The work of Harte and even of Hay is the work of an onlooker rather than a sharer. One feels that both were studying their picturesque surroundings objectively for the sake of "copy"; but Joaquin Miller, like Mark Twain, may be said to have emerged from the materials he worked in. He could write in his later years, "My poems are literally my autobiography." "If you care to read further of my life, making allowance for poetic license, you will find these [poems] literally true." In some ways he is a more significant figure than either Harte or Hay. No American writer, not even Thoreau or Whitman, has ever been more uniquely individual, and none, not even Mark Twain, has woven into his writings more things that are peculiarly American, or has worked with a more thorough first-hand knowledge of the picturesque elements that went into the making of the new West. He is the poet of the American westward march, the poet of "the great American desert," the poet preËminently of the mountain ranges from Alaska to Nicaragua as John Muir is their prose interpreter.

I

The life of Miller is a series of foot-notes to his poems. He was born on the line of the westward march. In the valuable autobiographical preface to the Bear edition of his poems he writes: "My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio." That was in 1841, and the name given him was Cincinnatus Hiner Miller. His parents, like those of Mark Twain, were of that restless generation that could abide nowhere long, but must press ever on and on westward. His mother's people had migrated from the Yadkin River country in North Carolina with the Boones, "devoted Quakers in search of a newer land"; his grandfather Miller was a Scotchman, a restless pioneer who had fallen at Fort Meigs, leaving a family of small children to come up as they could in the wilderness. One of them, the father of the poet, picked up in a varied career along the border certain elements of book learning that enabled him to teach school in the settlement towns of Ohio and Indiana.

The boy's earliest memories were of the frontier with its land clearing, its Indian neighbors, and its primitive hardships. Schooling he received at the hands of his father. The first book that he could remember was FrÉmont's Explorations, read aloud to the family by the father until all knew it literally by heart, maps and all. Lured by its enthusiastic descriptions and by reports of a former pupil who had gone to Oregon and by the new act of Congress which gave to every homesteader six hundred and forty acres of land free, on March 17, 1852, with "two big heavily laden wagons, with eight yoke of oxen to each, a carriage and two horses for mother and baby sister, and a single horse for the three boys to ride," the family set out across the wild continent of America. "The distance," he records, "counting the contours of often roundabout ways, was quite, or nearly, three thousand miles. The time was seven months and five days. There were no bridges, no railroad levels, nothing of the sort. We had only the road as nature had made it. Many times, at night, after ascending a stream to find a ford, we could look back and see our smoldering camp-fires of the day before."

That heroic journey into the unknown West with its awful dangers, its romantic strangeness, its patriarchal conditions, its constant demand for self-dependence, made an indelible impress on the young lad. It was a journey of Argonauts, one of the thousands of journeys that made picturesque a whole epoch. He has described it in some of the most stirring of his poems. All through his poetry occur stanzas like this:

He has described it too in prose that is really stirring. His dedicatory preface to The Ship in the Desert, London, 1876, is a poem of the Whitman order. Note a stanza like this:

How dark and deep, how sullen, strong and lionlike the mighty Missouri rolled between his walls of untracked wood and cleft the unknown domain of the middle world before us! Then the frail and buffeted rafts on the river, the women and children huddled together, the shouts of the brawny men as they swam with the bellowing cattle, the cows in the stormy stream eddying, whirling, spinning about, calling to their young, their bright horns shining in the sun. The wild men waiting on the other side; painted savages, leaning on their bows, despising our weakness, opening a way, letting us pass on to the unknown distances, where they said the sun and moon lay down together and brought forth the stars. The long and winding lines of wagons, the graves by the wayside, the women weeping together as they passed on. Then hills, then plains, parched lands like Syria, dust and alkali, cold streams with woods, camps by night, great wood fires in circles, tents in the center like CÆsar's battle camps, painted men that passed like shadows, showers of arrows, the wild beasts howling from the hills.

