the Life Among the Modocs, 1873, he is represented as a very handsome and romantic professional gambler of great courage and chivalrous nature who was generally understood to be a prince, but who, after fighting with Walker in Nicaragua, acknowledged himself to be only plain James Thompson, an American. In 1876, Miller dedicated his First Fam'lies of the Sierras as follows: "To my old companion in arms, Prince Jamie Tomas, of Leon, Nicaragua." But that this "Prince Jamie Tomas" was the James Thompson of "Life Among The Modocs and the mysterious stranger of the autobiographical sketch is made clear at last by a footnote to the poem called "Thomas of Tigre," in the fourth volume of the Bear Edition.
After the departure of "the Prince," the most influential friend of the strange boyhood days on Mt. Shasta was another mysterious figure, Joseph De Bloney, whom Miller met in the spring of 1855. In an apparently serious sketch of him, included in Memorie and Rime, De Bloney is described as "a Californian John Brown in a small way." According to this account, he was of an old noble Swiss family, and had probably crossed the plains with Fremont under an impulse similar to that which animated Brigham Young in Utah and Walker in Nicaragua—an impulse to found a new state. "His ambition was to unite the Indians about the base of Mt. Shasta and establish a sort of Indian republic, the prime and principal object of which was
