Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

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intoning, “The collection will now be taken.”
He then welcomed the entrepreneurial Hubbard,
declaring, “Ben said you were coming, but
preachers are such damn liars.” 21
Given the centrality of religion to the social and
literary life of early Alameda County, it is apt
that Miller’s first documented social outing was
sponsored by Charles and Lucia Woodbury in
the summer of 1887. The Woodburys invited the
poet, the Irishes, and the Wendtes to meet the
simpatico Reverend John K. McLean and his wife
of the Congregational Church. 22 Charles’s ties
with the Unitarian sect came naturally. Born in
Massachusetts, but raised partially in Michigan,
he returned to his native state to attend Williams
College, where he became a disciple of the eminent
thinker and onetime Unitarian minister,
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their acquaintance lasted
on and off for five years. At the time of his Oakland
entertainment, Woodbury, head of a growing
family and president of a varnish company, was
writing a book about his life-changing relationship
with Emerson twenty years earlier. For the
remainder of his life, besides playing the violin
and penning the occasional religious poem and
book review, this devout Unitarian gave lectures
on the Concord philosopher and his circle. 23
It was to this learned patriarch’s warm and welcoming
household that Miller repaired—“wet,
dripping, draggled, muddy hands and face, torn
clothes, and worn-out body and mind from my
long walk and contact with wire fences”—en
route to speak at the First Presbyterian Church.
Along with his fire and “sundry cups of hot tea,”
Miller, in kind with the audiences who gathered
for his friend’s talks, would have valued Woodbury’s
New England associations. During one
of his several trips to Boston, he wrote Abbie
and their daughter, Juanita, that he had visited
Longfellow’s grave and was going to the “classic
ground” of Concord and Lexington. 24
California History • volume 90 number 1 2012
The three compatriots—Woodbury, Irish, and
Miller—arrived in California about the same
time. Although all were individuals of some
significance, Woodbury was, for the most part,
a private figure. Miller, a prolific writer with a
national reputation to maintain, required a degree
of isolation to do his work. In contrast, Irish, the
poet’s most intimate ally, was 95 percent in the
public eye. Now forgotten but at the time judged
one of California’s “most picturesque public
figures,” he deserves separate treatment. 25
literary liaiSonS
Keeping very quiet, for understandable reasons,
about her religious preferences (she was the
daughter of the younger brother of Joseph Smith,
the founder of Mormonism 26 ), Ina Coolbrith was
judged by Harr Wagner as Miller’s closest literary
friend. Without a doubt, she was his longestrunning
female friend. This much-esteemed
figure in the California pantheon of writers was
a beautiful young woman of twenty-nine when
the Indiana-born poet first met her in 1870 during
the second of his early visits to San Francisco.
Miller had come to her attention the previous
year with the receipt at the Overland Monthly
offices of the slim book of verse Joaquin, et al.
A divorcée and transplant from Los Angeles,
Coolbrith, herself a contributor to the journal,
urged editor Bret Harte to review the curious
submission from the backwoods Oregon judge.
When, following the review’s appearance, Miller
himself arrived at the journal’s offices, Coolbrith
kindly took charge of the newcomer. Almost
twenty years later, still single and guardian to her
orphaned niece and nephew, she lived in a modest
house on Webster Street, not far from her
job as Oakland’s—and the state’s—first public
librarian.
Miller owed this attractive colleague more than
one debt. He was en route to greater arenas of
glory when he spent a day with Coolbrith gathering
olive branches in Marin County to make a