And what a crowd! Many the descendants of the legendary C.E.S. Wood. Readers of Nez Perce history might remember that C.E.S. was aide-de-camp to General O.O. Howard in the Nez Perce War of 1877, and is credited with taking down Chief Joseph’s speech at war’s end at Bear’s Paw, Montana: “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
But this is great-granddaughter Mardi Wood’s show, and what a beautiful show it is. In a wonderful talk at the show’s opening on Saturday, Mardi explained how she was invited to Italy by an artist/professor friend to set up a ceramics program. There she fell in love with the country, with Etruscan pottery and the ancient Italian cattle, the Maremmana. With a smile, she said that she also fell in love with an Italian shepherd—who was a poet!
What a life: Over 30 years of living in Italy, traveling back and forth, creating beautiful hand-built and thown pottery and ceramics, and, when in Italy, drawing and painting the Maremmana up close. She described working fast as she drew a mother cow and nursing calf. The paintings have a kind of unrehearsed, raw look. Understandable.
The Maremmana make up the vast majority of the two-dimensional work, with an occasional horse in the mix. Some of the works are large—three by four feet—but there are smaller ones and some reasonable priced prints that will fit on humbler walls. The ceramics are a mixture of traditional forms—cups and pots, stoneware and porcelain—and slabs that stand or hang—with images, many of the horned Maremmana—baked into the surfaces. It is a very pleasing and impressive show, and the artist is still working at 89!
We were doubly privileged to have three of Mardi’s siblings and other relatives at a further distance but all related to C.E.S Wood at the reception. Mardi remembered sitting on the old man’s lap when she was four. She also talked about his work in Portland after the war. How he had two office rooms, one for the moneyed clients and one for the Indians, the labor unionists and suffragettes, and other radicals and radical causes he represented.
Younger sister Mary, who still teaches Indian and Environmental Law at the U of Oregon, told the story of their grandfather, Erskine, who spent two summers in Chief Joseph’s tipi at Nespelem. Chief Joseph and other Nez Perce apparently visited the Woods in Portland, and on one occasion Chief Joseph suggested that Erskine spend a season with him. It became two seasons, and years later Erskine published the diary.
Many of us have read “Days With Chief Joseph,” which recounts what was important to a 13-14-year-old boy: how many ducks and deer shot, fish caught, horses rounded up, and tipi’s moved. Mary explained that Erskine’s biggest regret was not honoring a request from the Nez Perce Chief for a horse. Erskine’s father had suggested that he ask Joseph what kind of gift he would accept for his kindness to the young boy, and the boy, expecting a request for ancestral lands, had not bothered to pass Chief Joseph’s request for a horse on to his father.
In 1997, Mary organized the fulfillment of that promise. In a small valley behind Wallowa Lake, the Wood family presented a fine stallion to Nez Perce from Nespelem. It was the day I met Scott Momaday, who originally broke the story of the failed gift—but that is another story!
There’s some controversy about the elder Wood’s translation of Joseph’s speech, but no controversy about the importance of C.E.S. in and around Portland after the War. Here is what Tim Barnes says of him in the Oregon Encyclopedia:
“C.E.S. Wood may have been the most influential cultural figure in Portland in the forty years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. He helped found the Portland Art Museum and was instrumental in making the Multnomah County Library a free and public institution. He secured the services of his friend Olin Warner, a nationally known sculptor, to design the Skidmore Fountain, and his words ‘Good citizens are the riches of a city’ are inscribed at its base. The Portland Rose Festival was his idea. He numbered among his friends Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, John Reed, Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Ansel Adams, John Steinbeck, Charlie Chaplin, James Hill, and Langston Hughes. Soldier, lawyer, poet, painter, raconteur, bon vivant, politician, free spirit, and Renaissance man, Wood might also be the most interesting man in Oregon history…
“C.E.S. Wood helped create the institutions and form the attitudes that we recognize as intrinsic to the Oregon experience. He championed independence, social justice, the arts, freedom, and the free. He is one of the patron saints of Oregon’s understanding of how to live well.”
One of the more recent Nez Perce histories, Daniel Sharfstein’s Thunder in the Mountains, a dual biography of General O.O. Howard and Chief Joseph, has a long account of C.E.S. Wood’s life before the Nez Perce War, describing his time in Alaska, and a woman he left behind. All of the descendants liked that book, and Mardi smiled again and said “yes” about the love interest in Alaska, and there might have been a child.
I’d concur with Tim Barnes about C.E.S.’s gifts to Oregon, and add that his descendants have been and continue to be gifts to the state and beyond. I suggest that you read the entire Oregon Encyclopedia piece, read the Wikipedia piece on the old man, and make it a point to visit the Josephy Center and great-granddaughter Mardi’s fine exhibition!
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Photo of cup is from Mardi Wood’s web page.
