Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/99

Rh regard this primitive country with attention only to the numbers of its people, it appears a small and even an insignificant outpost of the world; but if, with a truer sense of values, we study it under its necessities for social and political organization, there opens to the mind's eye a field vast, practically, as the scheme of civilization itself. Thus even in the old Oregon of small things, the man who sat at the fountain of community intelligence—the editorship of the one and only newspaper of the country—lived and worked for large purposes and under high aspirations. In a mind of common mold, taking its tone from the life around about it, there would have developed a sense of power leading to the exhilarations of an individual conceit. Upon the mind of Mr. Scott the effect was far different. In him and upon him there grew a noble development of moral responsibility. And this he carried through the vicissitudes of changing times. It was this which gave to him, firmly rooted as he was, the power which, in conjunction with his individual gifts, sustained him as a continuing force through all the years of his life.

The external record of Mr. Scott's life is quickly told. He was born February 1, 1838, near Peoria, Ill., in the pioneer county of Tazewell, to which his grandfather, James Scott, a native of North Carolina, after a career of twenty-six years in Kentucky, came in 1824, the first settler in Groveland township. In 1852, at the age of fourteen, he crossed the plains to Oregon as a member of his father's family, arriving at Oregon City October 2 of that year. After something less than two years in the Willamette Valley, he went as a member of a still migratory family to Puget Sound, where a pioneer home was established in what is now Mason County, three miles northwest of the present town of Shelton, on land still known as Scott's Prairie. Immediately following the settlement of the Scotts at Puget Sound, came the Indian war of 1855-6, and in connection with this war Mr. Scott began the career of public service which ended with his death in 1910. Mr. Scott's part in the Indian War was that of a volunteer soldier in the