Rose Wind Press

FOREWORD

The collection of letters shared on this site is the stormy record of a secret engagement filled with longings and betrayals, family intrusions, and the 19^th Century stirrings of 20^th Century beliefs. A Victorian love story told through the exchange of letters between a young army officer and a social debutante, it runs the gamut of human passion, stubborn relationships, military portrayals and social denial. In the lovers’ West Point days of togetherness, the air sizzled with romance and adventure – in tune with the swirling melodies of Strauss waltzes and the entertaining new marches of John Philip Souza. Their secret collaboration became a struggle to express art, poetry and prose with emotion and honesty. Their thoughts reflected conflict, racial tension and the reactions of children who have known war. In six years of courtship and four years of separation, the letters are rife with foolish teasing, morose despair, and the unsettling dimensions of acculturation and change. This is an experimental study – expanding and exploring ideas and sometimes trivialities – little tantrums of history that beg to be seen. It is a tale of two coasts – East and West – during a period of expansion West and revitalization in the East.

Even by today’s standards, Wood and Nan shared little in common, except to be children of physicians. Their family backgrounds ran on divergent courses. Nan had no siblings and was orphaned by age twelve. Raised by a doting and indulgent stepfather, her girlhood was sprinkled with frequent visits to grandparents in Baltimore and at Atamasco in Maryland. Even as a young teen, she drove her sporty phaeton with a youngster servant, dressed in flamboyant livery, hanging on at the back for dear life over the country roads of Maryland and city streets of Washington, D.C. Nan was Roman Catholic in an age of growing resentment and skepticism about the Pope and his followers in America, but she maintained an extraordinary independence that was somewhat underappreciated by the headstrong young woman.

On the list of contrasts – and there were many – Wood was one of six sons and three daughters born to his father through two marriages. His father’s naval career peaked before the Civil War and retirement was not economically pleasant for the now landlocked former surgeon general of the U.S. Navy. As the second oldest son and the fourth oldest child, Wood was familiar with competition and compromise. He was expected to help monetarily support the education of his younger brothers, taking his responsibility seriously.

But opposites attract, and when Nan and Wood fell deeply in love in the spring of 1873, neither was in a position to foreswear all family objections or to independently support a marriage financially or otherwise. Wood was Protestant, or perhaps already agnostic, and disdained Nan’s Roman Catholic beliefs. Nan enjoyed a lively circle of friends that eventually and awkwardly included Wood’s older brother Max and his fiancée Jeannie West. Guardedly, Nan wore a simple gold ring on her left hand -- a gift and a symbol of Wood’s pledge but she dared tell no one of their trysts or secret affair. If once there were letters from other suitors during this time, none are known to have survived. Their engagement soon grew into a relationship of unresolved issues and disappointed dreams.

The Lovers

Charles Erskine Scott Wood was an exceptional writer, an aspiring poet, an excellent storyteller, and a talented painter. Much has been written of his legal and literary career following the Indian Wars and military service. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Erskine_Scott_Wood or http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/entry/view/c_e_s_wood/] In 1877, Lieutenant Wood recorded Chief Joseph’s surrender speech on the scanty pages of his pocket sketchbook. Wood gave his memo to the Chicago newspapers at the nearest railhead and the speech was recorded for posterity. As a lad of thirteen, his son Erskine spent two hunting seasons with Joseph in his family tepee on the Washington State reservation. Both Bohemian and Bolshevik in later days, Wood was handsome and intimately popular with women. These early letters reveal the aspirant nature of a young, multi-talented artist, and the impediments on his path to achievement. His most acclaimed poetry – Poet in the Desert and Poems from the Ranges – sprang from his diaries and memories of soldiering days. Wood’s financial success as a lawyer was the means to a fulfilled life. Several biographies of Wood helped explain his valuable contributions but none of the authors had access to the Lewis and Clark College collection, except one. At age ninety-eight, Erskine Wood tackled an eloquent memoir of his father but he seemingly failed to read the letters that peacefully collected dust in his attic. A year after the death of Erskine’s wife Lou Wood, the letters and books of Erskine’s library were bequeathed to Lewis and Clark College and its law school with a chair in Erskine Wood’s name.

