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By: Meghan Saar 03/01/2008
Joaquin Miller
Joaquin Miller’s cradle may have been a “covered wagon pointed west,” but even this established poet was not above criticism.
When you walk around Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland, California, a garden he called “The Hights” when he settled here in 1886, don’t think of his best-known poem, “Columbus,” but his most controversial one, “Kit Carson’s Ride.”
General Edward F. Beale, who accompanied Kit Carson during the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, wrote a scathing review of this poem to poet Bayard Taylor. It “ought to be put in a moral glass bottle, labeled ‘Poison,’ put on a high shelf in the cupboard out of reach of children, and forgotten,” he wrote. He even went so far as to regret “that the scalp of Joaquin had not been counted among the ‘coups’ of that redoubted knight of the prairies and mountains.”
What was Beale so upset about? In Miller’s Songs of the Sierras, Carson saved himself while a prairie fire overtook his Indian bride, and even escaped on his lady love’s horse.
Miller heard the loud and clear complaints, and revised the poem when he released his complete works, admitting “the end was coarse and unworthy the brave spirit of Kit Carson.” The new ending showed the fire consumed only the lovers’ fellow companion and the horse.
• TWMAG.COM: Read the poems and the letters exchanged between Beale and Taylor
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