Copyright 1999 by Joel GAzis-SAx

It is understandable why Joaquin Miller confused and disgusted many people. All things mad appealed to him. This son of an Indiana Quaker defended slaveholding and opposed the Union Cause during the Civil War. Later, he confessed to admiring John Brown. He evinced love for the Indians, but led punitive expeditions against them. He saw the Modocs (among who he lived for a short time) as people, but he did not seem to care much for their natural right to have their own nation -- unless it were governed in the main by white men. He professed to admire women, but treated his early wives shamelessly, in the manner of his hero, the self-proclaimed Satanic poet, Byron. The papers of his day called him "The Poet Lothario" because he abandoned his first white wife and children. His American literary peers mostly disliked him. Walt Whitman declined to meet him. Other poets discounted his work, predicting that his doggerel would be forgotten once a generation had passed. (They were right.) Nonetheless, he thought himself as good as Shakespeare and, once, his megamanic ego led him to accuse Henry James of plagiarism. More recently, biographers have found that, in his autobiographical writings, he often lied about his past. His personal life angered his fellow Oregonians and, though he had brought the state world recognition through his writings, it disowned him; so he moved to California and added to its fame instead.

He did make friends, however, and captured the imaginations of some of the brightest and liveliest minds of his day. Rossetti, Tennyson, Swinburne, and others praised his rough-hewn Songs of the Sierra and thought him the genius of America. The buckskin coat, red shirt, and long, blonde tresses he wore on his visits to European capitals set the prototype for the Man of the Wild West which Buffalo Bill imitated, Judge Roy Bean aped, and the famous of Europe took for the real thing. Judge Bean admired the "Jersey Lily", Lillie Langtry from afar and never met her; Joaquin Miller was her genuine friend, confidant, and principal enthusiast.

One might say he was slightly less insane than the Emperor Norton, who lived across the Bay from Miller's Oakland home. Joshua Norton styled himself as royalty. Miller told everyone he was a poet. And, as with the Emperor, many people indulged him. Yerba Buena Island seemed too barren to him, so he organized an Arbor Day planting of hundreds of trees. The patchy chaparral and brown grasslands of the Oakland Hills did not suit his idea of nature, so he constructed a forest watered by distant springs. This garden, known as the Hights, became a place of pilgrimage for travellers who craved a few hours in the presence of his ersatz 49er persona. To this place also came the literary figures of his day, including Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, Ina Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, Lillie Langtry, and Yone Noguichi, the Japanese poet and father of sculptor Isao Noguichi. They suffered his poetry, assisted in his charades (which included a sprinkler-watered rain dance), and enjoyed the sylvan hospice he'd created for them.

Upon his death in 1913, the world was spared from further inflictions of Miller's metrical endeavours. As his ashes underwent a second burning upon the pyre he'd built with his own hands, mourners read poetry and, in silence, observed the curtain call for one of the most outrageous, lifelong performances that California or the world had ever seen.

Definition excerpted from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from INSO Corporation; further reproduction and distribution in accordance with the Copyright Law of the United States. All rights reserved.