Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/102

92 her husband, a product of the pioneer life. The first Roelofson in America was a Hessian soldier who arrived about 1755 and presumably took part in the French and Indian Wars which preceded the Revolution. The so-called Roelofson Clan is widely scattered over the United States.

John Tucker Scott, founder of the Scott family in Oregon, knew no other life than that of the frontier. He was born, as we have seen, in Kentucky, and within eighteen miles of the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln and six days before that event. His early boyhood was passed amid the tragic excitements of Kentucky, and at the age of fifteen he followed his father, James Scott, into the wilds of Illinois. The spirit of the man is illustrated by the fact that in 1852, at the age of forty-three, he ventured upon the great trek which brought him and his family of nine sons and daughters to the then Oregon wilderness.

I can speak from personal recollection of this typical pioneer. In physical aspect he was very much the counterpart of his distinguished son, although framed in even larger mold. There was in his face and eye a certain eagle-like quality, not often seen in these days of gentler living and softer motives. Of native mind John Tucker Scott had much; of knowledge he had, through some inscrutable process, a good deal; of conventional culture comparatively little. Yet he was essentially a man of civilized ideas and standards. So little resentful was he against the Indian race from which his family had suffered grievously that prior to the migration to Oregon his name was enrolled in the membership of a society for mitigating the sorrows and cruelties of Indian life. There was m the man an element of humanitarian feeling, with a tendency to sympathy with movements not always wisely considered for the betterment of social and moral conditions. I think I am not going too far in saying that there were in him tendencies which might easily have made him an habitual agitator; yet I suspect that the soundness of his mmd would under any circumstances have checked any temperamental disposition toward utopianism. He had grown old when I knew