to be regarded as an authoritative man of letters; consequently he minimized his frontier upbringing and magnified his education and general culture. Furthermore, he ultimately desired to be regarded as devoutly American and as intensely pacifistic; consequently he touched very lightly in later years the period when he was a secessionist, he skilfully hinted here and there that the stories of his outlawry were mythical, and he worked over his poems, making great excisions and adding new passages, with the purpose of harmonizing them with his declaration that he would rather starve than be celebrated as the poetic glorifier of war.[1] This was obviously a difficult task in the case of the bloody and imperialistic career of Walker.
In the summer of 1861 Miller began other interesting adventures which are better attested. At this time he was riding Mossman and Miller's pony express, carrying letters and gold dust between Walla
- ↑ "'The Tale of the Alcalde,' he says in his note in the Bear edition," has been a fat source of feeding for grimly humorous and sensational writers, who long ago claimed to have found in it the story of my early life; and, strangely enough, I was glad when they did so, and read their stories with wild delight. I don't know why I always encouraged this idea of having been an outlaw, but I recall that when Trelawny told me that Byron was more ambitious to be thought the hero of his wildest poems than even to be King of Greece, I could not help saying to myself, as Napoleon said to the thunders preceding Waterloo, 'We are of accord.' The only serious trouble about the claim that I made the fight of life up the ugly steeps from a hole in an adobe prison wall to the foothills of Olympus, instead of over the pleasant campus of a college, is the fact that 'our friends the enemy' fixed the date at about the same time in which I am on record as reading my class poem in another land."
