Books with author Jo Miller

"It goes without saying that anything written by Joaquin Miller will be interesting. Of all the subjects he has chosen there is none more interesting than bears." -Book Notes Miller in this book of bear stories doesn't limit himself to the typical bear attack genre. For example, he describes a joke a grizzly bear played on an Indian: "The old Indian had only time to turn on his heel and throw himself headlong in the large end of a hollow log, which luckily lay at hand. This, however, was only a temporary refuge. He saw, to his delight, that the log was open at the other end, and corkscrewing his way along toward the further end, he was about to emerge, when, to his dismay, he saw the old mother sitting down quietly waiting for him! "After recovering his breath as best he could in his hot and contracted quarters, he elbowed and corkscrewed himself back to the place by which he first entered. But lo! the bear was there, sitting down, half smiling, and waiting to receive him warmly. This, the old Indian said, was repeated time after time, till he had no longer strength left to struggle further, and turned on his face to die, when she put her head in, touched the top of his head gently with her nose and then drew back, took her cub with her and shuffled on." Joaquin Miller (1837 – 1913) was a colorful American author and frontiersman. In 1900 he published "True Bear Stories." Other books he authored include: "My Life Among the Indians"; Specimens; Pacific Poems; Songs of the Sierras; Songs of the Sun-Lands; Life Amongst the Modocs; Arizonian; First Fam'lies of the Sierras; The One Fair Woman; The Baroness of New York; The Danites; Songs of Italy; Memorie and rime; The Destruction of Gotham; Songs of the Soul; True Bear Stories; Chants for the Boer; The Complete Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller; As It Was in the Beginning; The Building of the City Beautiful; Light: A Narrative Poem; The Danites in the Sierras; The Gold-Seekers of the Sierras; An Elk Hunt; The Battle of Castle Crags Joaquin Miller, like Mark Twain, may be said to have emerged from the materials he worked in. No American writer, not even Thoreau or Whitman, has ever been more uniquely individual, and none, not even Mark Twain, has woven into his writings more things that are peculiarly American, or has worked with a more thorough firsthand knowledge of the picturesque elements that went into the making of the new West. He is the poet of the American westward march, the poet of "the great American desert," the poet preeminently of the mountain ranges from Alaska to Nicaragua as John Muir is their prose interpreter.

True Bear Stories (Illustrated)By Joaquin Miller, With Introductory Notes By Dr. David Starr Jordan, President Of Leland Stanford, Jr., University. Together With A Thrilling Account Of The Capture Of The Celebrated Grizzly “MONARCH.”Fully Illustrated.Chicago And New York: Rand, Mcnally & Company, Publishers.Copyright, 1900, By Rand, Mcnally & Co.Dedicated ToMy Dear Little Daughter, Juanita Miller, For Whose Pleasure And Instruction I Have Many Times Dug Up The Most Of These Stories From Out The Days Of My Boyhood.PREFACE.My Bright Young Reader: I was once exactly your own age. Like all boys, I was, from the first, fond of bear stories, and above all, I did not like stories that seemed the least bit untrue. I always preferred a natural and reasonable story and one that would instruct as well as interest. This I think best for us all, and I have acted on this line in compiling these comparatively few bear stories from a long life of action in our mountains and up and down the continent.As a rule, the modern bear is not a bloody, bad fellow, whatever he may have been in Bible days. You read, almost any circus season, about the killing of his keeper by a lion, a tiger, a panther, or even the dreary old elephant, but you never hear of a tame bear’s hurting anybody.I suppose you have been told, and believe, that bears will eat boys, good or bad, if they meet them in the woods. This is not true. On the contrary, there are several well-authenticated cases, in Germany mostly, where bears have taken lost children under their protection, one boy having beenreared from the age of four to sixteen by a she bear without ever seeing the face of man.I have known several persons to be maimed or killed in battles with bears, but in every case it was not the bear that began the fight, and in all my experience of about half a century I never knew a bear to eat human flesh, as does the tiger and like beasts.Each branch of the bear family is represented here and each has its characteristics. By noting these as you go along you may learn something not set down in the schoolbooks. For the bear is a shy old hermit and is rarely encountered in his wild state by anyone save the hardy hunter, whose only interest in the event is to secure the skin and carcass.Of course, now and then, a man of science meets a bear in the woods, but the meeting is of short duration. If the bear does not leave, the man of books does, and so we seldom get his photograph as he really appears in his wild state. The first and only bear I ever saw that seemed to be sitting for his photograph was the swamp, or “sloth,” bear—Ursus Labiatus—found in the marshes at the mouth of the Mississippi River. You will read of an encounter with him further on.I know very well that there exists a good deal of bad feeling between boys and bears, particularly on the part of boys. The trouble began, I suppose, about the time when that old she bear destroyed more than forty boys at a single meeting, for poking fun at a good old prophet. And we read that David, when a boy, got very angry at a she bear and slew her single-handed and alone for interfering with his flock. So you see the feud between the boy and bear family is an old one indeed.But I am bound to say that I have found much that is pathetic, and something that is almost half-human, in this poor, shaggy, shuffling hermit. He doesn’t want much, only the wildest and most worthless parts of the mountains or marshes, where, if you will let him alone, he will let you alone, as a rule. Sometimes, out here in California, he loots a pig-pen, and now and then he gets among the bees. Only last week, a little black bear got his head fast in a bee-hive that had been improvised from a nail-keg, and the bee-farmer killed him with a pitchfork; but it is only when hungry and far from home that he seriously molests us.The bear is a wise beast. This is, perhaps, because he never says...

Excerpt from Joe Miller's Complete Jest Book: Being a Collection of the Most Excellent Bon Mots, Brilliant Jests, and Striking Anecdotes, in the English LanguageCommittee clerks if the house, and let each of 'em take a document, and they can all read together. Man.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.