Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/281

 early papers to which she contributed in her Port Orford days have been preserved. Two years ago, a letter was sent to George Melvin Miller, the poet's brother at Eugene, who has since died, in the hope that he would have clippings of the poems she wrote in the 60's. "I am sorry," he replied, "that I have none of Minnie Myrtle's literary work. Her work was never compiled in book form to my knowledge. According to my recollection, only a few pieces of her work ever were published." George Melvin Miller's own wife, Lischen Miller, had been a poet, but apparently she had shared the family indifference towards the literary fame of Minnie Myrtle Miller.

After several other vain inquiries for clippings, a search was made through all the old papers that could still be had in broken files, with attention focused for anything accredited to her name or her three alliterative initials. This chapter contains all of her poems that were found in this way, as well as some prose, a form in which she was piquant and buoyant when the subject was not her husband. It was all for the second period, however, and still without example of what she wrote in her joyous girlhood days when she was "the merry-hearted and spoiled child of the mines," when she was "the poetess of the Coquelle"—before Joaquin Miller had brought sadness into her life.

The broken marriage of the Millers, and the way he forsook a poetess for poetry, was a matter of wide public interest in Oregon in 1871, while Miller was becoming famous in London, as has already been indicated and as some other selections will still further show. The affair certainly motivated a good