Joaquin Miller's Poem: "Kit Carson's Ride"
By: TW Editors 03/01/2008
Letter from Edward Fitzgerald Beale
Kit Carson’s Ride
Under this title there comes to us in Harper’s Weekly, a very long poem by one Joaquin Miller, of California. As well as we can make it out, it seems to be an ugly cross of Browning on Swinburne, and ought to be put in a moral glass bottle, labeled “Poison,” put on a high shelf in the cupboard out of the reach of children, and forgotten.
It is rarely that the license allowed to poets has been more thoroughly abused than in the ill-written lines which are contained in the article that heads this notice. As a rule in poetry when fact is departed from, it has always been to exaggerate the virtues of a departed hero, but never to slander him by rendering his picture ridiculous, much less indecent, and as we recall the modest, earnest, refined simplicity of Carson, and compare it with the frenzied and licentious buffoon presented in the poem and picture referred to, we cannot but regret that the scalp of Joaquin had not been counted among the “coups” of that redoubted knight of the prairies and mountains. How far the descendants of that upright and noble man might be justified in sueing [sic] the author for defamation of character in a city court, we do not know, but are sure in the courts of that generous and active Judge Lynch, away off in the Rockies, where Kit’s fame is yet cherished by many a hardy pioneer, we might safely count on “Exemplary damages”—something that would make his hair stand on end.
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