Nannie Moale Smith was Wood’s youthful strength and forbearance -- his constant but sometimes blinded lover. She was not his muse or his inspiration, nor was she his mentor in the arts. Nan was a talented pianist, seamstress and designer, and a gifted thespian for society entertainments. Going against Victorian fashion, Wood was a rebel seeking to know Nan Smith for the woman she was and who she would become. He lectured her to improve her mind and ignore trifling novels. He urged her to read the great annals of literature and discuss them with him in her letters. But in her correspondence, Nan did not encourage Wood’s talents or even his pursuit of artistic success, and she was not his critic. In fact, her letters seem to ignore his frustrations with painting and writing. As the engagement progressed, Nan quietly contacted her uncles and an attorney, hoping to liquidate her inheritance and create a sizeable dowry that might at least supplement a lieutenant’s income, and she hoped it would pay for a trip to Europe and the international art shows in France. It was Nan who carefully collected the lieutenant’s letters, numbering them in the order received, and vowing to keep them until one day when they were married, they would read them together. This is evidenced by the fact that many more of Wood’s letters than of Nan’s were preserved.

Both correspondents were incorrigible flirts and readily admitted to it. At sixteen, Nan stubbornly declared that she was interested only in gentlemen and officers of high rank, those men who deeply appreciated the attentions and willing devotion of pretty young ladies of high social and moral standing. Nannie was a vivacious brunette raised in the Capital’s finest school for young ladies and the Roman Catholic Church. Nan’s memoir, written near the end of her life, recounted the charmed days she spent with Wood and the glamour and flash of growing up in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore at the end of the Civil War. She glossed over some of the most challenging times, which these letters all too often revealed. She was content to surround herself with attentive suitors and the day-to-day obligations of running a household for a widowed stepfather.

Wood commanded a bevy of beautiful young women attracted by his handsome demeanor and endless repertoire of entertaining stories. He idled his time at the Military Academy reading the works of William Shakespeare and discussing fine art with West Point’s prestigious instructor Robert Weir.  Weir had two pretty daughters who entertained Wood’s talents and ambitions, too, but the cadet was hoping to snag a wealthy bride, not necessarily a social belle. He needed a handsome dowry that would allow him and his bride to forget about money and the military. He believed financial security would help him develop his poetry, prose and painting skills without practical or mundane interruptions. All of his talented exertions left little energy for chemistry or algebraic equations at the Academy.

In the 1870’s there was no shortage of marriageable women. Due to President U.S. Grant’s immense popularity and his Military Academy graduate friends, West Point was a magnet for “summering” and flirting with young cadets. For girls hoping to marry, the decade was a highly competitive time because of the dearth of eligible bachelors. It was the decade following the deadliest war in American history, over 600,000 people lost their lives and many of them were men under the age of thirty. Disease and poor nourishment, battles and destruction, took a horrendous toll on children as well as adults. At the end of the War, thousands of men headed west seeking a future. Many of those men never married.

Wood and Nan entered adulthood at a time when the nation was only beginning to recoup its financial bearings and the work force remained sorely depleted of young men. The U.S. Army now faced the serious challenge of spanning the North American continent from ocean to ocean and protecting all of its inhabitants, hostile or friendly. In the aftermath of war and its intense demands, as well as the ever potent political strain in a country ravaged by fear and greed, women as well as men turned to jobs in industry, medicine, and revealed their talents in the published world. The successful writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott not only strengthened the acceptance of women writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, but they served as encouragement to unknown male writers like Wood. Wood was the son of a popular non-fiction author Dr. William Maxwell Wood who discouraged his son’s writing ambitions because he felt they would never provide financial security.

Upon graduation from West Point, Wood received his first posting and departed for Camp Bidwell, California, in early December 1874. Travelling nearly two weeks by rail and then, the last 600 miles by rude wagon road in an army ambulance, Wood was introduced to his fellow officers, all veterans of the Modoc War (1872). The living conditions were rustic – the beans and hay of army life. He did not hate it; he did not like it, but he was damned lonely in the between.

Wood and Nan were children of war. Born in 1852 and 1856 respectively, both were old enough during the Civil War to understand the fear and hardships faced by every family in the United States, North and South. Each was raised in a family with African American servants who were once slaves, and as is often true, youthful impressions and attitudes were cemented for life.

Mechanics of Letter Writing

The focus of this project – the transcriptions of letters exchanged between two lovers separated by the continent for four years in the 1870’s -- is a course of study on many planes. An essential form of American communication, letter writing reached its zenith in that decade. Transportation and the delivery of mail allowed this couple to correspond as often as every two weeks, writing one another every day and posting mail once a week. Telegraph wires were already strung throughout the East while frequent vessels calling on West Coast ports and steamboats on inland waterways assisted in the more rapid delivery of critical news. Improved and safer stage coach routes, as well as the mosquito fleets of steamers on Puget Sound, the Columbia River and the Mississippi, helped keep the mail moving, connecting communities and military forts with letters, packages and newspapers throughout the country. By the end of the decade, telephones were put to good use, and Lieutenant Wood would experience first hand the new-fangled contraption in the home of General Oliver O. Howard. The military was also one of the first to use typewriters, thus reducing laborious hours spent by young 2^nd Lieutenants who were drilled in penmanship to produce legible, often remarkably handsome reports. Christopher Latham Sholes designed the first commercial typewriter in 1873. Ideally, it was manufactured and distributed by gun makers Remington & Sons. [http://www.ehow.com/facts_5157761_did-typewriter-begin.html]

