Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

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wreath for Byron’s grave. At this juncture, she
convinced the aspiring poet to change his name
from Cincinnatus to Joaquin, in honor of the
fabled Mexican bandit and Miller’s poem in the
just-reviewed, eponymous book. 27 When two
years later, Miller—now returned from Britain—
was notified that the half-Wintun daughter he
had fathered thirteen or fourteen years earlier
and had left behind in Shasta County needed
to be rescued from a bad situation, he arranged
for the teenager to reside with Coolbrith. Callie
lived with her mentor—part of the time as a
quasi-domestic—for an extended period. The two
formed a strong bond. 28
Until she moved back to San Francisco in 1899,
Coolbrith was one of the anchors of the East
Bay’s literary life. Well known is the help she
gave to a disadvantaged and youthful Jack London.
Less known is her support of more established
writers, in particular George Wharton
James. This restless young Brit, a minister by
training, arrived with his family in 1887 (coincidentally
the same year Miller put down stakes
in the hills just to the south) for an almost
two-year stay in Oakland. At the beginning of a
remarkable writing career that spanned mental
well-being, the Grand Canyon, the Southwest
Indians, and southern California, James was
offered a small loan by Coolbrith, who also wrote
the introduction to one of his first literary efforts,
a manual on physiology for youth. Extending
her graciousness even further, she took her new
friend to the Hights, the first of James’s many
visits over the next two and a half decades. 29
Coolbrith introduced two other literary figures to
the frontier poet: the New York poet and painter
Edmund Russell and the Rhode Island–raised,
utopian reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Russell spent six months in San Francisco and
Oakland in the early 1890s, during which time
he was inspired to compile an anthology of contemporary
California poetry. During her longer
Oakland stay, from 1891 to 1894, Gilman pub-
California History • volume 90 number 1 2012
lished her still-admired, semiautobiographical
short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. The grandniece
of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet’s brother,
the fiery (and scandal-tainted) Reverend Henry
Beecher, Gilman’s impecunious state required
her to take charge of a boardinghouse directly
across from Coolbrith’s household. 30 Here, this
remarkable woman composed poetry, fiction,
and nonfiction for at least five different journals
and newspapers; lectured; and engaged in social
protest (sanitation, temperance, kindergartens,
unemployment). For some of this time, she
tended a dying mother (Swedenborgian minister
Joseph Worcester visited and advised her to get
help). And, for almost all of it, she looked after a
young daughter. 31 Gilman may have been singular
in her productivity, but she stood out as being
one of the few women who was utterly resistant
to the bard’s spell.
A stalwart daughter of Presbyterian New England,
Gilman confided her disgust with Miller to
her diary, calling him a “dirty person.” The highminded
Gilman also expressed her contempt in
her description of the scene that George Wharton
James, a less-exacting Methodist, was delighted
to capture for the ages four years later: both visitors
had discovered the writer in his standard
working position, in bed, but, in Charlotte’s case,
with a cigar, whose ashes he carelessly dropped
on the floor. 32
hillSide boheMia
Gilman—her scorn not withstanding—and James
were welcome guests at the Hights. Torrents
of curiosity seekers were not. The bard railed
against the “lion-hunters” who would “purloin
his manuscripts, steal his books, peer through
his windows, and even carry off his coats, gloves
and handkerchiefs.” The incident inciting this
outburst was the appearance of four female “pilgrims
to the shrine of poesy,” who steadfastly
refused to acknowledge Miller’s attempt to take
his “rapidly cooling” bath. 33