Two years with his parents on the new Oregon farm, and the lad ran away to the mines. "Go, I must. The wheels of the covered wagon in which I had been born were whirling and whirling, and I must be off." For a time he was cook in a mining camp, but it was work impossible for a boy of thirteen, and soon he was on his wanderings again, first with one Ream, an adventurer, then with Mountain Joe, a trader in half-wild horses. He was drawn into Gibson's fight with the Modocs, was wounded frightfully by an arrow that pierced close to the base of the brain, and later was nursed back to life by a squaw who had adopted him in place of her son who had fallen in the battle. "When the spring came and Mount Shasta stood out white and glorious above the clouds, I hailed him as a brother." And again he stole away and joined another band of Indians. "When the Modocs arose one night and massacred eighteen men, every man in the Pit River Valley, I alone was spared and spared only because I was Los bobo, the fool. Then more battles and two more wounds." For a long time his mind was like that of a child. The Indians indeed, as he records, treated him "as if [he] had been newly born to their tribe."

Soon I was stronger, body and soul. The women gave me gold—from whence?—and I being a "renegade," descended to San Francisco and set sail for Boston, but stopped at Nicaragua with Walker. Thence up the coast to Oregon, when strong enough. I went home, went to college some, taught school some, studied law at home some; but ever and ever the lure of the mountains called and called, and I could not keep my mind on my books. But I could keep my mind on the perils I had passed. I could write of them, and I did write of them, almost every day. The Tale of the Tall Alcalde, Oregonian, Californian, With Walker in Nicaragua—I had lived all these and more; and they were now a part of my existence.... Meantime I was admitted to the bar. Then came the discovery of gold in Idaho, Montana, and so on, and I was off like a rocket with the rest.

To call Miller illiterate, as many, especially in printing offices which have handled his copy, have done, is hardly fair. His father, it must be remembered, was a schoolmaster with the Scotch reverence for serious books and for education, and the boy's early schooling was not neglected. To say, on the other hand, as many, including the poet himself, have said, that he received a college education, is also to speak without knowledge. He did complete a course in Columbia University, Eugene, Oregon, in 1859, but it was an institution in no way connected with the present University of Oregon. It was, rather, a mission school maintained by the Methodist Church South, and, according to Professor Herbert C. Howe of the University of Oregon, "its instruction was, at its utmost stretch, not enough to carry its pupils through the first half of a high school course, and most of its pupils were of grammar grade." It was closed suddenly early in the Civil-War period because of the active Southern sympathies of its president, who was himself very nearly the whole "university." It is significant that at almost the same time the Eugene Democratic Register edited by Miller was suppressed for alleged disloyalty to the Union.

For a period the poet undoubtedly did apply himself with diligence to books. Of his fellow students at Eugene he has recorded, "I have never since found such determined students and omnivorous readers. We had all the books and none of the follies of the great centers." The mania for writing had seized him early. Assisted by his father, he had recorded the events of his trip across the plains in a journal afterwards burned with his parental home in Oregon. "The first thing of mine in print was the valedictory class poem, 'Columbia College.'" Undoubtedly during this period he read widely and eagerly. "My two brothers and my sister were by my side, our home with our parents, and we lived entirely to ourselves, and really often made ourselves ill from too much study. We were all school teachers when not at college."

Living away from the centers of culture, with books as exotic things that came from without, almost as from another world, Miller, like many another isolated soul, grew to maturity with the feeling that something holy lay about the creation of literature and that authors, especially poets, were beings apart from the rest of men. Poetry became to him more than an art: it became a religion. "Poetry," he declared in his first London preface, "is with me a passion which defies reason." It was an honest declaration. During the sixties as express messenger in the Idaho gold fields, as newspaper editor, and judge, he wrote verse continually—"I lived among the stars"—but he preserved of all he wrote only a few rather colorless pieces which he published in 1868 with the title Specimens. The next year he issued at Portland, Oregon, Joaquin et al, a book of one hundred and twenty-four pages. It was his salute to the literary world. He addressed it "To the Bards of San Francisco Bay," and his address sheds light upon the timid young poet:

He followed his book down to what was to him the glorious city of art and of soul that would welcome him with rapture, for was he too not a bard? Says Charles W. Stoddard, "Never had a breezier bit of human nature dawned upon me this side of the South Seas than that poet of the Sierra when he came to San Francisco in 1870."[62]