The most significant impact on the era was the expansion of the railroads. Crossing the nation on regular schedules, establishing time zones, delivering people, goods and services (much of it U.S. Army related in the 1870’s out West), and most importantly displacing thousands of Native Americans, the development of the railroad held significant influence on C.E.S. Wood’s military career and his courtship of Nan Smith. Undoubtedly, these lovers never knew it.

Most of us enjoy reading letters, and reading other people’s mail more than one hundred thirty years after it was written may be a nostalgic activity indeed. I knew the history of the C.E.S. Wood family, and particularly the earliest years of U.S. Army connections so I was genuinely elated with the prospects of meeting old historical “friends” on the handwritten pages created so many years ago. Here was an opportunity to read about the officers and their families, the Native Americans as they met with first impressions from Alaska to Montana, and the communities and lifestyles they experienced. Correspondence is rarely what one anticipates, but often it exceeds the limits of the historian’s imagination. This collection of old letters shared by two archival institutions is nothing short of astounding.

Early on, this project was envisioned as a study of Wood’s military connections as well as the evolving personal relationship with his secret fiancée, but it is hoped that other valuable research may result from these transcriptions. Military records predating typewriters required legible penmanship and accurate spelling. Wood’s handwriting fell just short of elegant but Nan’s was atrocious. In fact, she often pitied her lover for having to decipher her words. The majority of their letters were written horizontally in the accustomed manner, running on for seven or eight pages front and back on folded, linen-laid stationery. The writer would then turn the pages and write vertically across the existing script for the same number of pages, front and back.

Remarks

With the phenomenal patience and kind assistance of Paul Merchant, Archivist of the William Stafford Collection at Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon, and the wonderful, sustaining encouragement of friends and family, I have transcribed all of the letters in the Lewis & Clark special collection that were exchanged between Charles Erskine Scott Wood and Nan Moale Smith from 1872 -1879. These letters will be shared on this website thanks to the generous cooperation of Lewis & Clark College, Special Collections. I take full personal responsibility for the transcriptions but permission to use the letters (transcriptions or original form) should be sought from Lewis & Clark College. Additionally, I transcribed letters from The Huntington Library exchanged by the two lovers during the same period of time, but for now, those letters will be used for research only. It remains a mystery why Nan’s collection of letters was ever divided. The Lewis & Clark Wood Collection was stored in the attic of son Erskine Wood’s home in Vancouver, WA, until given to that college in 2005. Other letters consulted from this period were a part of the C.E.S. Wood and Sara Bard Field Collection given to The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, in the 1960s.

Working with the letters from both institutions was a challenging task. Having edited several journals and published memoirs and biographies I found the youthful energy of these writers’ to be exceptional. They ran a cataclysmic array of emotions, reeling from happiness or drenched in maudlin anguish and despair. Life moved quickly and even in illness or boredom, they had no time to deal with details or to over philosophize the consequences of the day. The key to understanding many of the letters was found in Nan’s scrapbooks filled with clippings and quips as the days of separation turned into months and then into years. Wood tended to bare his soul in his correspondence while his secret fiancée was the epitome of emotional guardedness, projecting a steady image of propriety and perfection of womanhood that smothered spontaneity and protected private thoughts even from herself. Nan was no Pollyanna, but she was the essence of a virtuous and headstrong Victorian woman.  Her strength of character matched Wood’s willfulness. Nan was delightfully well educated, spoke fluent French and was comfortably connected with the finest social and international circles of Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and later, Troy, New York.

