C. E. S. Wood may have been the most influential cultural figure in Portland in the forty years surrounding the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. He helped found the Portland Art Museum and was instrumental in making the Multnomah County Library a free and public institution. His words, "Good citizens are the riches of a city," are inscribed at the base of the Skidmore fountain, which he arranged and was designed by his friend Olin Warner. The Portland Rose Festival was his idea. He numbered among his friends Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, John Reed, Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Ansel Adams, John Steinbeck, Charlie Chaplin, James J. Hill, and Langston Hughes. Soldier, lawyer, poet, painter, raconteur, bon vivant, politician, free spirit, and Renaissance man, Wood might also be the most interesting man in Oregon history.

He was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, February 20, 1852, the son of Rosemary Carson and William Maxwell, first surgeon general of the navy. Wood graduated from West Point and came west in 1874 to fight Indians. He served as aide-de-camp to General O.O. Howard in the Nez Perce (1877) and Bannock-Paiute (1878) campaigns. Wood recorded one of the most famous speeches in Native-American oratory, the surrender speech of Chief Joseph, which ends, "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." He and Joseph became friends and he would twice send his oldest son Erskine to summer with Joseph in Colville, Washington.

Wood returned to West Point as Howard's adjutant, earning a law degree at Columbia University on the side. It was here he participated, again anonymously, in literary history, arranging for the West Point press to print, surreptitiously, Mark Twain's "1601," or Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors, a scatological story of life in Queen Elizabeth's bed chambers. The elaborately printed edition of only fifty copies is legendary among book collectors.

He retired from the army and returned to the West with his family, settling in Portland in the mid 1880s. He became a member of the first law firm in Oregon, Durham and Ball, where he specialized in maritime law. Senator George Williams was in the firm and many of its clients were wealthy pillars of the town. Wood represented the French banking group Lazard Freres, helping it sell a wagon road grant, arguing the case before the Supreme Court in 1915. His fee was "probably the first million dollar fee in Oregon history."

He and his wife Nanny raised five children and were vital members of the Portland aristocracy. They had three sons, Erskine, Max, and Berwick, and two daughters, Nan and Lisa. His wife Nanny was a "grande dame" of Portland society and noted for her beautiful garden.

Wood's love of the visual arts is carved in Portland cultural heritage. The presence of works by several American impressionists, J. Alden Weir, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Childe Hassam, and Olin Warner, in the houses of fortunate Oregonians and in the Portland Art Museum is primarily due to Wood. Some of his work still hangs in the museum, perhaps done with Hassam in eastern Oregon on one of his visits.

He called himself a philosophical anarchist but worked with the Democrats, even running for senator in 1906. A Democrat in a Republican state, he nevertheless had a real influence on the political atmosphere, working closely with William U'Ren to draft and pass the initiative and referendum and direct election laws. He became an advocate of George's single tax, the idea of taxing only undeveloped land in order to discourage land speculation, thereby redistributing wealth and democratizing the economy. In 1908 he resigned from the Oregon Bar Association after it refused to admit a black attorney. He was a vocal supporter of the suffrage movement and eloquent critic of the United States' entry into World War I. He supported the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), and defended both Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger when their rights to speak in Portland were challenged.

Wood was a gifted public speaker and a talented, versatile writer of poetry, fiction, drama, satire, essay, articles, and occasional verse. Between 1904 and 1911, Wood wrote for The Pacific Monthly, a popular Portland magazine, publishing poems, stories, articles, book reviews, features, and a column called "Impressions." In "Portland's Feast of Roses," a 1908 article boosting the Rose Festival and the growing prosperity of Oregon, Wood pauses to question the cutting of old growth timber: "There is no spot where the primeval forest is assured from the attack of that worst of all microbes, the dollar." His politically charged Christmas verse (annual gifts) are beautiful examples of fine press printing. His first book was A Book of Indian Tales (1901), myths and legends he collected while soldiering and exploring in the Northwest and Alaska. In 1904, he published A Masque of Love, a poetic drama defending free love.

In 1915, Wood published The Poet in the Desert, a long poem set in the southeastern Oregon desert, which he often visited, staying in the Harney basin area with his friend Big Bill Hanley. In this epic Jeremiad, Wood summons the spirit of the natural world--truth--in judgment of the ills of civilization--poverty, prostitution, and economic injustice. Wood wrote three distinct versions of it (1915, 1918, 1929) and it is the work for which he wished to be remembered. He gained a modicum of fame for Heavenly Discourse (1927), a book of forty satirical dialogues set in heaven with a benevolently libertarian god attended by angels and his intellectual heroes (Mark Twain, Voltaire, Rabelais). His favorite targets are prudery, prohibition, war, and evangelical fervor.

C. E. S. Wood left Portland at the age of sixty-six to live in Los Gatos, California, with the young poet and suffragist Sara Bard Field. Though he provided for his family with the fee he received from the Freres group, Wood's departure scandalized Portland. He and Sara built a modest estate called "The Cats" on a hillside overlooking Los Gatos and lived a life of comfortable Bohemianism, writing and entertaining guests. Wood wrote a long rant called Too Much Government (1931) and a sequel to Heavenly Discourse called Earthly Discourse (1937). Occasionally he and Sara roused themselves for a worthy cause. Wood died just before his 92nd birthday on January 22nd,1944.

Tim Barnes
Tim Barnes is a writer and poet who teaches English and writing at Portland Community College. He has published several essays on C.E.S. Wood and is the co-editor of Wood Works: The Life and Writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood.

Sources

Collected Poems of Charles Erskine Scott Wood. Foreword by Sara Bard Field. Introduction by William Rose Benét. New York: Vanguard Press, 1949.

Heavenly Discourse. Charles Erskine Scott Wood. New York: Vanguard Press, 1928.

Two Rooms: The Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood. Robert Hamburger. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

WoodWorks: The Life and Writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood. Edwin Bingham & Tim Barnes, eds. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1997.