Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/100

90 ranks, and it is of record that he endured the hardships and hazards of the campaign with the cheerful hardihood which marked every other phase of his life, public and private. In 1856, at the age of eighteen, we find Mr. Scott a laborer for wages in the Willamette Valley, dividing his small earnings between contributions in aid of his family and a small hoard for purposes of education. He entered Pacific University at Forest Grove, a small pioneer institution for all its resounding name, in December, 1856, but was compelled under necessities, domestic and individual, to abandon its classes four months later to become again a manual laborer. From the late Thomas Charman of Oregon City, in April, 1857—at that time just nineteen years of age—he bought an axe on credit and part of the time alone and part in association with the late David P. Thompson, he worked as a woodcutter, living meanwhile in a shack of boughs and finding his own food, supplied only with a sack of flour and a side of bacon from Charman's store. While so working and so living he took from his labors time to attend the Oregon City Academy during the winter of 1858-9. In the Fall of the latter year he reentered Pacific University at Forest Grove, and supporting himself by alternating periods of team-driving, woodcutting and school teaching during vacations and what we now call week-ends, he graduated in 1863—a first graduate of the school. After another period of school-teaching and study Mr. Scott came to Portland and entered as a student in the law office of the late Judge E. D. Shattuck, sustaining himself by serving as librarian of the Portland Library, then, as fitting the day of small things, a small and struggling institution. Mr. Scott's first regular contribution to The Oregonian appeared