Immortality

Shall the dead live again?  I cannot prove to you that the dead will rise again.  I cannot prove to you that the sun will rise again.  But I surely believe it will.  And I as surely believe that the dead will rise again.  Blow a little thistle-seed far away, a little thing no bigger than a pin’s point; let it fall on the dark earth in the farthest corner of the world, yet it will in the springtime come forth a lovely flower, perfect in its kind.  And man is surely as much to God as a little thistledown.

-       Joaquin Miller[1]

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[1] Joaquin Miller was born Cincinnatus Hiner Miller in 1837. His father, a Quaker and an Indiana magistrate, relocated the family in 1852 to Oregon. They traveled with two heavy wagons, eight oxen yoked to each, a carriage and two horses. The three-thousand-mile trip took seven months and five days. The family settled in the Willamette Valley where they established a home and farm. Young Cincinnatus soon left his family’s new home and headed to the California gold fields. He worked in a number of mining camps. He reported that he was severely wounded by a Modoc Indian arrow that pierced his face and exited the back of his neck. The injury took a year to heal; he later had little memory of that period of time. This makes his early adulthood hard to trace; the problem is compounded by his tendency to make up colorful stories about himself. He began writing poetry; one poem dealt with the legendary California bandit, Joaquin Murietta. He adopted the bandit’s given name for his own, and went by Joaquin Miller ever after.

Miller left Northern California and traveled to San Francisco, then returned to Oregon. He attended college briefly, taught school, studied law, and was admitted to the bar. But then came the Idaho gold strike, and he once more went prospecting. He returned to Oregon at the beginning of the Civil War with enough gold to build a new home and purchase a newspaper, the Eugene City Democratic Register. In it, he pled for an end to the war, adopting his father’s non-violent creed. His anti-war editorials suppressed, he again turned to mining. He was eventually elected to the position of Judge in a Southern Oregon community.

Miller left Oregon in 1870 and traveled to Europe, where he published his first books, Song of the Sierras and Life among the Modocs. These were successful; when he returned, he was able to purchase 75 acres in the hills above Oakland, California, where he built a home with a full view of the Golden Gate. A last adventure took him to the Klondike during the Alaskan Gold Rush. He came home after six months, exhausted, with thousands of dollars of gold dust, and $6,000 from W. R. Hurst for his Alaskan letters. In his later years Joaquin became known as “The Poet of The Sierras.” A colorful figure, he was well known in California literary and social circles. Six volumes of his collected poems and other writing were published in 1909. He died 1913. (Source: Central California Poetry Journal, Vol. 96, No. 1.)