As a youth Joaquin Miller’s venturesome father, Huling, moves the family in 1850 from Indiana to Oregon. When the Gold Rush begins, the 14 year old son runs away to California where he works as a cook in a mining camp and lives among the local tribes. After being wounded by a Modoc arrow during the 1855 Battle of Castle Crags, he is nursed back to health by a Wintu woman, who bears him a daughter. Claims that he joined William Walker’s filibuster in Nicaragua in 1855 have been dismissed. But bolstered by $3,000 earned as a pony express rider, he moves to Eugene, Oregon, befriends the political leader Joseph Lane, and edits the Democratic Register until it is banned in 1862 as pro-Confederacy. His poetry career begins in earnest in the late 1860’s. He travels to England in 1871 and, dressed in sombrero and cowboy books, is hailed as the symbol of the wild west. His two most famous works, Song of the Sierra and Life Among the Modocs are published there. He dies in California in 1913 at age 75.
Cincinnatus “Joaquin” Miller
