Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 42/Debt of Pacific Northwest to Dr. Joseph Schafer

by Alfred Powers

DEBT OF PACIFIC NORTHWEST TO DR. JOSEPH SCHAFER

ALFRED POWERS

Dr. Joseph Schafer, superintendent of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, died at Madison on January 27. He was one month past 73 years old.

He lacked four months of being 33 when he came to Oregon in the late summer of 1900. Half of his mature, creative, productive life—the magnificent, buoyant, tireless first half—was given to Oregon. He returned in 1920 to Wisconsin where he had spent his boyhood and early, preparatory manhood.

Oregon is proud of the men and women it has sent to the more populous regions of the nation to turn up significant careers for themselves. During successive bienniums, Who's Who in America has been noticeably sprinkled with their names. This, upon closer analysis, is not a cause for pride, but rather a reflection upon our prodigality in giving away our talent. In many instances, out of economic necessity, these gifted Oregonians have reluctantly moved away because a few thousand dollars extra, sometimes only several hundred dollars, beckoned at the other end.

Dr. Schafer loved Wisconsin and could not be indifferent to the professional opportunities available there, but many of his friends felt that very reasonable rewards would have kept him here for the second twenty years of a citizenship that no commonwealth can afford to relinquish casually.

Oregon, however, never became remote to him. He not only thought of it nostalgically, but he kept in touch with it, and revisited it, and, as much as possible at a distance, always remained currently a part of it. A feature of his remarkable capacity was that it could cumulatively encompass all enlarging influences. Growth in his case was not a replacement of lesser previous gains with large ones but a series of net additions. He never forgot knowledge and he was permanently enriched by emotional values. His new absorptions and achievements in Wisconsin did not erase his abundant, robust, congenial years in Oregon.

In 1900, Dr. Frank Strong was president of the University of Oregon—another man permitted to leave and to build up a great university at Lawrence, Kansas. In that year, Professor F. G . Young went to the University of Wisconsin for summer study. He was an advisor to President Strong in finding an instructor of history. He had known Dr. Schafer ten years before at the Dakota normal school.

Thus it turned out that Dr. Schafer was to come to Oregon. Moreover, he was to come in a way to conduct him forthwith into the spirit of Oregon's history and backgrounds—via the Oregon Trail. Further still, he and Professor Young were to journey along the yet remaining emigrant ruts on bicycles. In treble historical intimacy, they were to cover the old route on wheels that were second-hand.

During the previous March had been issued the first number of the Oregon Historical Quarterly. Professor Young was its editor and was to remain its editor for 28 years. He was preparing for the magazine an article on the Oregon Trail.

In the December number of the Quarterly—volume I, number 4—Professor Young's article duly appeared. Those who have that valuable number, may find the article and enjoy reading it again, for it is one of the best essays ever written on the Oregon Trail. It has 31 pages of text, and 16 illustrations, presumably from amateur photographs by the two bicyclists. The account, however, is quite impersonal. It says nothing about bicycles. In one of the pictures, legended "The deep worn Trail along the Sweetwater," there is included with the ruts a small figure of a man standing beside a bicycle-whether Professor Young or Dr. Schafer, the engraving is too indistinct to reveal.

In the Oregonian for September 9 and September 17, 1900 , there appeared two less formal narratives of the trip, with some references to the bicycles, but altogether the two men played up very little this original and dramatic episode of historical investigation.

Only last year, Dr. Schafer recalled the experience:

It will illustrate one of Professor Young's Oregon interests if I add that the journey West was made in his company, he having spent six weeks at Madison, Wisconsin, in summer study, with the design of returning via the Oregon trail, which he was bent on describing in the next number of the Oregon Historical Quarterly founded by him that year as the organ of the State Historical Society. We went to Omaha by train, outfitted with second-hand bicycles, which we rode from Julesburg to Fort Laramie and again from Casper to Independence Rock, Split Rock, South Pass, and Rock Springs. Historical exactness calls for a modification of the phrase "we rode." At all events, if we did not ride all that weary way, we were aware that we had the wheels with us.

