Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/483



Charles Erskine Scott Wood—usually known as Colonel C. E. S. Wood—is now 83 years old and his long life has been divided into four periods of alternating restriction and freedom, the latter gained in each instance by victorious acquiescence in the former.

At the age of 22 he was graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. The fact that he finished is sign enough that he knew how, with a polite and deferential "Yes, sir," to take orders given, with sadistic satisfaction, by young superiors. The first mature period of his life, therefore, was a period of exaggerated discipline and of strict, inescapable regimentation.

As a young officer himself, he served ten years in the army. He secured an assignment in the West and took part in Indian campaigns. In this way he enjoyed freedom of geography, of movement and of association, dominant in his everyday opportunities over the salutes, ceremonies and regulations of army authority.

Then for many years he was a corporation lawyer in Portland and sat in drawing rooms and around the conference table with the Brahmins of the city. While receiving and earning large fees from them, he never hesitated to talk and write as a man of extremely liberal, even iconoclastic opinions. He had two separate offices, one where he practiced law, the other where he indulged his soul; one where men of objective minds came with money and large enterprises, the