Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

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rancher’s domain became an attraction for both
the anonymous tourist and the aspiring artist.
Witty, for the most part, gregarious, egoistic but
also strongly idealistic, Joaquin Miller and his
Hights—the name he gave his acreage—were
major players in Oakland’s lively, turn-of-thelast-century
cultural scene.
SoCial CliMbing
When, in the spring of 1887, Miller purchased
his piece of the Contra Costa hills, he was an
acclaimed poet with multiple books and four
plays to his name. At the age of ten, Cincinnatus
Hiner Miller, as he was named, moved with his
family from Libertyville, Indiana, to Oregon.
Thirty years later and an aspiring writer, this child
of the Wabash River and the Conestoga wagon
became the sensation of the drawing rooms of
London. Sporting long hair and a Wild West outfit
of sombrero, scarlet shirt, scarf, and sash, the
onetime gold miner, Indian fighter, Pony Express
rider, newspaper publisher, and judge captivated
the haute monde of Britain. A dozen years before
William Cody’s Buffalo Bill show packaged the
mythos, this self-called Byron of the Rockies
introduced an old-world audience to the romance
and adventure of the western frontier.
Having acquired his Oakland holding, Miller
built a tiny log hut as temporary shelter. At this
phase of his life, he would amass an amorphous
total of three wives and seven, mostly absent,
children (two, however, soon showed up, causing
no end of trouble). 5 His third spouse, Abbie
Leland Miller, was back in New York, where,
along with Newport or Saratoga Springs, she preferred
to remain. 6 Several factors eased Miller’s
plan to settle permanently in northern California.
Having lived in the Shasta/Siskiyou areas on and
off between 1853 and 1859, he knew the wilds of
that part of California. Subsequent visits to San
Francisco in 1863, 1870, and again in 1871–72,
California History • volume 90 number 1 2012
combined with some early writing, had laid down
tracks for an eventual return. In the 1870s and
1880s, his prodigious output during his residency
in Europe and on the East Coast had distinguished
this frontiersman as one of the West’s
most prolific writers. Along with his adventurous
life, in the sixteen years (1870–86) preceding his
return, he had produced six books of poetry, four
novels, two works of romanticized nonfiction,
and ten plays, only two of which were actively
produced. Of those two, The Danites in the Sierras
was both a Broadway and a London success (it
was performed in London by the first American
troupe to travel abroad). Two collections of verse,
Pacific Poems (London, 1871) and Songs of the Sierras
(London and Boston, 1871), had even earned
the Oregonian a California title, namely, Poet of
the Sierras. 7 All of this acclaim had the beneficial
effect of securing Miller a job in advance of his
arrival. Harr Wagner, the new editor of a revived
Golden Era magazine, had offered the Washington,
D.C.–based Miller the position of associate
editor. This allowed him to pick up way ahead of
where he left off.
Miller’s cumulative achievements, combined
with his bonhomie, made him a natural candidate
for one of San Francisco’s leading social
fraternities, the Bohemian Club. Founded in
1872 by a group of journalists, this society had
expanded early on to include artists and their
patrons. By 1888, Miller had joined Mark Twain,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Warren Stoddard,
and Ina Coolbrith as an honorary member.
(His continuation in that status may be explained
by both his early fame and his persistent state
of penury.) According to an account by the neophyte
journalist Elodie Hogan, this membership
paid immediate dividends. A few of Miller’s club
mates contributed their talents to the construction
of the Abbey, the chapel-like cottage that the
writer built for himself while living in the log
hut at the Hights. One, possibly Martinez native
and man-about-the-arts Bruce Porter, fashioned