Here were two men—one 42, the other 33—who were to give incalculable benefits through their writings on Oregon history, boyishly going forth in this way. And the vigor and freshness of what they recorded is confirmation of the fact that those who would tell with vividness and verisimilitude of adventure must themselves have the spirit of adventure.

That enduring article of Professor Young's in the Quarterly was one effect of their ingenious project. Then, five years later, in A History of the Pacific Northwest, Dr. Schafer, because of it, was able to write the following eloquent and memorable paragraph:

These facts tell the story of how the natural course of the Pacific Coast's development was changed by the magic of gold. The long list of American explorers, traders, and missionaries, whose deeds and sacrifices glorify the early history of the Pacific Northwest, were largely forgotten by a nation entranced with the story of the "Forty-niners." The far-reaching influence of Oregon as the oldest American territory on the Pacific Coast faded quickly from the memories of men. The Oregon Trail was already deep worn through the sand hills along the Platte and Sweetwater, Bear River, and the Portneuf, by the wagons of the Oregon pioneers; it was lined with the crumbling bones of their cattle, and marked by the graves of their dead; yet instantly, after the passage of the thronging multitudes of '49, it became the "California Trail," and to this day most men know it by no other name.

His eagerness in first-hand investigation of the facts and locations of history, carried over in his literary treatment. His style was as irreproachable as that of a classic in observance of good taste and all the established canons, but it found a way,

within these allowable limits, to be idiomatic, zestful, and strong. In elements of grace it was distinctively rich—easy, resonant, unerring in placement of words and phrases, and containing many passages that reverberate in the memory. It was nowhere marked by cliches, repetitions, pedantry, or appliques of undigested research. An old friend in the University at Eugene, upon receiving one of Dr. Schafer's early Wisconsin volumes, went about the academic offices reading the introduction aloud and remaking: "Lord, Lord, a man who can write like that limited to Wisconsin!"

As an example of the musical quality of his prose, take this sentence from an article in the North American Review:

He is the mountaineer, who, without training, though strong and resilient, begins the march by morning starlight and stands at evening on the summit.

He was a great stickler for good taste all along the line. A striking instance occurred at the time of World War I. The history text then used in the Portland public schools had been criticized by certain patriotic groups for containing references not calculated to create a love of country in the young. Among the statements under fire was one on General Grant. The school historian in two clauses of a sentence had given Grant suitable credit for greatness but had ended with this adverse third clause: "but as a statesman he was pitiable." Dr. Schafer in explaining the matter to a group of teachers—and it was characteristic of him that such controversial matters should be frankly treated—he said the statement was true enough but it was in bad taste, and on that account should never have been included in a school text.

He had a lively humor and a hearty laugh that would keep going and going in cadences of mirth. In sending a picture of himself to a newspaper feature writer, the only one he could find was a bucolic scene, for at that time he owned a farm near Eugene. He suggested it might be entitled "Me and the bull." One of his early assembly talks at the University of Oregon was on Jesse Applegate. It was announced as an illustrated lecture. But he had only one picture, a single stereopticon lantern slide, made to do recurrent duty in the course of the lecture.

It showed the great frontiersman with a shorn, elongated head—a cross between Rameses in the ancient histories and Boris Karloff in the motion pictures. He was jested a good deal about this, to which he responded with telescopic laughter. The students who loved him, were very much amused by his appreciation of Dr. Richard Burton's lecture on Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey. Dr. Burton's humor was too refined and subtle to make much of a hit with the Eugene students. But when the lecturer would lead up to one of his tepid cracks, Dr. Schafer, sitting up front, would again and again turn back to look at the audience with an expansive, contagious grin. This contagion did the work, if the original wit did not, and the students laughed uproariously.