But the great Western city, as did New York a few months later, went on totally unaware of his advent. The bards even of San Francisco Bay did not come to the borders of the town to welcome the new genius. They seemed unaware of his presence. Harte was inclined to be sarcastic, but finally allowed the Overland Monthly to say a word of faint praise for the young poet, despite what it termed his "pawing and curvetting." "His passion," it declared in a review written probably by Ina Coolbrith, "is truthful and his figures flow rather from his perception than his sentiment." But that was all. He considered himself persecuted. His associates in the law had made fun of the legal term in the title of his book, had hailed him as "Joaquin" Miller, and had treated him as a joke. "I was so unpopular that when I asked a place on the Supreme Bench at the Convention, I was derisively told: 'Better stick to poetry.' Three months later, September 1, 1870, I was kneeling at the grave of Burns. I really expected to die there in the land of my fathers." He would support himself as Irving had supported himself with his pen. He sought cheap quarters in the great city and began to write. February 1, 1871, he recorded in his diary: "I have nearly given up this journal to get out a book. I wanted to publish a great drama called 'Oregonian,' but finally wrote an easy-going little thing which I called 'Arazonian,' and put the two together and called the little book Pacific Poems. It has been ready for the printer a long time."

He took the manuscript from publisher to publisher until, as he declares, every house in London had rejected it. His reception by Murray shows the general estimate of poetry by London publishers in the early seventies:

He held his head to one side, flipped the leaves, looked in, jerked his head back, looked in again, twisted his head like a giraffe, and then lifted his long finger:

"Aye, now, don't you know poetry won't do? Poetry won't do, don't you know?"

"But will you not read it, please?"

"No, no, no. No use, no use, don't you know?"

Then in desperation he printed a part of it at his own expense under the title Pacific Poems and sent out copies broadcast to the press. Never was venture so unpromising crowned with results so startling. The little book was hailed everywhere as something remarkable. The St. James Gazette declared that the poem "Arazonian"—that was Miller's early spelling of the word—was by Browning. The new author was traced to his miserable lodgings and made a lion of, and before the year was over the whole original manuscript of Pacific Poems had been brought out in a beautiful edition with the title Songs of the Sierras. Its author's real name did not appear upon the title page. The poems were by "Joaquin Miller," a name destined completely to supersede the more legal patronymic. "The third poem in my first London book," he explains, "was called 'California,' but it was called 'Joaquin' in the Oregon book. And it was from this that I was, in derision, called 'Joaquin.' I kept the name and the poem, too, till both were at least respected."[63]

Few American books have been received by the English press, or any press for that matter, with such unanimous enthusiasm. Miller was the literary discovery of the year. The London Times declared the book the "most remarkable utterance America has yet given"; the Evening Standard called it poetry "the most original and powerful." The pre-Raphaelite brotherhood counted its author as one of their own number, and gave him a dinner. Browning hailed him as an equal, and the press everywhere celebrated him as "the Oregon Byron." The reason for it all can be explained best, perhaps, in words that W.M. Rossetti used in his long review of the poet in the London Academy: "Picturesque things picturesquely put ... indicating strange, outlandish, and romantic experiences." The same words might have been used by a reviewer of Byron's first Eastern romance on that earlier morning when he too had awakened to find himself famous. The book, moreover, was felt to be the promise of stronger things to come. "It is a book," continued Rossetti, "through whose veins the blood pulsates with an abounding rush, while gorgeous subtropical suns, resplendent moons, and abashing majesties of mountain form ring round the gladiatorial human life."

II

Of Miller's subsequent career, his picturesque travels, his log cabin life in Washington, D.C., his Klondike experiences and the like, it is not necessary to speak. There was always an element of the sensational about his doings and his equipment. To the majority of men he was a poseur and even a mountebank. At times indeed it was hard for even his friends to take him with seriousness. How was one, for instance, to approach in serious mood As It Was in the Beginning, 1903, a book twelve inches by five, printed on coarse manila wrapping stock, bound in thin yellow paper, and having on the cover an enormous stork holding in his bill President Roosevelt as an infant? Those who were closest to him, however, are unanimous in declaring that all this eccentricity was but the man himself, the expression of his own peculiar individuality, and that he was great enough to rise above the conventionalities of life and be himself. C.W. Stoddard, who of all men, perhaps, knew him most intimately in his earlier period, maintained that

People who knew him wondered but little at his pose, his Spanish mantle and sombrero, his fits of abstraction or absorption, his old-school courtly air in the presence of women—even the humblest of the sex. He was thought eccentric to the last degree, a bundle of affectations, a crank—even a freak. Now I who have known Joaquin Miller as intimately as any man could know him, know that these mannerisms are natural to him; they have developed naturally; they are his second nature.[64]

