paring his filibustering excursions into Mexico and Nicaragua. To add the last attraction, General Joe Lane, once a pupil of Hulings Miller in the sugar camps of Indiana, had been appointed Governor of Oregon.
The multiplied appeals of the Far West had become irresistible. As soon as they could equip themselves for the journey, three years after the discovery of gold, the Millers started for the promised land. With a presentiment on his father's part that it would some day be a pleasure to go over the record, Joaquin, then in his eleventh year, kept a journal of the great expedition. Though this unfortunately was lost, the poetic residuum of his impressions is preserved in "Exodus for Oregon" and "The Ship in the Desert." As he recalled their adventure many years later, they set out in wagons on the seventeenth of March, 1852; in May, they crossed the Missouri above St. Joe, where they found the banks for miles crowded with tents of the emigrants; followed the Platte River; threaded Fremont's South Pass over the Rockies; rested at Salt Lake City; skirmished with the Indians in the desert; descended to the head waters of the Snake River; crossed the Cascade Mountains at The Dalles; and, after seven months and five days, ended their march of three thousand miles in Oregon, near the middle of the Willamette Valley—"the most poetic, gorgeous and glorious valley in flowers and snow-covered mountains on the globe."
