Page:Americans (1922).djvu/246

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he later cut up into its constituent pictures, sings the glories of Oregon and the emigrants. In "Olive Leaves," his garland from Palestine, he begins a peculiarly American reappropriation of Christianity and an assimilation of it to his growing humanitarian sentiment. And "Fallen Leaves" are for the most part memories of the West. So that if he does not exhibit any very daring unconventionalities in form, he does employ his forms with a good deal of flexibility in imaginatively molding the raw stuff of American experience.

In 1873, also, Miller published in France and England the most original and the most poetical of all his books in prose, and, on the whole, perhaps the most interesting book that he ever produced, Life Among the Modocs, which circulated in translations, later editions, and abridgments, pirated or otherwise, under various titles—as Unwritten History, Scenes de la Vie des Mineurs et des Indiens de California, Paquita, My Own Story, and My Life Among the Indians. In 1872 and 1873 the Modoc Indians were attracting the attention of the public by their stubborn resistance to the government's attempt to move them from their old lands to a new reservation. In the course of this resistance their killing of two peace commissioners naturally excited popular indignation. But in Miller, instinctively sympathetic with the under dog, the last hopeless stand of this warlike tribe, which he had known in his boyhood, appealed strongly to the humani-