Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

40
Joaquin Miller
and the social Circle
at the Hights
this verse from the poem “Columbus,”
1 a few schools, a park, and an
annual poetry series in Washington,
D.C., are the visible remnants of the man who,
at the turn of the last century, was arguably
the most famous poet in America. Currently,
Joaquin Miller is experiencing a mini-revival. A
comprehensive Web site spans 166 years of his
writing and ongoing bibliographical references.
Two symposiums have been held, in Ashland in
2004 and in Redding in 2005. In 2013, following
the launch of a three-year exhibition at the
Mt. Shasta Sisson Museum, a third gathering
will celebrate the centenary of the Poet of the
Sierras’ death. 2
California History • volume 90 number 1 2012
By Phoebe Cutler
Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores,
Before him only shoreless seas.
The good mate said: “Now must we pray,
For lo! the very stars are gone.
Brave Adm’r’l, speak; what shall I say?”
“Why, say: ‘Sail on! Sail on! and on!’”
Born in Indiana, raised in Oregon’s Willamette
Valley, tested in the mountains of northern California
and on the plains of Idaho and Montana,
then feted in two European capitals, this backwoods
scribe, at the age of nearly fifty, settled
down in the hills behind Oakland. 3 There, what
his final, almost three decades lacked in an earlier
adventurous life—Indian skirmishes, bear
encounters, and frozen Pony Express rides—was
compensated for by a whirl of activity of a different
kind. Newly self-styled as a “fruit grower
and poet,” 4 Miller transformed seventy stony
acres into a virtual forest and garden spectacle.
With his pre-established reputation and continuing,
prodigious, and varied output, the novice
Opposite: Joaquin Miller (ca. 1839–1913), celebrated western writer and public personality, found fame and
influence across continents. In addition to his poems—a number of them written in his last decades, when this
portrait was made—the self-promoting Poet of the Sierras wrote essays, fiction, plays, and autobiography. In
1879, the architect Arthur Gilman affirmed: “Almost every one of our leading American poets is of handsome or
striking appearance. But none of them—the kindly-eyed Longfellow, the aged and Socratic Bryant, the brownhaired
Lowell, the shaggy Whitman—is more noticeable on the street than Joaquin Miller.”
California Historical Society/USC Special Collections