Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

a man as ever lived.” 58 At least one contemporary
book other than Miller’s own output attests to
the force of the poet’s personality. In his Sunset
review of Adelaide Hanscom’s pictorial interpretation
of the classic The Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám, George Wharton James recounts how
Miller, who had agreed to pose for several photogravures,
corralled Sterling, the poet Charles
Keeler, and James himself to stand in for various
characters. As a result of Miller’s intervention,
we have an enduring record of George Sterling
as a thoughtful, retreating soul, Charles Keeler as
an angel shape with a cask of grapes, and James
as a sultan. 59
“bright, partiCular Star”
At the end—February 17, 1913—Miller’s two original
circles reclaimed their own. Five days later,
the First Unitarian Church held a memorial service
with eulogies by the minister, Professor William
Dallam Armes of UC Berkeley, and John P.
Irish. 60 In May, the Bohemian Club orchestrated
a scattering of Miller’s ashes at the Hights. The
Call estimated that five hundred people tromped
up the hill to the site of the poet’s funeral pyre.
Coolbrith “chanted her lines in a full voice that
reached out in the neighboring pines and acacias.”
61 Irish lit the flames, above which the old
gold miner’s ashes were flung. At that point, a
sixty-voice chorus from the club burst forth with
the bard’s own three-verse farewell to himself
titled “Goodby.” The first verse read:
Yon mellow sun melts in the sea,
A somber ship sweeps silently
Past Alcatraz toward Orient skies,
A mist is rising to the eyes,
Good by, Joaquin; good by, Joaquin; good
night, good night. 62
It was more than a goodbye to Miller. It was also
a goodbye to the locale’s literary and social scene:
Stoddard had died four years before; Bierce disappeared
in the Mexican desert one year later;
London died two years after that. The same year
as Miller’s demise, Sterling went on a binge and
his wife initiated a divorce. By 1919, Whitaker
was dead in New York. Despite this disintegration,
the Poet of the Sierras’ influence among
the community lived on. In 1909, a group had
formed the California Writers Club with Austin
Lewis as president. Incorporating on February
28, 1913, the association adopted a ship as its
logo and Sail On, from Miller’s poem “Columbus,”
as its motto. In 1919, Oakland’s parks
department acquired most of the Hights, which
became Joaquin Miller Park, where for thirty
years the California Writers Club held memorial
activities, culminating in 1941 in the building
of a 1,400-foot-long, Italian-style cascade using
stone brought from the Sierra. Miller would have
been pleased.
The death of the flamboyant author received
national recognition. His reputation had been
building since his, to many Americans, inexplicable
acclaim abroad in the 1870s. By 1893,
the log cabin he had built and lived in for two
years—near the White House—was on exhibit at
the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Distinguished in the eyes of his neighbors and
others by his outlandish dress and self-prepared
funeral pyre, Miller was viewed as an eccentric,
but no Bay Area literary event was complete without
him. One local organizer seeking his presence
at an industrial exposition addressed Miller
as Oakland’s “bright, particular star” (the “star”
agreed to lecture; his chosen topic: “The Size of
the Dollar”). 63
By early 1915, various women’s groups were leading
a campaign to preserve the Hights. In 1917,
Abbie, encouraged in her negotiations by John P.
Irish, settled on a price with the city of Oakland
for the Hights while securing lifetime tenure for
herself and a quarter acre for Juanita. Joaquin
Miller Park was duly the largest of Oakland’s
parks for years to come.
59