Cincinnatus Heine Miller (1837 - 1913)

Cincinnatus Heine Miller

Cincinnatus Heine Miller, better known by his pen name Joaquin Miller, was an American writer and poet and journalist.

Miller spent his youth traveling across the country and in California among miners, gamblers, and Indians. During the Gold Rush, he had to endure many misadventures. He attended Columbia College (Eugene, Oregon) and was admitted to the Oregon State Bar in 1860.

From 1862-1866 he published the Eugene Democratic Register newspaper and was a county judge in Oregon. For the Register, he wrote an article in defense of Mexican bandit Joaquin Murietta, whose name he later took as a pseudonym. In the late 1860s his first collections of poems, Samples and Joaquin, were published.

In 1870 Miller traveled to England, where thanks to exotic manners and bright costume in the style of Westerns became popular among the literati and published several collections of poems. Among them was a book, Songs of the Sierra, which established his nickname "The Poet of the Sierra." He became a kind of celebrity among the Pre-Raphaelites, he was honored by the British press, he attended the Savage Club as a guest of Nathanial Hawthorne's son Julian, who called him a "licensed libertine."

Joaquin Miller's best works convey a sense of the grandeur of the Old West. His most famous poem is "Columbus."