Joaquin Miller was the pen name of the hyperbolical American eccentric Cincinnatus Heine (or Hiner) Miller (September 8, 1837, or November 10, 1841 - February 17, 1913). Born in Indiana, he moved to Oregon and later to California where he had a variety of occupations, including mining-camp cook who came down with scurvy from eating what he cooked, lawyer and a judge, a newspaper writer and a Pony Express rider. After spending several years in New York and Europe, he settled in California, where he grew fruit and published his poems, championed, althought not enthusastically, by Ambrose Bierce. Called (mainly by himself) the "Poet of the Sierras" and the "Byron of the Rockies", he was more of a celebrity in England than in his native U.S.

Miller's home from 1886 to 1913, which he called "The Hights ^*," is now a California Historical Landmark. He planted the surrounding trees and he personally built, on the eminence to the north, the funeral pyre and the monuments dedicated to Moses, General John C. Frémont, and Robert Browning. The Hights was purchased by the city of Oakland in 1919 and can be found in Joaquin Miller Park.

Miller is best remembered today for one of his poems:

“In men whom men condemn as ill

I find so much of goodness still.

In men whom men pronounce divine

I find so much of sin and blot

I do not dare to draw a line

Between the two, where God has not.”

His poems include "Songs of the Sierras," "Songs of the Sun-Lands," and "The Ship in the Desert."

References

External links

• Biography
• Joaquin Miller Park

1837 births | 1913 deaths | Oaklanders | American poets | Historic California people

Joaquin Miller