I
The life of Miller is a series of foot-notes to his poems. He was born on the line of the westward march. In the valuable autobiographical preface to the Bear edition of his poems he writes: "My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio." That was in 1841, and the name given him was Cincinnatus Hiner Miller. His parents, like those of Mark Twain, were of that restless generation that could abide nowhere long, but must press ever on and on westward. His mother's people had migrated from the Yadkin River country in North Carolina with the Boones, "devoted Quakers in search of a newer land"; his grandfather Miller was a Scotchman, a restless pioneer who had fallen at Fort Meigs, leaving a family of small children to come up as they could in the wilderness. One of them, the father of the poet, picked up in a varied career along the border certain elements of book learning that enabled him to teach school in the settlement towns of Ohio and Indiana.
The boy's earliest memories were of the frontier with its land clearing, its Indian neighbors, and its primitive hardships. Schooling he received at the hands of his father. The first book that he could remember was Frémont's Explorations, read aloud to the family by the father until all knew it literally by heart, maps and all. Lured by its enthusiastic descriptions and by reports of a former pupil who had gone to Oregon and by the new act of Congress which gave to every homesteader six hundred and forty acres of land free, on March 17, 1852, with "two big heavily laden wagons, with eight yoke of oxen to each, a carriage and two horses for mother and baby sister, and a single horse for the three boys to ride," the family set out across the wild continent of America. "The distance," he records, "counting the contours of often roundabout ways, was quite, or nearly, three thousand miles. The time was seven months and five days. There were no bridges, no railroad levels, nothing of the sort. We had only the road as nature had made it. Many times, at night, after ascending a stream to find a ford, we could look back and see our smoldering camp-fires of the day before."
That heroic journey into the unknown West with its awful dangers, its romantic strangeness, its patriarchal conditions, its constant demand for self-dependence, made an indelible impress on the young lad. It was a journey of Argonauts, one of the thousands of journeys that made picturesque a whole epoch. He has described it in some of the most stirring of his poems. All through his poetry occur stanzas like this:
What strength! what strife! what rude unrest!
What shocks! what half-shaped armies met!
A mighty nation moving West,
With all its steely sinews set
Against the living forests. Hear
The shouts, the shots of pioneer,
The rending forests, rolling wheels,
As if some half-checked army reels,
Recoils, redoubles, comes again,
Loud-sounding like a hurricane.
He has described it too in prose that is really stirring. His dedicatory preface to The Ship in the Desert, London, 1876, is a poem of the Whitman order. Note a stanza like this:
How dark and deep, how sullen, strong and lionlike the mighty Missouri rolled between his walls of untracked wood and cleft the unknown domain of the middle world before us! Then the frail and buffeted rafts on the river, the women and children huddled together, the shouts of the brawny men as they swam with the bellowing cattle, the cows in the stormy stream eddying, whirling, spinning about, calling to their young, their bright horns shining in the sun. The wild men waiting on the other side; painted savages, leaning on their bows, despising our weakness, opening a way, letting us pass on to the unknown distances, where they said the sun and moon lay down together and brought forth the stars. The long and winding lines of wagons, the graves by the wayside, the women weeping together as they passed on. Then hills, then plains, parched lands like Syria, dust and alkali, cold streams with woods, camps by night, great wood fires in circles, tents in the center like Cæsar's battle camps, painted men that passed like shadows, showers of arrows, the wild beasts howling from the hills.
Two years with his parents on the new Oregon farm, and the lad ran away to the mines. "Go, I must. The wheels of the covered wagon in which I had been born were whirling and whirling, and I must be off." For a time he was cook in a mining camp, but it was work impossible for a boy of thirteen, and soon he was on his wanderings again, first with one Ream, an adventurer, then with Mountain Joe, a trader in half-wild horses. He was drawn into Gibson's fight with the Modocs, was wounded frightfully by an arrow that pierced close to the base of the brain, and later was nursed back to life by a squaw who had adopted him in place of her son who had fallen in the battle. "When the spring came and Mount Shasta stood out white and glorious above the clouds, I hailed him as a brother." And again he stole away and joined another band of Indians. "When the Modocs arose one night and massacred eighteen men, every man in the Pit River Valley, I alone was spared and spared only because I was Los bobo, the fool. Then more battles and two more wounds." For a long time his mind was like that of a child. The Indians indeed, as he records, treated him "as if [he] had been newly born to their tribe."
Soon I was stronger, body and soul. The women gave me gold—from whence?—and I being a "renegade," descended to San Francisco and set sail for Boston, but stopped at Nicaragua with Walker. Thence up the coast to Oregon, when strong enough. I went home, went to college some, taught school some, studied law at home some; but ever and ever the lure of the mountains called and called, and I could not keep my mind on my books. But I could keep my mind on the perils I had passed. I could write of them, and I did write of them, almost every day. The Tale of the Tall Alcalde, Oregonian, Californian, With Walker in Nicaragua—I had lived all these and more; and they were now a part of my existence.... Meantime I was admitted to the bar. Then came the discovery of gold in Idaho, Montana, and so on, and I was off like a rocket with the rest.
To call Miller illiterate, as many, especially in printing offices which have handled his copy, have done, is hardly fair. His father, it must be remembered, was a schoolmaster with the Scotch reverence for serious books and for education, and the boy's early schooling was not neglected. To say, on the other hand, as many, including the poet himself, have said, that he received a college education, is also to speak without knowledge. He did complete a course in Columbia University, Eugene, Oregon, in 1859, but it was an institution in no way connected with the present University of Oregon. It was, rather, a mission school maintained by the Methodist Church South, and, according to Professor Herbert C. Howe of the University of Oregon, "its instruction was, at its utmost stretch, not enough to carry its pupils through the first half of a high school course, and most of its pupils were of grammar grade." It was closed suddenly early in the Civil-War period because of the active Southern sympathies of its president, who was himself very nearly the whole "university." It is significant that at almost the same time the Eugene Democratic Register edited by Miller was suppressed for alleged disloyalty to the Union.
