The place where few feet of the place where, less than nine years later, he was to have his desk as editor of the Oregonian. He walked that day to a point near Butte Creek, 36 miles from Portland, arriving there at 6 p. m.
After a year in the academy at Oregon City, Scott, then 21 years old, entered the collegiate department of Pacific University, where he had been a preparatory student, and there completed his formal education, grounding himself firmly in the classics—a foundation ample for his developing career as editor and as student of history and of contemporary problems. He was graduated in 1863.
Going to Portland he undertook the study of law, as already told. His admission to the bar came in September, several months after he had taken charge as editor of the Oregonian. The next month he married Elizabeth A. Nicklin at Salem.
Contemporaries and historians have united in crediting Harvey Whitefield Scott with editorial leadership in Oregon during half a century. This does not mean, however, that at 27 young Harvey Scott was a rounded-out editor. It was a new field for him, and he had to "learn his metier." One of his earliest bits of work on the Oregonianr, written soon before he became recognized as editor of the paper, was an editorial on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps it will serve to show that Scott still had to climb before he reached the heights he attained as thinker and writer. Plenty of verbal strength is shown, plenty of fire, but this is not the Harvey Scott of 1900. Here is the last paragraph of the editorial:
Upon this fiendish spirit of murder which has been sedulously propagated and inflamed by the disloyal men and the disloyal press of the North, there must be meted out the fullest retribution. Thousands on thousands have fallen as sacrifices to the truculent spirit of revenge and hate by which this conflict was begun; but of all these martyrs, the blood of none calls so loudly for vengeance, as that of the murdered Abraham Lincoln. Loyal men of the North! You know now the demoniacal intent of your enemies. Mildness and magnanimity will not disarm them. Let all who mourn the death of noble Abraham Lincoln resolve that the fell spirit which caused it shall be eradicated utterly, even if the whole race of traitors and assassins must, for that purpose, be destroyed.
It happens that we can place alongside this product of his editorial childhood another, the product of his mellowed maturity. Compare with the paragraph just quoted the following, taken from his last year's work, published April 14, 1910 (Scott died in August); note what the years of work and study and thought had done for Scott as editorial writer:
