Harriet Mann—for the more familiar name of Olive Thorne Miller was the pen name adopted after her marriage—was born at Auburn, New York, where her father, Seth Hunt, was a banker; but she was of New England ancestry on both sides of the family, her paternal grandfather being an importing merchant of Boston, and her great-grandfather, Captain Benjamin Mann, having organized a company during the revolution of which he was in command at Bunker Hill.
From Auburn the family moved to Ohio when she was eleven years old, making the journey, in lieu of railroads, by “packet” on the canal through the Mohawk Valley, by steamer across Lake Erie, and finally by an old-fashioned thoroughbrace coach for twenty-five miles through Ohio—a journey full of romance to an imaginative child, and described entertainingly in one of Mrs. Miller’s delightful and in this case largely autobiographical child stories, ‘What Happened to Barbara.’ In Ohio she spent five years in a small college town where she attended private schools, among them one of the Select Schools of that generation, with an enrollment of some forty or fifty girls. At the age of nine, as she says, she “grappled with the problems of Watts on the Mind!” To offset the dreariness of such work, she and half a dozen of her intimate friends formed a secret society for writing stories, two members of the circle afterwards becoming well known writers. For writing and reading even then were her greatest pleasures. The strongest influence in her young life, she tells us, was from books. “Loving them above everything, adoring the very odor of a freshly printed volume, and regarding a library as nearest heaven of any spot on earth, she devoured everything she could lay her hands upon.” As she grew older the shyness from which she had always suffered increased painfully, and coupled with a morbid sensitiveness as to what she considered her personal defects made people a terror to her; but solitary and reticent, she had the writer’s passion for self expression and it is easy to understand her when she says, “To shut myself up where no one could see me, and speak with my pen, was my greatest happiness.”
In 1854, she married Watts Todd Miller, like herself a member of a well known family of northern New York, and in her conscientious effort to be a model wife and to master domestic arts to which she had never been trained, she sacrificed herself unnecessarily. “Many years I denied myself the joy of my life—the use of my pen,” she tells us, “and it was not until my children were well out of the nursery that I grew wise enough to return to it.”
The history of the vicissitudes of her literary life is at once touching and enlightening. Full of ardor to reform the world, to prevent needless unhappiness and to set people on the right path, her first literary attempt was the essay, but as she expressed it, “the editorial world did not seem to be suffering for any effusions of mine,” and her manuscripts were so systematically returned that she was about giving up, concluding during very black days that she had mistaken her calling; when a practical friend gave her a new point of view. What did the public care for the opinions of an unknown writer? she asked. Let her give what it wanted—attractively put information on matters of fact. Then when her reputation was established, people might be glad to listen to her views of life.
Philosophically accepting the suggestion, she calmly burned up her accumulated “sentiments and opinions,” and set about writing what she termed “sugar-coated pills of knowledge” for children. The first, the facts of china-making in the guise of a story, she sent to a religious weekly which had a children’s page, and to her surprise and delight received a check for it—her first—two dollars! This was apparently in 1870, and for twelve years, she worked in what she terms that “Gradgrind field” in which during that period she published some three hundred and seventy-five articles in religious weeklies, ‘Our Young Folks,’ ‘The Youth’s Companion,’ ‘The Independent,’ ‘St. Nicholas,’ ‘The Chicago Tribune,’ ‘Harper’s,’ ‘Scribner’s,’ and other papers and magazines, on subjects ranging from the manufacture of various familiar articles, as needles, thread, and china to sea cucumbers, spiders, monkeys, and oyster farms; and during those twelve years, in addition she published five books, the best known of which were perhaps ‘Little Folks in Feathers and Fur,’ 1873, ‘Queer Pets at Marcy’s,’ 1880, and ‘Little People of Asia,’ 1882.
About this time, having lived in Chicago nearly twenty years, the Millers, with their two sons and two daughters, moved to Brooklyn, where they lived until Mr. Miller’s death. Not long after settling in Brooklyn, when she had spent twelve years mainly on miscellaneous juvenile work, Mrs. Miller was visited by a friend who gave her a new subject, completely changing the course of her life. The friend was none less than Mrs. Sara A. Hubbard, whom she had known as a book reviewer in Chicago, but who was also an enthusiastic bird woman—later an Associate of the A. O. U.—and whose greatest desire in coming to New York had been to see the birds.
As Mrs. Miller naïvely remarks, “of course I could do no less than to take her to our park, where were birds in plenty.” And here, in Prospect Park when she was nearly fifty years old—incredible as it seems in view of her later work—Mrs. Miller got her first introduction to birds. “I knew absolutely nothing about ornithology,” she confesses; “indeed, I knew by sight not more than two birds, the English Sparrow and the Robin, and I was not very sure of a Robin either! I must say in excuse for myself,” she adds, “that I had never spent any time in the country and had been absorbed all my life in books. My friend was an enthusiast, and I found her enthusiasm contagious. She taught me to know a few birds, a Vireo, the charming Catbird, and the beautiful Wood Thrush, and indeed before she left me I became so interested in the Catbird and Thrush that I continued to visit the park to see them, and after about two summers’ study the thought one day came to me that I had seen some things that other people might be interested in. I wrote what I had observed and sent an article to the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ and it was accepted with a very precious letter from Mr. Scudder, who was then editor. All this time my love of birds and my interest in them had been growing, and soon I cared for no other study. I set up a bird-room in my house to study them winters and I began to go to their country haunts in the summer.”
Of the bird-room described so interestingly in ‘Bird Ways’ it is only necessary to say that first and last Mrs. Miller had about thirty-five species of birds which she bought from the bird stores in winter and allowed to fly about in her bird room, where she could study them unobtrusively at her desk by means of skillfully arranged mirrors. For twenty summers, from 1883 to 1903, she spent from one to three months in the country studying the wild birds, visiting among other sections, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Colorado, Utah, and California, taking careful notes in the field and writing them up for publication at the end of the season. To one who has not known her, the method may sound deliberate and commercial, but to one who has worked joyfully by her side, each year’s journey is known to have meant escape from the world, to the ministering beneficence of Nature. Let her speak for herself.—“To a brain wearied by the din of the city ... how refreshing is the heavenly stillness of the country! To the soul tortured by the sights of ills it cannot cure, wrongs it cannot right, and sufferings it cannot relieve, how blessed to be alone with nature, with trees living free, unfettered lives, and flowers content each in its native spot, with brooks singing of joy and good cheer, with mountains preaching divine peace and rest!”[1] Freed from city life and the tortures imposed by her profound human sympathy, each gift of fancy and imagination, each rare quality of spirit, joined in the celebration of the new excursion into fields elysian. But while each sight she saw was given glamour and charm by her imagination and enthusiasm, her New England conscience ruled her every word and note, and not one jot or tittle was let by, no word was set down, that could not pass muster before the bar of scientific truth.
Mrs. Miller’s first bird book was published in 1885 and the others followed in quick succession although they were interlarded with magazine articles and books on other subjects—as ‘The Woman’s Club,’ 1890, ‘Our Home Pets,’ 1894, ‘Four Handed Folk,’ 1896, and a series of children’s stories, 1904 to 1907. Her eleven bird books, published by the Houghton, Mifflin Company, were ‘Bird Ways,’ 1885, ‘In Nesting Time,’ 1887, ‘Little Brothers of the Air,’ 1892, ‘A Bird Lover in the West,’ 1894, ‘Upon the Tree Tops,’ 1897, ‘The First Book of Birds,’ 1899, ‘The Second Book of Birds,’ 1901, ‘True Bird Stories from my Note-Books,’ 1902, ‘With the Birds in Maine,’ 1903, ‘The Bird our Brother,’ 1908, and her last book, ‘The Children’s Book of Birds’—a juvenile form of the First and Second Book of Birds—1915.
The newspaper and magazine articles of this second period of Mrs. Miller’s literary work, beginning with the time when she first began to study birds, were published not only in the principal religious weeklies and others of the former channels, but by various syndicates, in ‘Harper’s Bazar,’ and the ‘Atlantic Monthly.’ They included not only a large number of bird papers, some of which appeared later in her books, but also articles on general subjects, proving her friend’s statement, for now that her reputation had become established on a basis of fact, the public was ready to profit by her “sentiments and opinions.”