48 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 <strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012 The three compatriots—Woodbury, Irish, and Miller—arrived in <strong>California</strong> 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 <strong>California</strong>’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 <strong>California</strong> 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
Ina Coolbrith (1841–1928), one of the Bay Area’s most prominent literary figures, met Miller when she was about twenty-nine, when this studio portrait was made. Coolbrith and Miller were bound by their shared Conestoga wagon past, Midwest origins, long acquaintance, involvement with literature, and unconventional single states. That closeness did not preclude Coolbrith from complaining that Miller did not credit her for his changed name and had reneged on his promise to provide her housing on his hill. Oakland Public Library, photograph by Louis Thors 49
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