“The Ship in the Desert” was first published in London—Chapman
and Hall, 1876. It was nearly twice its present length
and was dedicated To my Parents in Oregon, as follows:
With deep reverence I inscribe these lines, my dear parents,
to you. I see you now, away beyond the seas—beyond the lands
where the sun goes down in the Pacific like some great ship of
fire, resting still on the green hills, waiting
“Where rolls the Oregon
And hears no sound save its own dashing.”
Nearly a quarter of a century ago you took me the long and
lonesome half-year's journey across the mighty continent, wild
and rent and broken up and sown with sand and ashes and
crossed by tumbling wooded rivers that ran as if glad to get
away, fresh and strange and new, as if but half-fashioned from
the hand of God. All the time as I tread this strange land I
re-live those scenes, and you are with me. How dark and deep,
how sullen, strong and lionlike the mighty Missouri rolled between
his walls of untracked wood and cleft the unknown domain
of the middle world before us! Then the frail and buffeted
rafts on the river, the women and children huddled together, the
shouts of the brawny men as they swam with the bellowing
cattle, the cows in the stormy stream eddying, whirling, spinning
about, calling to their young, their bright horns shining
in the sun. The wild men waiting on the other side; painted
savages, leaning on their bows, despising our weakness, opening
a way, letting us pass on to the unknown distances, where they
said the sun and moon lay down together and brought forth the
stars. The long and winding lines of wagons, the graves by the
wayside, the women weeping together as they passed on. Then
hills, then plains, parched lands like Syria, dust and alkali, cold
streams with woods, camps by night, great wood fires in circles,
tents in the center like Cæsar's battle camps, painted men that
passed like shadows, showers of arrows, the wild beasts howling
from the hills. You, my dear parents, will pardon the thread of
fiction on which I have strung these scenes and descriptions of
a mighty land of mystery, and wild and savage grandeur, for
the world will have its way, and, like a spoiled child, demands
a tale—
“Yea,
We who toil and earn our bread, still have our masters.”
A ragged and broken story it is, with long deserts, with alkali
and ashes, yet it may, like the land it deals of, have some green
places, and woods and running waters, where you can rest.
Three times now I have ranged the great West in fancy, as
I did in fact for twenty years and gathered unknown and unnamed
blossoms from mountain top, from desert land, where
man never ranged before, and asked the West to receive my
weeds, my grasses and blue-eyed blossoms. But here it ends.
Good or bad, I have done enough of this work on the border.
The Orient promises a more grateful harvest. I have been true
to my West. She has been my only love. I have remembered
her greatness. I have done my work to show to the world her
vastness, her riches, her resources, her valor and her dignity, her
poetry and her grandeur. Yet while I was going on working so
in silence, what were the things she said of me? But let that
pass, my dear parents. Others will come after us. Possibly I
have blazed out the trail for great minds over this field, as you
did across the deserts and plains for great men a quarter of a
century ago.
Joaquin Miller.
Lake Como, Italy.
I had bought land near Naples, where I wrote most of this,
along with a young Englishman intending to settle down there;
but we both were stricken with malarial fever; he died, and I,
broken and sick at heart for my mountains, finally came home.
The author of Cleopatra, a man of great and varied endowments,
laid a strong hand to the fashioning of this poem, and
in return I made mention of his Sybals and Semiramis. We
knew, in Rome, and loved much the woman herein described. In
truth, I never created any one of my men or women or scenes
entirely.
As for the story of the ship in the desert, it is old, old. You
can see the tide marks of an ocean even from your car window
as you glide around Salt Lake, hundreds of feet up the steeps.
The mighty Colorado Cañon was made by the breaking away of
this ocean, you find oyster shells and petrified salt water fish in
the Rocky Mountains, and a ship in the desert is quite in line
with these facts.
The body of this poem was first published in the Atlantic
Monthly. The purpose of it was the same as induced the Isles
of the Amazons, but the work is better because more true and
nearer to the heart. Bear in mind it was done when the heart
of the continent was indeed a desert, or at least a wilderness.
How much or how little it may have had to do in bringing Europe
this way to seek for the lost Edens, and to make the desert
blossom as the rose, matters nothing now; but, “He hath brought
many captives home to Rome whose ransom did the generous
coffers fill.”
