[¹] Copyright, 1873, 1882, by Harper & Brothers.
JOAQUIN MILLER.
“THE POET OF THE SIERRAS.”
N the year 1851, a farmer moved from the Wabash district in Indiana to the wilder regions of Oregon. In his family was a rude, untaught boy of ten or twelve years, bearing the unusual name of Cincinnatus Hiner Miller. This boy worked with his father on the farm until he was about fifteen years of age, when he abandoned the family log-cabin in the Willamette Valley of his Oregon home to try [♦]his fortune as a gold miner.
[♦] ‘this’ replaced with ‘his’
A more daring attempt was seldom if ever undertaken by a fifteen year old youth. It was during the most desperate period of Western history, just after the report of the discovery of gold had caused the greatest rush to the Pacific slope. A miscellaneous and turbulent population swarmed over the country; and, “armed to the teeth” prospected upon streams and mountains. The lawless, reckless life of these gold-hunters—millionaires to-day and beggars to-morrow—deeming it a virtue rather than a crime to have taken life in a brawl—was, at once, novel, picturesque and dramatic.—Such conditions furnished great possibilities for a poet or novelist.—It was an era as replete with a reality of thrilling excitement as that furnished by the history and mythology of ancient Greece to the earlier [♦]Greek poets.