La cabaña del poeta Joaquin Miller

Miller (1841-1913)
(photo credit: Library of Congress)

Miller en los últimos años

Joaquin Miller was born Cincinnatus Hiner Miller on a farm near Liberty, Ind., on Sept. 8, 1837. His parents set out for the West in 1852 and settled in the Willamette Valley, Ore. Within 2 years their restless son left for the California gold mines. For a time Miller lived with northern California Indians near Mt. Shasta. He was implicated in the massacre of the Pit River Indians, attended college briefly, and operated a pony-express service between the Idaho mines and the West Coast.

In 1862 Miller became editor of the Democratic Register in Eugene, Ore. Before the year was over he had married and had founded a new paper, the Eugene City Review. Later Miller settled in a mining camp in Canyon City, Ore. He practiced law, worked a claim of his own, fought Indian harassment, and was elected judge of Grant County in 1866 for a 4-year term. In 1869 the Millers were divorced.

For the next 10 years Miller pursued a literary career. His first book of verse was Specimens (1868). It was followed by Joaquin et al (1869), a collection of 11 poems signed Cincinnatus Hiner, mostly sentimental doggerel and bad imitations of Edgar Allan Poe. His work had little success in America, so he sailed for London, a "passionate pilgrim" determined to sell his verses of life in the Far West. He printed Pacific Poems (1871) privately. An English publisher brought out Songs of the Sierras (1871), which launched Miller socially and commercially as the Kit Carson of poetry. His fame, however, was short-lived and his talent essentially thin. Songs of the Sun-lands followed (1873), along with the partially autobiographic Life among the Modocs. A tour of Italy produced a curious novel, The One Fair Woman (1876), and Songs of Italy (1878).

By 1879 Miller was back in New York, married to Abigail Leland, a hotel heiress, and seeking a new career in the theater. Of the four plays he preserved, The Danites of the Sierras (1881), an obvious melodramatic story of the Mormons, was the most popular and made him a small fortune. In 1887, without his wife, he settled on 75 acres of barren hillside in Oakland, Calif., to write more poetry and finish his utoplan romance, The Building of the City Beautiful (1893). He died at his beloved "Hights" in February 1913.

Joaquín Miller cabina en Washington, DC Rock Creek Park

(...) It is 1884, and you've been convinced to travel to the outskirts of the city, two miles beyond the nearest streetcar line to satisfy your literary curiosity. You have heard that Joaquin Miller, the Poet of the Sierras, the Byron of the West, has built himself a log cabin here and dubbed it “a little edge of God's rest.” (...)

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Architecture

The Joaquin Miller Cabin is an example of vernacular architecture and a rare log cabin structure in the Nation's Capital. The exterior of the L-shaped cabin was constructed of split logs and chinking with a fieldstone fireplace at the center of the cabin. The cabin was painstakingly deconstructed and moved in 1911.

Miller Cabin Series

Since 1973 the cabin has played host to the oldest continuous reading series in Washington through the Miller Cabin Poetry Series run by nonprofit literary and educational organization Word Works. In 1978 the series was held inside the cabin, until they outgrew the space. The readings are now held outdoors. The series has been documented in two anthologies of the participating poets, Whose Woods These Are and Cabin Fever: Poets at Miller's Cabin. Sample poems in the Miller Cabin series include The Three Laughers of Tiger Ravine by David Wolinsky.

Joaquin Miller "Poet of the Sierras"

Many summer visitors to Rock Creek Park are surprised to find a log cabin along Beach Drive at the overpass of Military Road, and few are likely to know that it was once the home of poet Joaquin Miller, who lived from 1837 to 1913. It was moved there the year of his death from its prior location just east of the cascade in Meridian Hill Park when it was threatened with demolition. Miller would later be well-known in international literary circles, and had built the cabin there in 1893 when he had moved to Washington with political ambitions that ultimately failed. In fact, much of his background and life experiences that he wrote about were apparently wild fabrications.

Known as the “Poet of the Sierras," Joaquin Miller was perhaps best known for his poem “Columbus.” His cabin stood along 16th Street for 30 years until threatened with demolition as the new park was being planned. He is quoted as saying, "I sit up here in my fine cabin, while the President himself sits down there at the end of the street with his little cabinet."

Miller’s creative writing began with his assumed name; his real name was Cincinnatus Heiner (or Hiner) Miller. He was born on September 8, 1837, a date that frequently changed during his lifetime. The name "Joaquin" was adapted later from the legendary California bandit, Joaquin Murietta.

Born to Quakers in Indiana, the family moved to Oregon and settled on a small farm. His often cited exploits included a variety of occupations, from mining camp cook, lawyer, judge, newspaper owner and writer, Pony Express rider, and horse thief. As a young man, he moved to northern California during the Gold Rush, and apparently had a variety of adventures, including a year living in a Native American village and being wounded in a battle with Native Americans. A number of his works, Life Among the Modocs, An Elk Hunt, and The Battle of Castle Crags, draw on these alleged experiences.

About 1857, Miller supposedly married an Indian woman named Paquita and lived in the McCloud River area of northern California; the couple had two children. Miller then married Theresa Dyer (alias Minnie Myrtle) in 1862, and had three children with her. The couple divorced in 1869. Miller married for the third time in 1879 to Abigail Leland in New York City.

He was jailed briefly in New York for stealing a horse, and various accounts give other incidents of his repeating this crime in California and Oregon. Despite that fact, Miller found his way to Canyon City, Oregon by 1864 where he was elected the third Judge of Grant County; his log cabin built there is still standing as well.

After losing his bid for a seat on the Oregon Supreme Court, he left the Pacific Northwest and spent some years traveling, living in and visiting England, New York, San Francisco, Brazil, and Washington, DC, where he built his cabin on Meridian Hill in 1883. Disappointed at not being appointed as Ambassador to Japan, about 10 years later Miller settled in the Oakland Hills of California. He gave his Washington cabin to a friend, who soon gave it to the Sierra Club. In 1912, one year before Miller's death, the National Park Service became its reluctant new owner.

The California State Association had sought to move it to Rock Creek Park, but the Park Service had refused the request. It was only after Senator John D. Works of California intervened successfully that the cabin was disassembled, moved, and rebuilt at its current location.

From 1893 to his death 1913, Miller resided on a hill in Oakland, California, in a home he called "The Hights"[sic]. He planted hundreds of trees and even built his own funeral pyre on the property. The Hights was purchased by the city of Oakland in 1919 and eventually became the Joaquin Miller Park, a designated California Historical Landmark.

Fellow author Ambrose Bierce once called Miller "the greatest-hearted man I ever knew" but was also quoted as saying that he was "the greatest liar this country ever produced. He cannot, or will not, tell the truth."

Miller's poem “Columbus” was once one of the most widely known American poems, memorized and recited by most school children of the era. It reads:

"Behind him lay the gray Azores,

"Behind the Gates of Hercules;

"Before him not the ghost of shores,

"Before him only shoreless seas.

"The good mate said: 'Now must we pray,

"For lo! the very stars are gone.'

"Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say?

“Why, say, ‘Sail on! sail on! and on!’”

His other poems include “Songs of the Sierras,” “Songs of the Sun-Lands,” and “The Ship in the Desert.” In 1909, six volumes of his collected poems and other writings were published. He died in Oakland on February 17, 1913. (...)

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