Cincinnatus Hiner “Joaquin” Miller was a real person who also is a character in my novel White Poison. By his own account, he was shot in the neck by an arrow during the battle of Castle Crags in 1855, no more than five miles as the crow flies from Dunsmuir, CA, where I grew up. And Miller’s book Life Amongst the Modocs, published in 1873, is, for better and worse, the only major literary product of that time and place.
It’s a strange, even schizophrenic book. It bills itself as “unwritten history,” and some of it does seem to be a straightforward account of Miller’s experiences on the frontier. But much of it is so romanticized that it has to be read as fiction. Miller’s contemporary Ambrose Bierce grumped that he couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about anything. For example, Miller did live for a spell with Indians, but not with the Modocs – he apparently used their name in his title to boost sales; the Modoc War of 1873 had revived interest in that part of the country.
Yet Life Amongst the Modocs is a better book than I thought it would be. Miller had talent, and now and then he could be profound. More than almost any other 19th-century writer, he grasped that the “winning of the West” – of which the California Gold Rush was a particularly bloody part – was not one thing but two. It was a great romantic adventure – a young nation flexing its muscles, stretching itself from sea to sea, giving ordinary people a chance to strike it rich and change their lives. At the same time, it was an orgy of conquest and slaughter and environmental destruction. The American mind was, and remains, ill-equipped to grapple with both stories at once. It had to accept one or the other, which accounts for the note of falsity that creeps into most Westerns, in print or on the screen.
Miller didn’t succeed in integrating or reconciling those two stories – who has? – but he did manage to tell both. A restless, impressionable enthusiast, he took turns glorying in the Gold Rush and being horrified by it, writing, as I say in my novel, “with his right hand as if unaware of what his left hand had already written.” By the standards of his time, he was relatively enlightened. It’s no surprise to hear that in his old age he settled among the redwoods in the Berkeley Hills and dabbled in Eastern religions, like a precursor of the hippies.
A true Californian.