Letters

Abstract

Letters To theEditor: Imuch enjoyed Ken Lomax's splendidly crafted and informativepiece, "AChronicle of theBattleship Oregon." The article stirredup thedust in mymemory binwhen Lomax remindedme that theOregon had been towed offforscrap in 1942.1was a ten year-old living in Sheridan at the time,with an Oregonian route and a plan toput aside enough money fora new fielder's glove. Early in 1943,1 believe itwas, posters showed up on the town streetsand at the local theater tellingme that, in exchange forbuying aWar Bond for $18.75, I could have a piece of the Battleship Oregon. Dad ? one of those for whom theOregon had been "a sentimental symbol of civic pride" as you put it ? was so excited over the prospect ofhaving a piece of the ship thathis enthusiasm was contagious ? and there went my plans for a new glove. FormyWar Bond purchase I got a piece ofwood, about two inches square and one inch thick,bearing a stamp that said it was from theBattleship Oregon. I kept itforyears onmy dresser. Itmight stillbe banging around in the bottom of some sack or box in the attic! Even while being deflowered, theold battle ship still managed to serve in WWII. Again, my compliments on a fine piece. Charles Burgess Burien,Washington To theEditor: In support ofhis argument thatC.E.S. Wood "confessed" towriting Chief Joesph's surrender speech himself,George Venn offersas "proof" the following sentence extracted from one of Wood's letters:"I took itfor my own benefit as a literary item" ("Soldier toAdvocate," OHQ Spring 2005,757257). The contextofthat sentence,however, shows it to be anything but a "confession": "Neither General Miles nor anyone else knows Joseph's surrender speech accurately exceptmyself. No one was interested to take itdown. Oscar Long, Miles' regimental adjutant,was there to take it down but did not. No one was told to take it down. Iwas not told.The speeches of Indians were not considered of importance. I took itfor my own benefit as a literaryitem,and Ihave told you I at request gave itto theAdjutant General of theArmy in Washington for thearchives and itdisappeared." This, of course, leads to a conclusion much different fromVenn's: thatC.E.S. Wood recorded the speech not as an assigned duty,but from a personal awareness of its importance; that it was, in fact,a record of Joseph'swords and not a product of, as Venn states, Wood's "observa tions and fictions." Mark Highberger, publisher Bear Creek Press Wallowa, Oregon George Venn replies: When Wood wrote McWhorter in 1936, "I took it [the speech] formy own benefit as a literary item," Wood revealed? for the first and only time ? that he adopted an artistic persona ? not a literalistic one ? to create the surrender speech. Years ofwitnesses implicitly confirm that revelation. In 1878,Duncan Mc Donald, a Nez Perce who interviewed post-war refugees inCanada, wrote thatChief Joseph's speech at thepre-war Lapwaii Council was "the only speech Joseph, Sr., evermade during the year of 1877." In thirteenpublished versions of the speech,Wood himself revised time, place, speaker, and text.By 1939,those conflicting re visions causedWood towrite, "Joseph's speech of surrender nowhere appears correctly and I myself am partly responsible forthis." Except for variants on the last sentence ? perhapsWood's direct quote of Joseph ? no eyewitnesses ever published the speech.Haruo Aoki's article in the fall 1989 Idaho Yesterdays expresses the skepti cism of contemporary scholars and historians: Letters 333 "Any citation of the long textas an example of American Indian oratory isunwarranted and is an outcome of citingonly the lastand unreliable accounts of C. E. S.Wood." After researching this controversy fornine years, I stand bymy statementson pp. 64-65 ofmy article: except for his confession toMcWhorter, Wood disguised his art as artifact. To theEditor: I take no great pleasure in knowing that others sharemy frustrationas to the scarcityof records regarding early cooperative societies, as expressed in a letterfromErnest Haycox, Jr., printed in the Winter 2004 issue. So Iam pleased to report that the incorporation papers for the Nehalem Valley Cooperative Colony do, indeed, still exist, and may be examined in the State Archives in Salem, under FileNo. 3319. The date...