The NY Times published an
article (PDF) when Joaquin Miller died. From his NY Times Obituary:
Cincinnatus Heine Miller was the real name of the "Poet of the Sierras". He was born in Indiana in 1841. The world knew him by his pen name, Joaquin Miller, and for many years associated him with the mountains and mines of the Far West. Ever since his retreat in the 1870's to "The Heights" his high acres near Oakland, California, he had been looked upon as one of the picturesque figure of the Golden Gate, a figure inseparable from California. With his high boots, buckskin clothing and broad sombrero resting on a massive head of flowing white hair, he was a figure that would soon pass, with other outposts of pioneer days into the last great epic of civilization.
This removed life that Miller led in his last quarter century there at that high point where Fremont tented and from which he caught the view that led him to the name "The Golden Gate" gave him a reputation as a philosophical Hermit a sort of John Burroughs of the Far West. Although Miller loved this picturesque retirement there were occasional but remarked lapses from his devotion to it. in the late 1890's he suffered himself to be dispatched to the Klondike as the special correspondent of that scene of interest of the New York Evening Journal; and it must be admitted that he sometimes came East to spend some days with the Roycroft Colony at East Aurora. Some thought there were occasional aspects of Miller's simplicity that smacked of Elbert Hubbarddism. But he did love his heights, where he and his mother planted hundreds of trees, where he built his home and his chapel, and where finally he built the pyre - a cairn of rough stones inscribed "To the Unknown" - on which he gave directions that his body be burned and from which the ashes were to be carried off by the winds through the cypress grove and over the mountains that he knew so well.
"More than twenty years ago," he wrote not so many years back, "I sat down here on the mountain side with mother and began to plant trees. Men and women came to work and to rest with us, men and women from colleges and universities. No one was ever asked to come- and no one was ever asked to go.."
Miller's family moved to Oregon when he was only 13, and from there he ran away to the California gold fields. Then followed several years of mining life close to the soil with the Indians, a bit of law study, a little law practice , some years on the bench as a country Judge in California, and then his first attempt at writing. This was the editor of the Eugene City Democratic Register, which was suppressed. The name Joaquin came from his spirited defense of Joaquin Murietta, a Mexican bandit. The name stuck to him, and after several attempts to shake it off, he shrewdly accepted it. One of his first attempts to sell a manuscript was in his offer of copy to Editor Bret Harte of The Overland, San Francisco, but his verse attempts in this country - his "Songs of the Sierra" w were coldly received by Eastern publishers, so he took them to London. There they were published and created a sensation. Miller was petted, lionized, exalted, a little spoiled. He returned to this country and Heights, where he soon settled, became a literary mecca.
His books are "Pacific Palms", "Songs of the Sunland", "The Ship of the Desert", "Life Among the Modocs", "First Families of the Sierras", "Shadows of Shasta", "Memories and Rime", "Baroness of New York", "Songs of Far-Away Lands", "The Destruction of Gotham", "'49 of the Gold-Seekers of the Sierras", and "The Life of Christ". He wrote several plays, notably "The Danites".
Miller always protested that he did not like writing and that he would stop as soon as he could afford to do so. He accumulated several thousands, but lost them however in Wall Street, a most unhermitlike thing to do, and it made writing all the more a necessity.
"I never really intended to devote my life to writing", he once said. "I do not like it. My ambition has always been to build up a little home and make a moderate living by raising something in a garden and also practicing law in a quiet way. A man who writes constantly cannot think much, and a man who does not think much ought not to have much to say."