Oregon Experience: CES Wood
Frontier Humanist
 CES Wood, West Point, 1874 Courtesy: Lewis and Clark Library |
By Tim Barnes, Portland Community College
Charles Erskine Scott Wood, though born in the East in 1852, grew up with the Wild West, the frontier, tucked and pulsing in his mind. In the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mill, he and his brothers rambled surrounding hills, imagining themselves Davy Crocketts and Daniel Boones, trappers, fur traders, Indian fighters, Indians. In a letter to Max Hayak, German publisher of Wood's epic paean to freedom, The Poet in the Desert (1915), set in eastern Oregon, Wood remembers:
"When I was a schoolboy the map of the United States from the Missouri River west to the Rocky Mountains and beyond nearly to the Pacific Ocean was a blank space of pink paper, "The Great American Desert."
This was the condition of the American imagination. The idea of free, wild, open land gripped and roused the American psyche so much that Frederick Jackson Turner asserted in his famous essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," that, "The true point of view of the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West." Wood, though born into Eastern society circles and the son of William Maxwell Wood, the first surgeon general of the United States Navy, must have sensed the truth of Turner's insight.
The truth of it struck home when, as a West Point second lieutenant just posted to the frontier, he rode from Fort Bidwell, California, across the eastern Oregon desert to Fort Vancouver, Washington. The letter to Hayak continues:
"When I graduated from West Point my first regimental station was on the edge of this desert. All my Indian campaigns were in it. It means youth to me ... Its blinding light, dazzling wide stretches--pale far purple mountain peaks--and the glorious skies are beautiful to my eyes--intoxicating…"
Like many of those westering, Wood was looking for freedom, for elbow room, for a new life, for that heady spirit this land was founded on--liberty.
Ironically, he found freedom as a soldier, a man whose job it was to subdue that spirit, to tame the Wild West. It is Wood's reaction to this encounter, the same confrontation that all our pioneers faced, that marks him unique and sets the tone of his long life.
Though he worked as a soldier and lawyer for those people who were divvying up the land wrested from the native peoples, Wood learned from the indigenous. He valued and defended their cultures and rights. At no point in his life did he accept the idea that the only good Indian is a dead one. In Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940, Sherry L. Smith writes, “[Wood] reformulated the fundamental meaning of ‘Indian’ from object of conquest to tool of social criticism and object of emulation.” Wood's reaction to the way the west was settled, to the Indian massacres and the land grabs, defines him as a humanist among materialists.
Wood's frontier humanism can be traced in the development of his concepts of freedom, individualism, and equality--freedom foremost. Contrasted with the prevailing attitudes of frontier America, there emerges a clear and principled humanism, one that informs all of Wood's writing.
This humanism, in which freedom is the fundamental principle, grows out of his childhood. His father was a stern man of literary leanings, author of several autobiographical narratives. As a youth, Wood read in Spanish and classical literature, finding a sense of life in Cervantes, Voltaire, and Swift that his own upbringing muted. His rigidly Presbyterian mother did not permit whistling on Sundays, or any other frivolous breach of Sabbath gravity.
Appointed to West Point through his father's influence (William Maxwell was a personal friend of President U. S. Grant), Wood did much extracurricular reading in Milton, Chaucer, Spenser, Sir Walter Scott, and chaffed at the discipline at West Point, earning nearly enough demerits for expulsion.
It is no wonder then that the Great American Desert so captured his sensibility, his yearning for a freedom requisite to his imaginings, to his readings into the heart of humankind. In Main Currents in American Thought, Vernon Parrington writes of the American of the 1870's:
"A free people had put away all aristocratic privileges and conscious of its power went forth to possess the last frontier. Its social philosophy, which it found adequate to its needs, was summed up in three words--preemption, exploitation, progress. . . . It was a simple philosophy and it suited the simple individualism of the times. The Gilded Age knew nothing of the Enlightenment; it recognized only the acquisitive instinct."
This was not Wood's instinct. Once in the West he reacted against the frontier spirit that, as Roderick Nash observes in Wilderness and the American Mind, "found it difficult to regard wild country with other than enmity." Our "National pride," Nash points out, "stems from both having and destroying wilderness." The most striking example of Wood's position is the Nez Perce campaign of 1877. Wood was General O.O. Howard's aide-de-camp for most of the campaign and participated in the entire chase of Chief Joseph and the non-treaty Nez Perce. Trapped in a large hollow along a stream in the Bear’s Paw Mountains, fifty miles from the Canadian border, the Nez Perce negotiated their surrender. There, paraphrasing the report of two Nez Perce emissaries according to his literary intuition, Wood recorded the most famous American Indian surrender speech of all time, which ends, "From where the sun now stands I will fight no more for ever." Though anonymous, this is Wood's first appearance in print. Wood began a friendship with Joseph at the surrender that would last until Joseph's death. Wood's son Erskine spent several summers with Joseph on the Colville reservation in Washington.
Wood's first book, A Book of Tales: Being Myths of the North American Indian (1901), is Indian myths that he recorded while soldiering the West. Though a bit romanticized, Wood's ethnography is sound and two tales are collected in Jarold Ramsey's definitive Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country. Wood's first signed publications were in Century Magazine in the 1880's and early 90's.
