Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/266

 His cabin...still stands in the little town, but when I first saw it, in 1920, it showed marks everywhere both of age and prolonged neglect.... The building was serving at the moment as the buttress for discarded lumber and firewood, and chickens scratched in the mold about it. But, in the bright afternoon of an Eastern Oregon September, the place was not wholly bereft of the aspects of a shrine. The trees he planted could now lift their softening foliage above it; Canyon Creek still ran by it, just as in the old days; and beyond was the rimrock upon which he gazed in creative meditation.

My guide was a high school boy just returned from foot- ball practice. Replying to a remark that the cabin probably did not mean much locally, he said: “No, it’s just like an old shack around here mostly.”

The boy’s view at that time was not fully shared by the older population of the town, and two years later, in the summer of 1922, the cabin was made into a Joaquin Miller museum, with greater attention focused upon its reservation. Canyon City staged a pony express race of 187 miles, built “Whiskey Gulch” in Caynon Creek in front of the cabin, and summoned Juanita Miller from Oakland. She brought with her, “for keepsakes in papa’s old cabin,” his quill pen, some of his manuscript, and his last whiskey jug.

Mrs. Emma Hazeltine, still living in Canyon City at the time of my visit, had been Joaquin Miller’s neighbor and had known him and Mrs. Miller well. “Minnie Myrtle,” she said, “was just about as good a poet as Joaquin was, but she didn’t have much of a chance to write. Joaquin kind of neglected her. One day my sister and I were visiting Mrs. Miller, who had a trunk open to show us some souvenirs. The little girl was clinging to the strap of the top, which was liable to come down on her hand, when Joaquin came in and stepped over and slapped her as hard as he could. It was very embarrassing. Mrs. Miller tried to smooth it over by saying her husband was alarmed for the safety of the child.”

P. F. Chandler, editor of The Blue Mountain Eagle, says that when Joaquin Miller returned for a