Hamlin Garland, Charles F. Lummis, and many others who have known the poet intimately have spoken in the same way. His mannerisms and his eccentric point of view arose from the isolation in which his formative years were passed, his ignorance of life, his long association with highly individualized men in the mines and the camps and the mountains, and his intimate knowledge of the picturesque Spanish life of Mexico and Central America. His education had been peculiar, even unique. "All that I am," he declares in My Own Story,[65] "or ever hope to be I owe them [the Indians]. I owe no white man anything at all." He had never been a boy, he was utterly without sense of humor, and he had a native temperament aside from all this, that was all his own—need we say more?

III

When one approaches the poetry of Joaquin Miller, one is at first confused by the lavishness of it, the strength, and then swiftly the dreary weakness of it. It is like his own landscapes, abounding in vast barrens and flats, with here and there glimpses of glittering peaks and vast ranges, and now and then oases full of marvelous revel of color and strange birds and tropic flowers. Three-fourths of all he wrote is lifeless and worthless, but the other quarter is to American poetry what the Rockies are to the American landscape. Few poets have so needed an editor with courage to reject and judgment to arrange. Miller himself has edited his poems with barbarous savageness. He has not hesitated to lop off entire cantos, to butcher out the whole trunk of a poem, leaving only straggling and unrelated branches, to add to work in his early manner stanzas after his later ideals, and to revamp and destroy and cast utterly away after a fashion that has few precedents. He has done the work with a broad-ax when a lancet was needed. His editings are valuable, indeed, only in the new prose matter that he has added as foot-note and introduction.

The key to Miller's poetry is an aphorism from his own pen: "We must, in some sort, live what we write if what we write is to live." The parts of his work that undoubtedly will live are those poems that deal most closely with the material from which he sprang and of which his early life was molded. He is the poet of the frontier and of the great mid-century exodus across the Plains. Poems like "The Heroes of Oregon," and "Exodus for Oregon," are a part of the national history. They thrill at every point with reality and life.

And again

Pictures of the Plains, the Indian camp, the mine, the mountain, the herd, the trail, are to be found scattered everywhere in his work. One finds them in the most unlikely places—diamonds embedded often in whole acres of clay. In so unpromising a book as As It Was in the Beginning with its grotesque introduction explaining in characteristic mixed metaphor that "When, like a sentinel on his watch tower, the President, with his divine audacity and San Juan valor, voiced the real heart of the Americans against 'race suicide,' I hastened to do my part, in my own way, ill or well, in holding up his hands on the firing line"—even in this book one finds sudden flashes of truest poetry. He is describing winter on the Yukon. About him are an eager band of gold-seekers ready to press north:

He describes with realism the horrors and the beauties of the Arctic night, then at last the rising of the sun after the long darkness:

In passages like these the imagination of the poet breaks out for a moment like the moon from dark clouds, but all too often it is only for a moment.

He is the poet preËminently of the mountains of the Northwest. The spell of them was on him as it was on John Muir. At times in their presence he bursts into the very ecstasy of poetry; sonorous rhapsodies and invocations in which he reaches his greatest heights:

There is a sweep and vastness about him at his best that one finds in no other American poet. No cameo cutting for him, no little panels, no parlor decorations and friezes. His canvas is all out of doors and as broad as the continent itself:

The wild freedom of the Western air beats and surges in his lines:

Or again this magnificent apostrophe to the Missouri River:

And grandest of all, the poem that has all America in it and the American soul, perhaps the grandest single poem of the period, "Columbus":

In his enthusiasm for the mountains and the American landscape Miller was thoroughly sincere. Despite all his posturing and his fantastic costumes he was a truly great soul, and he spoke from his heart when he said in 1909: "But pity, pity, that men should so foolishly waste time with either me or mine when I have led them to the mighty heart of majestic Shasta. Why yonder, lone as God and white as the great white throne, there looms against the sapphire upper seas a mountain peak that props the very porch of heaven; and yet they bother with and want to torment a poor mote of dust that sinks in the grasses at their feet."[66]

IV

This leads us to the second phase of Miller's personality: he was a philosopher, a ponderer upon the deeper things of the spirit. He had inherited with his Scotch blood a religious strain, and a large section of his poetry deals with regions far indeed from his Sierras. He has written much upon the common fundamentals of humanity: religion, love, honor, courage, truth, and the like. In his "Vale! America," written in Italy during his second European sojourn, he could say,

And again

There was within him indeed something of the recluse and the hermit. No one of the period, not even Muir or Burroughs, approached Nature with more of worship. He would live with her and make her central in every point of his life. In his later years he built him a cabin on the heights above San Francisco Bay with a tremendous outlook of sea and mountain and sky, and lived there the rest of his life.