One major conundrum of this research was to resolve the issue of the spelling of Nan’s name.  In the 19^th Century, common nicknames for “Anne” were “Nan,” “Nancy,” and “Nanny.” Nan’s mother’s name was “Anne,” and an early letter written to her daughter as well as a later document from Nan’s attorney also addresses the young lady as “Annie.” [Letter L&C 1-1 appears in the Appendix of fully transcribed letters.] A newspaper clipping carefully described a formal ball given in the home of one of Nan’s close friends, and it addressed her formally as “Miss Anne Moale Smith.” In all of the letters written to her by C.E.S. Wood and signed by her when written to him, her name was spelled “Nannie.” Her biographer Philip Leon (Nanny Wood: From Washington Belle to Portland's Grande Dame Heritage Books, 2003) suggests that Wood affectionately misspelled her name, but even the scrapbook clippings from that era refer to her only as “Nannie” or “Nan.” Leon had no knowledge of these letters or scrapbooks when he wrote Nanny’s biography in 2003. They were as yet unseen and unread. The author is correct in spelling her name consistently throughout his book as “Nanny,” because that is the spelling in her memoir (written in the 1930s) and as it appears on her grave. Her son Erskine, also spelled her name “Nanny” in the biography of his father [Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood: A Renaissance Man (Vancouver, Washington: Rose Wind Press, 1991)]. With that in mind, the fact remains that all of the correspondence in each of the collections of letters dating to the early 1870’s spell her name as “Nannie,” and it is preserved as spelled in the originals here.  It should be noted that Nan’s cousin Fannie Gibbon was the daughter of “Fanny” Gibbon. One wonders if it was the practice of the day to change the spelling as you reached maturity and passed your name to a daughter. Nan’s daughter Nan Wood was born at West Point in 1881, and perhaps at that time “Nannie” converted the spelling to “Nanny” to signify that her little daughter was now mistress “Nannie.”

Charles Erskine Scott Wood was also at a loss to spell his name or acknowledge himself satisfactorily. The letters are signed “E.W.”, “Ern,” “Ersk,” and the Military Academy refers to him as “Charles” and “Scottie.” His mother’s endearment was “Erskie” and his paintings were usually (but not always) signed “C.E.S. Wood.” It was not unusual for a young person to scrutinize his or her name, but we cannot be sure that only one name won out over the rest. None of Wood’s sons were called “Charles” or “Scott” so he might have dismissed the usage of those names early on. Wood also used several pseudonyms for published articles mostly those dating to his later career as an attorney.

Remarks on Editing

At the conclusion of each chapter and as more letters are introduced to the text, those letters preserved in the Lewis & Clark Archival Collection will be presented independently and in addition to the commentary in full transcription. This may be found under the heading “Letter Transcriptions.” Occasionally, the letters were excerpted due to length and redundancy. With the time lapse between letters and their infrequent delivery, the lovers repeated information as they explored a mutual theme or expanded a topic or incident mentioned in previous exchanges. To ensure that the reader or researcher receives the full advantage of the text, the complete transcriptions are presented separately and footnoted for research purposes.

Letters drawn for research from The Huntington Library collection will not be presented in full transcription, but are quoted and cited only.

Since these letters and commentary are not available in book form, please visit our website to check for more chapters as they are added in the coming weeks of 2011.

Please also visit our blog for snippets of “residual” research that support a discussion of the people and subjects mentioned on this website. The blog address is acontinentapart.blogspot.com.

Bibliography

 A continuing bibliography link will build as chapters and letters are added to the website.

In addition to the numerous published writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood, these are excellent resources:

▪   George Venn, Soldier to Advocate: C.E.S. Wood's 1877 Legacy (La Grande: Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC, 2006) ISBN 1-877655-48-1

▪   Robert Hamburger, Two Rooms: The Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998) ISBN 0-8032-7315-0

▪   Edwin Bingham and Tim Barnes (eds.), Wood Works: The Life and Writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood (Corvallis: Oregon Sate University Press, 1997) ISBN 0-87071-397-3

▪   Edwin R. Bingham, et al., (eds.), Charles Erskine Scott Wood (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1990) available online via Western Writers Series Digital Editions ISBN 0-88430-093-5

▪   Philip W. Leon Nanny Wood: From Washington Belle to Portland's Grande Dame  (Heritage Books, 2003)

▪     Erskine Wood, Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood: A Renaissance Man (Vancouver, Washington: Rose Wind Press, 1991) ISBN 0-9631232-0-3

Acknowledgements

Lewis & Clark Special Collections     Please view their website for many of the paintings and family albums of C.E.S. Wood: http://digitalcollections.lclark.edu/

The Huntington Library in San Marino, California.  C.E.S. Wood and Sara Bard Field Collection.

Thomas Brewster and Woody Thomas -- grand nephews of C.E.S. Wood who have often helped fill in the gaps of the family tree. Tom, whose endless patience with my questions has been a rock.

I thank Von Hardesty for his writing and research suggestions, Philip Leon for his knowledge of Nan Smith and her family, Paul Merchant for his endless hours of good ideas, archival assistance and encouragement, and Alex Rose and Galena and David Rhoades for kind-hearted patience with their mother and mother-in-law as she waved hours of what must have been agonizing details of the lives of people they have never known and are not even related to … expecting them to jump in like shipwrecked mariners eager to receive fresh historical “news.”