Cincinnatus Heine Miller (September 8, 1837 – February 17, 1913), better known by his pen name Joaquin Miller, was an American poet, author, and frontiersman. He is nicknamed the "Poet of the Sierras" after the Sierra Nevada, about which he wrote in his Songs of the Sierras (1871). Joaquin Miller's parents were Hulings Miller and Margaret (née Witt), who married January 3, 1836, in Union County, Indiana. Their second son, Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, was born in 1837 near Union County, Indiana. For unknown reasons, Miller later claimed his birth date was November 10, 1841. He said he was born in Millersville, Indiana, a town he claimed was founded by his father, while on a wagon heading west. After leaving Union County, Miller's father then moved the family to Grant County, Indiana to a location near the Mississinewa River and near the Miami Indian Reservation. Besides adopting the pen name "Joaquin", he later changed his middle name from Hiner to Heine to evoke the German poet Heinrich Heine. He accompanied William Walker on the latter's 1855 filibustering expedition to Nicaragua. In the spring of 1857, Miller took part in an expedition against the Pit River Tribe after they killed a white man on the Pit River. Years later, he claimed that he had sided with the Native Americans and was run out of town for it. He was widely rumored to have married an Indian woman, possibly a Wintu princess who nursed him back to health after he was wounded by Modocs, and to have fathered with her a daughter named Cali-Shasta, or "Lily of the Shasta." Although Miller soon left the area to pursue other adventures, in the 1870s he sought out Cali-Shasta, then in her teens, and took her to San Francisco to be educated by his friend Ina Coolbrith. Contemporaries believed that Miller's "Indian wife" was the woman later kidnapped by Modocs and held in captivity for some years until rescued by a man named Jim Brock (whom she married), but when "Amanda Brock" died in 1909, Miller denied news reports describing his supposed romance with her. He credited her with saving his life but said she had always been a platonic friend. Less