For a period the poet undoubtedly did apply himself with diligence to books. Of his fellow students at Eugene he has recorded, "I have never since found such determined students and omnivorous readers. We had all the books and none of the follies of the great centers." The mania for writing had seized him early. Assisted by his father, he had recorded the events of his trip across the plains in a journal afterwards burned with his parental home in Oregon. "The first thing of mine in print was the valedictory class poem, 'Columbia College.'" Undoubtedly during this period he read widely and eagerly. "My two brothers and my sister were by my side, our home with our parents, and we lived entirely to ourselves, and really often made ourselves ill from too much study. We were all school teachers when not at college."
Living away from the centers of culture, with books as exotic things that came from without, almost as from another world, Miller, like many another isolated soul, grew to maturity with the feeling that something holy lay about the creation of literature and that authors, especially poets, were beings apart from the rest of men. Poetry became to him more than an art: it became a religion. "Poetry," he declared in his first London preface, "is with me a passion which defies reason." It was an honest declaration. During the sixties as express messenger in the Idaho gold fields, as newspaper editor, and judge, he wrote verse continually—"I lived among the stars"—but he preserved of all he wrote only a few rather colorless pieces which he published in 1868 with the title Specimens. The next year he issued at Portland, Oregon, Joaquin et al, a book of one hundred and twenty-four pages. It was his salute to the literary world. He addressed it "To the Bards of San Francisco Bay," and his address sheds light upon the timid young poet:
I am as one unlearned, uncouth,
From country come to join the youth
Of some sweet town in quest of truth,
A skilless Northern Nazarine,
From whence no good can ever come.
I stand apart as one that's dumb:
I hope, I fear, I hasten home,
I plunge into my wilds again.
He followed his book down to what was to him the glorious city of art and of soul that would welcome him with rapture, for was he too not a bard? Says Charles W. Stoddard, "Never had a breezier bit of human nature dawned upon me this side of the South Seas than that poet of the Sierra when he came to San Francisco in 1870."[62]
But the great Western city, as did New York a few months later, went on totally unaware of his advent. The bards even of San Francisco Bay did not come to the borders of the town to welcome the new genius. They seemed unaware of his presence. Harte was inclined to be sarcastic, but finally allowed the Overland Monthly to say a word of faint praise for the young poet, despite what it termed his "pawing and curvetting." "His passion," it declared in a review written probably by Ina Coolbrith, "is truthful and his figures flow rather from his perception than his sentiment." But that was all. He considered himself persecuted. His associates in the law had made fun of the legal term in the title of his book, had hailed him as "Joaquin" Miller, and had treated him as a joke. "I was so unpopular that when I asked a place on the Supreme Bench at the Convention, I was derisively told: 'Better stick to poetry.' Three months later, September 1, 1870, I was kneeling at the grave of Burns. I really expected to die there in the land of my fathers." He would support himself as Irving had supported himself with his pen. He sought cheap quarters in the great city and began to write. February 1, 1871, he recorded in his diary: "I have nearly given up this journal to get out a book. I wanted to publish a great drama called 'Oregonian,' but finally wrote an easy-going little thing which I called 'Arazonian,' and put the two together and called the little book Pacific Poems. It has been ready for the printer a long time."
He took the manuscript from publisher to publisher until, as he declares, every house in London had rejected it. His reception by Murray shows the general estimate of poetry by London publishers in the early seventies:
He held his head to one side, flipped the leaves, looked in, jerked his head back, looked in again, twisted his head like a giraffe, and then lifted his long finger:
"Aye, now, don't you know poetry won't do? Poetry won't do, don't you know?"
"But will you not read it, please?"
"No, no, no. No use, no use, don't you know?"
Then in desperation he printed a part of it at his own expense under the title Pacific Poems and sent out copies broadcast to the press. Never was venture so unpromising crowned with results so startling. The little book was hailed everywhere as something remarkable. The St. James Gazette declared that the poem "Arazonian"—that was Miller's early spelling of the word—was by Browning. The new author was traced to his miserable lodgings and made a lion of, and before the year was over the whole original manuscript of Pacific Poems had been brought out in a beautiful edition with the title Songs of the Sierras. Its author's real name did not appear upon the title page. The poems were by "Joaquin Miller," a name destined completely to supersede the more legal patronymic. "The third poem in my first London book," he explains, "was called 'California,' but it was called 'Joaquin' in the Oregon book. And it was from this that I was, in derision, called 'Joaquin.' I kept the name and the poem, too, till both were at least respected."[63]
Few American books have been received by the English press, or any press for that matter, with such unanimous enthusiasm. Miller was the literary discovery of the year. The London Times declared the book the "most remarkable utterance America has yet given"; the Evening Standard called it poetry "the most original and powerful." The pre-Raphaelite brotherhood counted its author as one of their own number, and gave him a dinner. Browning hailed him as an equal, and the press everywhere celebrated him as "the Oregon Byron." The reason for it all can be explained best, perhaps, in words that W. M. Rossetti used in his long review of the poet in the London Academy: "Picturesque things picturesquely put ... indicating strange, outlandish, and romantic experiences." The same words might have been used by a reviewer of Byron's first Eastern romance on that earlier morning when he too had awakened to find himself famous. The book, moreover, was felt to be the promise of stronger things to come. "It is a book," continued Rossetti, "through whose veins the blood pulsates with an abounding rush, while gorgeous subtropical suns, resplendent moons, and abashing majesties of mountain form ring round the gladiatorial human life."