Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

The 1920s witnessed the first signs of a reassessment
of the poet’s merit. Despite his wife
and daughter’s best efforts to fan the altar
flame, a University of Illinois professor conducting
research during the summer of 1921 for
a compendium of Joaquin’s poems could find
no copies of any of Miller’s books in a dozen
Bay Area bookshops. This neglect presaged an
opening fusillade on the frontier bard’s reputation.
64 Concurrently, the Hights was falling into
a state of disrepair. A journalist visiting it in 1923
described the Abbey’s broken windows and wideswinging
doors, Margaret Miller’s cottage on the
verge of collapse, the stone monuments vandalized,
great trees felled, and the acacia thickets
“ruthlessly cut away.” 65 Resisting this decline of
home and reputation, one or two of Miller’s bestknown
verses would habitually appear, at least
until the 1950s, in American poetry anthologies.
While a handful of poems lived on, the prolific
writer’s journalism more or less died with him.
Yet Miller, more than one biographer acknowledges,
regarded his prose more highly than his
poetry. Indeed, journalism came easily to him.
In Oregon in the early 1860s, he ran two shortlived
newspapers. Throughout his career, he was
writing constantly about his travels, initially in
personal diaries and, later, on assignment for
newspapers. His outspoken prose—both frank
and moralistic—was spiked with humor and
country argot. With the same brio with which he
confronted swindlers and marauding indigenous
people in the Sierra, he lambasted crooked land
speculators and irresponsible politicians.
One of his early pet complaints was the deplorable
condition of Oakland’s roads. In a characteristically
exaggerated account of a real event,
he described his attempt to give a lecture in the
neighboring settlement of Walnut Creek. Confronting
the men who had invited him to speak
with the lack of passable roads and his inability
to walk due to prior war injuries, Miller was
asked if he could swim: “Yes.” “Then swim to
Contra Costa,” he was advised. “Splendid good
swimming all the way. Take the water at the San
Francisco wharf, swim the bay of San Francisco,
then the San Pablo Bay, then Suisun Bay, then
up the Sacramento river, then up Walnut Creek
to the schoolhouse, where the committee will
be out on the porch with banners and bands to
receive you.” 66
Miller’s blend of candor and the vernacular
enjoyed wide appeal. Besides the New York–based
Independent, two other journals, the Chicago
Times and the San Francisco Call, regularly carried
his byline. With the wide proliferation of
Miller’s poetry and his prose, the hospitality of his
barbecues, and the eccentricity of his ranchero
life and appearance, it is not surprising that the
Hights and its environs became, by the 1890s, a
habitation for area artists and a destination for
visiting celebrities and local curiosity seekers.
When Elbert Hubbard and Benjamin Fay Mills
descended from the tram that terminated in the
little settlement of Dimond, the conductor counseled
them, “Take that road and sail on.” “He
smiled,” Hubbard recalled, “in a way that indicated
that he had sprung the allusion before and
was pleased with it.” 67
Phoebe Cutler is an independent scholar. Recipient of
the Heritage/Preservation Award (National Endowment for
the Arts, 2001) and the Rome Prize (American Academy in
Rome, 1988–89), she is the author of The Public Landscape of
the New Deal (Yale University Press, 1986), “Joaquin Miller’s
Trees, Pts. 1 & 2,” Eden: The Journal of the California Garden
& Landscape Society 13, nos. 2 and 3 (2010), “Sutro Baths:
Caracalla at Lands End,” Eden: The Journal of the California
Garden & Landscape Society 12, no. 1 (2009), and “The Rise
of the American Municipal Rose Garden, 1927–1937,” Studies
in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 25, no. 3
(July–Sept. 2005).
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