He became more and more solitary, more and more of a mystic as the years went on. Even from the first, as Rossetti pointed out, there is an almost oriental pantheism in him. It came perhaps from his Indian training. "Some curious specimens," Rossetti observed, "might be culled of the fervid interfusion of external nature and the human soul in his descriptive passages. The great factors of the natural world—the sea, the mountains, the sun, moon, and stars—become personalities, animated with an intense life and dominant possession."

But Miller was by no means a satyr, as many have pictured him, delighting in wildness for the mere sake of wildness. He overflowed with humanity. No man was ever more sensitive or more genuinely sympathetic. In his later years he sat above the tumult a prophet and seer, and commented and advised and warned. Great areas of his poetry have nothing to do with the West, nothing at all with the manner and the material that are so naturally associated with his name. For decades his voice was heard wherever there was oppression or national wrong. He wrote sonorous lyrics for the Indians, the Boers, the Russian Jews; he wrote the ringing "Cuba Libre" which was read by the Baroness de Bazus in the leading American cities before the Spanish war; he championed the cause of woman; and everywhere he took the side of the weaker against the strong. In this he resembles Mark Twain, that other prophet of the era. The freedom of the new West was in both of them, the true American "hatred of tyranny intense." He was won always by gentleness and beauty: he wrote a Life of Christ, he wrote The City Beautiful, and Songs of the Soul.

But almost all that he wrote in this pet field of his endeavor perished with its day. Of it all there is no single poem that may be called distinctive. He moralizes, he preaches, he champions the weak, but he says nothing new, nothing compelling. He is not a singer of the soul: he is the maker of resounding addresses to the peaks and the plains and the sea; the poet of the westward march of a people; the poet of elemental men in elemental surroundings—pioneers amid the vastness of the uttermost West.

V

It is easy to find defects in Miller's work. Even the sophomore can point out his indebtedness to Byron and to Swinburne—

his Byronic heroes and overdrawn heroines; his diction excessive in alliteration and adjectives; his barbarous profusion of color; his overworking of the word "tawney"; his inability to tell a story; his wordiness and ramblings; his lack of distinctness and dramatic power. One sweeps away the whole of this, however, when one admits that three quarters of all that Miller wrote should be thrown away before criticism begins.

The very faults of the poet serve as arguments that he was a poet—a poet born, not a poet made from study of other poets. He was not classic: he was romantic—a poet who surrendered himself to the music within him and did not care. "To me," he declared in his defense of poesy, "the savage of the plains or the negro of the South is a truer poet than the scholar of Oxford. They may have been alike born with a love of the beautiful, but the scholar, shut up within the gloomy walls, with his eyes to a dusty book, has forgotten the face of Nature and learned only the art of utterance."[67] This is one of the keys to the new era that opened in the seventies. It explains the new laughter of the West, it explains the Pike balladry, it explains the new burst of democratic fiction, the studies of lowly life in obscure environments. "To these poets," he continues; "these lovers of the beautiful; these silent thinkers; these mighty mountaineers, far away from the rush and roar of commerce; these men who have room and strength and the divine audacity to think and act for themselves—to these men who dare to have heart and enthusiasm, who love the beautiful world that the Creator made for them, I look for the leaven of our loaf."

Miller comes nearer to Mark Twain than to any other writer, unless it be John Muir. True, he is wholly without humor, true he had never been a boy, and in his mother's words had "never played, never had playthings, never wanted them"; yet notwithstanding this the two men are to be classed together. Both are the recorders of a vanished era of which they were a part; both emerged from the material which they used; both wrote notable prose—Miller's Life Among the Modocs and his other autobiographic picturings rank with Life on the Mississippi; both worked with certainty in one of the great romantic areas of human history. There is in the poems of Miller, despite all their crudity, a sense of adventure, of glorious richness, of activity in the open air, that is all his own. His Byronism and his Swinburneism were but externals, details of manner: the song and the atmosphere about it were his own, spun out of his own observation and colored by his own unique personality.