In 1884, Wood resigned from the Army, partially because he felt it broke its surrender promises to Joseph. An 1884 Century Magazine article, "Chief Joseph, The Nez Perce," defends and honors Joseph and, as well, praises the Indian culture for its natural anarchy because refusal to participate was a respected right among them. He praises its lack of individual ownership and way of husbanding the land for the good of the community, the tribe. Here we see Wood valuing the truths of other cultures, a humanistic tenet, and exploring the nature of human freedom, an equally humanistic impulse.
In 1893 Century Magazine featured an article by Wood called, "Famous Indians: Portraits of Some Indian Chiefs." Seven medallions of Northwest Indian chiefs done by Olin Warner, a friend of Wood’s and sculptor of the Skidmore Fountain, accompany the article. Joseph most likely modeled for his medallion at Wood’s Portland home. In the introduction to the article, Wood writes, “[the Indian] has gained little or nothing or nothing from white civilization, and has lost everything.”
This piece was published the same year that Frederick Turner declares the American frontier closed. In his essay, Turner lauds "that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom," but underscores the "dominant individualism, working for good and for evil." This is the problem that faced Wood's expanding humanism. The West was swollen with strong, capable, amoral, unenlightened men whose major interest was getting money however they could. It was a democracy of demagogues and would-be dictators, of aspiring captains of industry.
Wood, then living in Portland and practicing law, with a specialty in admiralty law, for the firm of Durham & Ball, watched with great alarm the vivisection of the West by the cattle and timber barons, the railroad and mining magnates. Though he was one of Portland's patricians and represented the local mercantile barons, he kept a second office where he entertained radicals, artists, and other dreamers of his day. He described the development of his social philosophy in a 1937 letter to Helena Kay, author of an M.A. thesis on his work:
"All this usurpation of land by a few was effected by means of the feudal deed in fee simple which gave to the grantee, "his heirs and assigns forever," the land described. By this deed, granted by Congress as the overlord, all land of value in the United States, from ocean to ocean, has passed into private, monopolistic hands. When this became plain to me, I read books discussing the Socialistic and the Anarchistic theories in relation to social organization and to economics and, while I prefer the Anarchistic theory, I am willing to aid any step in the revolutionary direction, even Single Tax. For I see that it is special privilege, protected by government, which makes a class rather than a classless society, automatically creating a ruling class which finds profit in exploitation and war."
Wood read Marx, the French anarchist Proudhon, and Henry George, advocate of the single tax. Parrington characterizes the purpose of Henry George's single tax, outlined in his Progress and Poverty, as being "to humanize and democratize political economy, that it might serve social ends rather than class exploitation." Wood's goal in his investigations was to continue the egalitarian society fostered in the western frontier before it was closed. His studies of Marxism are based on a belief that democracy should be operative within capitalistic enterprises, and his anarchy stems from his experience with the American Indians and focused on the belief that institutions should not outlast their purposes.
In much of Wood's work there is a pantheism, a belief in the example of nature, that reflects a reverence for the earth that is antithetical to the frontier inclination. This pantheistic intuition, rooted in aesthetics and in a humanistic understanding of the relationship between people and place, once again locates Wood apart from his fellow frontiersmen. In Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region, William Everson speaks of "the awesome scale of Western Landscape as the focal point of the underlying American intuition: the vision of God in nature." The frontiersmen bent on exploiting the land cannot afford to believe in the sacredness of space, of the earth as mother, as the Indians did. He, also, cannot afford to believe that human rights supersede property rights when it comes to the welfare of humankind on the planet.
The abrogation of the frontier dream of equality, democracy and individual freedom by avarice, injustice, and exploitation drew Wood ever more deeply into the nature of freedom. He found the solution to ills of society in man's acceptance of the essential axiom of nature: growth through freedom.
In Heavenly Discourse (1927), Wood’s best-selling book of political satires, God tells Mark Twain that he wants "nothing so much as freedom, freedom, always freedom--body, soul, and mind free, then let us see what will come of it." Twain responds, "Surely something great."
But Wood was not a libertarian, one who believes no restrictions but one's own, like many frontiersman; no, Wood was a humanist, one who believed in, as J.P. Van Pragg aptly phrases it in his essay "What is Humanism?" "an open society characterized by freedom of opinion, readiness to deliberate, mutual respect and democratic procedures, and directed towards the general welfare." In Heavenly Discourse, we find this concern for the good of the community in Wood's characterization of Jesus as the Jesus of the Beatitudes, the rebel pacifist preacher of brotherly love.
In Wood's philosophy, the concept of freedom is companioned by the principle of love. Together they create the elemental ordinance of an ethical life: growth through freedom. Van Praag writes that one of the central tenets of humanism is the demand from society, "that it creates conditions for the free development of individuals and groups in the form of prosperity, equity, legality, participation and self government." This is the moral perspective of all Wood's work and what led him to take a position toward Native Americans that at the time was unusual, progressive, and courageous. It marks him as a humanist among philistines, a man on the frontier of human justice as well as the frontier of the American West.
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- Read more about the life and legacy of CES Wood.
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