He also painted in Alaska, Mexico, Baja, the Hawaiian Islands, the South Seas, and parts of the East Coast of the United States.

Daken exhibited in the leading galleries of the day in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Famous in his day, Daken's every movement was tracked by the press, revealing the social, cultural, and political times in which he lived and the noted personalities of the era with whom he mingled: bohemians, revolutionists, politicians, fellow artists, writers, musicians, and Hollywood film stars and directors: Jack London, American novelist, journalist, and social activist; James D. Phelan, San Francisco Mayor and United States Senator; vaudeville star Sophie Tucker, with whom Daken had an affair; Aline Barnsdall, who built the Hollyhock House on Olive Hill in East Hollywood;  Aimee Semple McPherson, the Los Angeles Pentecostal evangelist and national celebrity; director Hal Roach, best known for his "Laurel and Hardy" and "Our Gang" ("The Little Rascals") comedy series; silent film star Virginia Lee Corbin; and others of the film world.

[14]  Born and raised in humble circumstances, Daken was unschooled, mined for gold with his father in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode, and developed an early passion for classical music, nature, and painting en plein air.

He and London had first met in 1901 in the Reno Station in Nevada and together rode the brake beams of a freight car on the Union Pacific Railroad to Oakland, California.

In mid-1913, during the Mexican Revolution, Daken left his family and moved to Mexico to paint and scout material for San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE).

In Mazatlán, he made hundreds of charcoal drawings and painted numerous scenes of the Sierra Madre Mountains in the red palette.

In 1914, in or around Mazatlán, he was shot three times and held a prisoner of war for two months, at the height of the disputes between Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa.

[22][23][24] He leased a home and studio in Corte de Linda Vista, a cluster of Spanish-inspired garden bungalows on Hayworth Avenue, today known as West Hollywood.

Daken is best known during his Hollywood years for his paint-to-music genre which he performed on stage in various venues including the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.

Intending to return to San Francisco when the Depression waned, they lived for a year in a mining camp near Yosemite in Bootjack, California.

[28] He died on April 25, 1935, and is buried in the historic Georgetown Pioneer Cemetery, founded at the onset of the California Gold Rush.

In the 1924, Daken led a two-month art expedition into Piute Pass in the John Muir Wilderness, joined by a cameraman and fifteen fellow Impressionists.

[38]  Daken wrote "Experiences in the Rugged West," a short story about his eight-week mining trip and surviving an avalanche in the Sierra Nevada mountains, published in 1928 in The Wasp, a San Francisco weekly tabloid.

In 1926, Daken told a Sunset Magazine reporter: "The bottom of the sea is a world of incessant warfare, and many a time I have been compelled to lay down my brushes and watch the outcome of a tragedy.

"[43] in 1926, Daken wrote "In the Grip of an Octopus," a short story about his underwater adventures, published in 1926 in The Wide World Magazine and in 1927 in newspapers from Los Angeles to Boston and in Canada.

In 2024,an exhibition titled Tilden Daken: The Art of Adventure, was held at Museum of Sonoma County and Jack London State Historic Park.