His own definition of poetry determines his place among the poets and explains his message: "To me a poem must be a picture," and it must, he further declared, be drawn always from Nature by one who has seen and who knows. "The art of poetry is found in books; the inspiration of poetry is found only in Nature. This book, the book of Nature, I studied in the wilderness like a monk for many years." The test of poetry, he maintained, is the persistence with which it clings in the memory, not the words but the picture. Judged by this standard, Songs of the Sierras, which is a succession of gorgeous pictures that cling in the imagination, must rank high.

It was his ideal to draw his generation away from their pursuit of gold and their slavery in the artificial round of the cities, their worship of European culture, European architecture, European books, and show them the beauties of their own land, the glories of the life out of doors, the heroism and sacrifice of the pioneers who made possible the later period.

"Grateful that I was born in an age of active and mighty enterprise, and exulting, even as a lad, in the primitive glory of nature, wild woods, wild birds, wild beasts, I began, as my parents pushed west through the wilderness, to make beauty and grandeur the god of my idolatry, even before I yet knew the use of words. To give expression to this love and adoration, to lead others to see grandeur, good, glory in all things animate or inanimate, rational or irrational, was my early and has ever been my one aspiration."

He would be the prophet of a new era. To the bards who are to come he flings out the challenge: "The Old World has been written, written fully and bravely and well.... Go forth in the sun, away into the wilds, or contentedly lay aside your aspirations of song. Now, mark you distinctly, I am not writing for nor of the poets of the Old World or the Atlantic seaboard. They have their work and their way of work. My notes are for the songless Alaskas, Canadas, Californias, the Aztec lands and the Argentines that patiently await their coming prophets."[68]

VI

The treatment of Miller by his own countrymen has never been so laudatory as that accorded him by other lands, notably England, but his complaint that his own people neglected him is groundless. All the leading magazines—the Atlantic, Scribner's, the Independent, and the rest—opened their columns to him freely. That reviews of his work and critical estimates of him generally were more caustic on this side the Atlantic came undoubtedly from the fact that the critic who was to review him approached his book always in a spirit of irritation at the British insistence that an American book to be worth the reading must be redolent of the wild and the uncouth, must deal with Indians, and buffaloes, and the various extremes of democracy. Miller has been the chief victim of this controversy—a controversy, indeed, which was waged through the whole period. The eccentricities of the man and his ignorance and his picturesque crudeness, set over against the extravagant claims of British writers, aroused prejudices that blinded the American critic to the poet's real worth.

On the whole the English have been right. Not that American literature to be of value must be shaggy and ignorant, a thing only of Pikes and slang and dialect. It means rather that the new period which opened in the seventies demanded genuineness, reality, things as they are, studies from life rather than studies from books; that it demanded not the reËchoing of outworn ideals and measures from other lands, but the spirit of America, of the new Western world, of the new soul of the new republic. And what poet has caught more of this fresh new America than the singer of the Sierras, the singer of the great American deserts, and the northern Yukon?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Joaquin Miller. (1841–1913.) Specimens, 1868; Joaquin et al, 1869; Pacific Poems, 1870; Songs of the Sierras, 1871; Songs of the Sunlands, 1873; Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs (with Percival Mulford), 1874; The Ship in the Desert, 1875; First Families of the Sierras, 1875; Songs of the Desert, 1875; The One Fair Woman, 1876; The Baroness of New York, 1877; Songs of Italy, 1878; The Danites in the Sierras, 1881; Shadows of Shasta, 1881; Poems, Complete Edition, 1882; Forty-nine: a California Drama, 1882; '49: or, the Gold-seekers of the Sierras, 1884; Memorie and Rime, 1884; The Destruction of Gotham, 1886; Songs of the Mexican Seas, 1887; In Classic Shades and Other Poems, 1890; The Building of the City Beautiful, a Poetic Romance, 1893; Songs of the Soul, 1896; Chants for the Boer, 1900; True Bear Stories, 1900; As It Was in the Beginning, 1903; Light: a Narrative Poem, 1907; Joaquin Miller's Poetry, Bear Edition, 1909.

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