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 Walla, Washington, and the newly opened mines at Millersburg, in Idaho. Attracted by certain contributions of "Minnie Myrtle" appearing in the newspapers of his pack, he wrote to her and had replies. His mining ventures yielded him enough to enable him to build "a beautiful new home" for his parents, and also to buy a newspaper. In 1863 he began to edit The Democratic Register in Eugene, Oregon, and he avowed southern sympathies which aroused the community. Though he had been brought up an ardent abolitionist and his elder brother John had entered the Northern army, he himself had imbibed, in his "college," which was tainted with disloyalty, or from the friends of Walker, who was a pro-slavery man, or elsewhere—he had imbibed principles and sentiments obnoxious to the aroused Unionist spirit of Oregon. As he explained it in Memorie and Rime, "when the war came, and the armies went down desolating the South, then with that fatality that has always followed me for getting on the wrong side, siding with the weak, I forgot my pity for the one in my larger pity for the other."

His entrance into journalism brought him again to the attention of his unknown correspondent, "Minnie Myrtle," who was then living in a mining and lumber camp at Port Orford by the sea, not far from the southern boundary of Oregon. Twenty years later, when this lady died in New York, in May, 1883, Miller told in his own fashion the story