for she, too, was an excellent and daring rider — “we set out at once to return to my post, far away over the mountains.” After a week’s ride, the bridal couple reached their intended home in Eugene, “ but only to find that my paper had been suppressed by the Government, and we resolved Sntrobuctton 19 to seek our fortunes in San Francisco. But we found neither fortune nor friends in that great city.” In 1863 Mrs. Fremont was there, and Charles Warren Stoddard, and Prentice Mulford, and Ina Coolbrith. Bret Harte was writing for The Golden Era. The nucleus was already formed of the literary group which Mark Twain joined in 1864, and which launched The Californian and The Overland Monthly. Whether at this time Miller made any attempt to break into the ‘ ‘ western school ’ ’ does not appear. If he did so, we can understand his failure. He was still a very immature writer, though Stoddard records that he did contribute to The Golden Era , “from the backwood depths of his youthful obscurity.” But coming as he did in the midst of the Civil War to the outskirts of a group animated by Bret Harte, then en¬ gaged in writing strongly patriotic verse and prose, the editor of a paper which had just been suppressed for disloyalty could hardly have expected a very cordial reception. One is tempted to conjecture that Miller’s failure to establish a literary or journalistic connection in the city may perhaps have dashed a little the spirits of his bride. At any rate, he says that even while they were living in San Francisco, she had presenti¬ ments of “wreck and storm and separation for us.” If thwarted aspiration for more literary and social life than she had enjoyed in the lumber camp had stimulated these presentiments, they must have been strengthened when Joaquin bought a band of cattle and journeyed with his wife and baby to a new mining camp at Canyon City, in eastern Oregon. As for him, it was the life to which he had always been accustomed, and he threw himself into the task of establishing himself with unwonted application of his restless energy. He practised law among the miners, he planted the first orchard in the land, he led in his third Indian campaign, he was rewarded in 1866 by election, for a four-year term, as judge of the Grant County court, and finally, he had begun to occupy himself seriously with poetry. In 1868 he pub¬ lished a pamphlet of Specimens, and in 1869, Portland, Oregon, 20 Sntrobuctum his first book: “ Joaquin , Et Al., By Cincinnatus H. Miller,” — dedicated “To Maud.”1 Ambition and a multitude of business, as he depicted the matter, had made him not the most genial of companions : “Often I never left my office till the gray dawn, after a day of toil and a night of study. My health gave way and I was indeed old and thoughtful. Well, all this, you can see, did not suit the merry-hearted and spoiled child of the mines at all. She became the spoiled child here that she had been at her father’s, and naturally grew impatient at my persistent toil and study. But she was good all the time. Let me say here, once for all, that no man or woman can put a finger on any stain in this woman’s whole record of life, so far as truth and purity go. But she was not happy here. Impatient of the dull monotony of the exhausted mining camp. she took her two children and returned to her mother, while I sold the little home. 