Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

Miller’s friendship with George Sterling and Charles Warren Stoddard (1843–1909) extended beyond the
Hights to Carmel, where Sterling had cofounded an artist’s colony. In a letter to Ambrose Bierce, Sterling
described the trio’s visit in October 1905 to Carmel Mission, where Miller flirted outrageously with the sexton’s
daughter. Later, after a liberal ingestion of spirits, he went off, half-cocked, to lecture at the Monterey
County Teachers’ Institute.
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
From their doings arise some of the more colorful
anecdotes regarding life at the Hights. Sterling,
a genuine fan of Miller’s poetry, recalled
Miller’s insistence on demonstrating his skill
with a tomahawk, an expertise he claimed had
often saved his life during his Shasta days.
Fueled with “an appreciable amount of moonshine,”
the bard flung the hatchet at a tree four
times, each time missing his target. After the
fifth attempt, he hit the tree with the butt end of
the handle. Commenting on this incident, Miller
biographer M. M. Marberry surmised that the
poet, who was famously resistant to the effects
of alcohol, most likely had never thrown a tomahawk
before. 42
A busy Socialist (and onetime candidate for governor),
Austin Lewis would not have been one of
the more frequent denizens of the Hights, but
even he recalls the group’s rollicking picnics.
From an orchard in Piedmont, the picnickers
would progress over the hills to Fruitvale. Lewis,
one of Sterling’s three boyhood pals who followed
him from Long Island, recalled that in
a quarry near Miller’s they would discuss “the
affairs of the universe” and listen “to the rhapsodical
lies of the old bard.” 43
Visits to the Hights were not all whiskey and talk.
Miller’s friends sometimes helped with the ranch
work. One well-circulated photograph circa 1909
depicts Miller supervising Whitaker and two
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