Men of the Time, eleventh edition/Miller, Joaquin
MILLER, Joaquin, an American poet, whose real name is Cincinnatus Heine Miller, was born in the Wabash district, Indiana, Nov. 10, 1841. When he was thirteen years old his father emigrated to Lane county, Oregon, whence the boy went three years later to try his fortune in California. After a wandering life of seven years, he returned home in 1860, and entered a lawyer's office at Eugene, Oregon. The next year he was an express messenger in the gold-mining districts of Idaho, which he left to take charge of the Democratic Register, a weekly newspaper at Eugene, afterwards suppressed by the authorities for its political sentiments. In 1863 he opened a law office in Cañon City, Oregon. From 1866 to 1870, he served as county judge of Grant county and during this time began to write his poems. He published first a collection in paper covers called "Specimens," and next a volume with the title "Joaquin et al., from which he derived his pseudonym. In 1870 his wife, whom he had married in 1863, obtained a divorce, and he went to London, where he published, in the following year, his "Songs of the Sierras," and "Pacific Poems." In 1873 appeared "Songs of the Sun Lands" and a prose volume entitled "Life among the Madocs: Unwritten History." His later works are "The Ship in the Desert," 1875; "First Fam'lies in the Sierras," 1875 (republished in 1881, under the title of "The Danites in the Sierras"); "The One Pair Woman," 1876; "Songs of Far Away Lands," 1878; "Songs of Italy," 1878; and "Shadows of Shasta," 1881. His wife, Minnie Theresa (Dyer) Miller, has also published verses under the pseudonym of "Minnie Myrtle."