Page:Americans (1922).djvu/223

 these parties; but if any credit is to be given to his Indian stories, he was recovering from his Castle Rocks wound from June, 1855, till the spring of 1856, when he joined the red men on the mountains; he spends the winter on the spurs of Mt. Shasta, and in the spring of 1857 he becomes implicated in the Pitt River Valley War, in which he is again seriously wounded; and his connections with this affair are not terminated till 1859. He might then have set out in time to join Walker's fatal expedition in Honduras; but he tells us that he did not. Walker, in his account of. The War in Nicaragua, published in 1860, nowhere mentions the boy whom he is alleged to have fathered. One's final impression is that the poem is fiction, colored by the tales and published narratives of the filibusters and perhaps by Miller's subsequent acquaintance with Central America. And this impression is strengthened by Miller's reply to one who asked him point blank whether he was ever with Walker in Nicaragua: "Was Milton ever in Hell?"

The fiasco of De Bloney's and Joaquin's Mt. Shasta "republic" fell, according to the legend, in the year of John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry, and two years after the ejection of Walker from Nicaragua. In Miller's mind these three curious attempts to escape from the jurisdiction of the United States became closely associated memories