When he was back in Oregon to exhibit his Arabian horses at the Lewis and Clark Exposition he was known as the world's greatest cartoonist, but he drew a picture on the west porch of the old Geer house in the Waldo Hills—a picture that is still there of a tall young man kneeling in grief, with these words above it:
I want to say that from this old porch I see my favorite view of all that the earth affords. It was the favorite of my dear Mother and of my Father, and why shouldn't it be the same to me? It's where my happiest hours have been spent.
He was born on March 8, 1867, on a farm four miles south of Silverton. His mother died when he was three and a half years old. He tells with humorous exaggeration of the tearful session on the part of his two grandmothers when he first told them that he was going to move into town, where his father was to run a general merchandise store. This municipality, which seemed so glamorous to him in prospect and which still looked so glamorous in retrospect, had a population of about 300. He opened the store in the mornings while his father was having breakfast, waited on customers to some extent, and played the snare drum in the Silverton band. Mostly, however, he drew pictures. He has been described as a boy by one of his aunts:
He was long, lank, ungainly and awkward. He wouldn't study, you couldn't make him work, and he handled the truth very recklessly. The one thing he could do was draw. Our barn doors and the fly leaves of books in our library were covered with drawings of horses, bulldogs, chickens and game roosters.
His wise father was not at all arbitrary about the work and let him draw. He attended a business college in Portland for a while, but wasted his time with drawing instead of learning bookkeeping and penmanship. Next, when efforts were changed from dislodging this dominant occupation to giving it discipline and training, he came back to Silverton from an art school in California, "because he was compelled to draw by scribe and rule." The hard-working people of Silverton began to feel sorry for his father, and
