Page:Americans (1922).djvu/230

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and journeyed with his wife and baby to a new mining camp at Canyon City, in eastern Oregon. As for him, it was the life to which he had always been accustomed, and he threw himself into the task of establishing himself with unwonted application of his restless energy. He practised law among the miners, he planted the first orchard in the land, he led in his third Indian campaign; he was rewarded in 1866 by election, for a four-year term, as judge of the Grant County court, and finally, he had begun to occupy himself seriously with poetry. In 1868 he published a pamphlet of Specimens, and in 1869, at Portland, Oregon, his first book: "Joaquin, Et Al., by Cincinnatus H. Miller"—dedicated "To Maud."[1]

Ambition and a multitude of business, as he depicted the matter, made him not the most genial of companions:

Often I never left my office till the gray dawn, after a day of toil and a night of study. My health gave way and I was indeed old and thoughtful. Well, all this, you can see, did not suit the merry-hearted and spoiled child of the mines at all. . . . She became the spoiled child here that she had been at her father's, and naturally grew impatient at my persistent toil and study. But she was good all the time. . . . Let me say here, once for all, that no man or woman can put a finger on any stain in this