HARVEY W. SCOTT.

 

            HARVEY SCOTT was born in Oregon when Oregon had not emerged from pioneer and frontier conditions. He came of that heroic stock which in the early forties in the central Mississippi valley gathered together a few belongings and with ox-teams turned their faces to the west and never rested until the awful march of twenty-five hundred miles was completed. They found where rolls the Oregon and planted the first stakes of civilization beside the Willamette. I know of no other achievement in history to compare with that. The retreat of Xenophon has been ringing down the stairs of history for three and twenty centuries, and it was a great exploit, but his march was not so long as was that of the Oregon pioneers : then his command was made up of trained fighting men and while he had much fighting to do, it all was against inferior races that with inferior weapons could not stand before the trained veteran Greeks, while all the way food was plentiful.

            But the Oregon pioneers blazed a trail for quite two thou- sand miles of their journey, and half of that was through a desert, so bare that it must have seemed to them a region from which the smile of God had forever been withdrawn.

            Harvey Scott was from birth endowed with the impression made upon his parents in that march. He was a kindly man and could be most genial, but left alone or in uncongenial company he was wont to lapse into silence and his face took on what might be called a long-distance look, such as his mother might have worn when trying to catch a glimpse of a land of grass and flowers and trees beyond the desert that en- compassed her.

            He early found a newspaper office, and began to write. It was not long until he became an editor and then for forty years he pursued that work, with a patience that was sublime, with ever-increasing power and with more and more solicitude for the glory of Oregon and the welfare of her people.

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            His environments were narrow at first ; they were bounded by the boundary lines of his state; they expanded until they took in his country and the whole world beyond. He began when schools were scattered and poor in Oregon ; from the first his journal presented a course of study for the state; in the end he was the state's great schoolmaster. Born with a thought that everything must be either right or wrong, at first some unconscious prejudices took form under his hand; these, as experience and a broader vision came to him, began to be eliminated until his sense of duty to his readers, coupled with his incorruptible integrity, finally assumed full sway. Then his journal, the Oregonian, took on its full power and did more to shape public opinion in Oregon and to lift up the minds of her people than any other one cause.

            His journal that at first was but a little red schoolhouse by the roadside expanded until to his people it became a mighty school of enlightenment and patriotism, a daily university course in integrity and wisdom.

            I never think of the battleship Oregon that I do not think of Harvey Scott. On an urgent call the ship rounded a continent in unparalleled swift time, without resting took its place in the battle line, and when the supreme call came, rushed invincibly into the very vortex of that storm and never slackened its speed, never faltered in power until the last opponent was a shattered wreck.

            If inanimate objects ever take on character, the battleship drew its character from Harvey Scott.

            Oregon will never appreciate what it owes him. That his final summons came while he was yet in possession of all his faculties and all his power, has been a grief to thousands, but for the sake of his memory and his fame maybe it was best, for surely it is better to see a great ship go down in the hour of victory with flags flying and victorious trumpets calling, than to watch it growing weaker and weaker until, dismantled, it becomes a target for envious guns.