Dr. Schafer's appealing human qualities, his enthusiasms, and the strongly motivating forces within him, have been described from long association by Eric W. Allen, dean of the school of journalism at the University of Oregon:

Joseph Schafer had the priceless gift of inspiring a definite liking in those who met him, and a warmth of affection in those who came to know him at all well. This was based on something deeper than "a pleasing personality," though he had that, too. The resonance of his rich voice, the quick responsiveness of his ready smile that recognized instantly any element of humor or whimsy in a conversation, and the heartiness of his big laugh made him a favorite in any group, but there was more than that.

Doctor Schafer was a generous soul, a sincere believer in the worth-whileness of other people. His life was gusto, a hundred little enthusiasms every day. He was no scorner of small things nor of other people's small-sized ideas. He would, seize with avidity even upon a remark intended as criticism, see the good in it, put it through his own peculiar process of magnification, and go on with it from there. Of course he was popular, and equally of course, he was a constructive force in every com munity in which he found himself.

A learned man himself, deeply versed and rigidly trained in his art and craft of history, he yet reserved the warmest place in his heart for the historical amateur. It became first his vision, and then his definite ambition, to create an Oregon which should be richly salted by the presence in each community of at least a few laymen who should make the study and recording of local history their serious hobby. Family by family, village by village, county by county, these devoted amateurs should study in minutest detail their local origins, and, gathering ultimately into little county historical societies, should sow the seed that would make the whole state history-minded, and at the same time prepare a rich soil for the later growth of a more scholarly historical literature.

He got this movement well under way but was never to complete the work in Oregon. The historians of his native state, Wisconsin, appreciated the deep significance and the practicali ty of his idea, and reached out for him, placing under his control the vast resources of the great Wisconsin Historical Society, with the mandate to carry out in Wisconsin the exact enterprise he had dreamed of and invented in Oregon.

With small means, Dr. Schafer raised a larger family than most people now-a-days dare attempt. In his later years, he struggled with ill health and great pain. But never did his personal concerns lessen his enthusiasm, his gusto, his belief in other people and in their work and his.

In addition to being head of the history department at the University of Oregon, he was director of the extension division and of the summer sessions. In the latter he started the practice, since followed, of securing some of the most distinguished teachers of America to break down what otherwise might become a provincial type of instruction and to make it possible for a teacher in the remotest section of the state to receive directly, and not through books alone, the stimulus of these intellectual leaders. He brought out among others, Harry Huntington Powers, J. Duncan Spaeth, G. Stanley Hall, and Stockton Axson.

He had a large family, as Dean Allen has mentioned; his teaching load at the University was heavy; he carried what was equal to a full-time job of administration in handling extension and summer sessions and in assisting President P. L. Campbell in the University's struggles for support; yet he found time—many wondered how—to do the writing that very soon gave him a national reputation.

It was the old, old story of midnight oil, still by no means out of date for those who make a noticeable impact upon the world through the amount and quality of their labors. Dr. Henry D. Sheldon, research professor of history at the University of Oregon, was Dr. Schafer's colleague on the faculty practically all during the latter's stay in Oregon and has been a close friend during the 20 years since. Dr. Sheldon has written as follows

of his work in history-in teaching, in research, and in writing:

The recent death of Dr. Joseph Schafer makes this a fitting time to recognize the important part which he played from 1900 to 1920 in promoting historical studies in Oregon. In the primary responsibility of developing the department of history in the University, he succeeded largely because of a certain contagious enthusiasm in research, particularly in the field of Oregon and western history. The students in his classes felt that history was a living subject and that they could further it. In the university library we find scores of theses written by seniors at graduation under his direction. These papers frequently throw light on some obscure point. He was also a competent and interesting lecturer. So the department under his leadership rapidly assumed a position of importance.

The same qualities of open-mindedness and enthusiasm which won the students were equally successful outside in his contact with the old settlers and others interested in Oregon history. Himself the son of a pioneer in southern Wisconsin and a student of Frederick Jackson Turner, he loved and understood the West and almost upon arrival became a loyal Oregonian. The lives of the prominent men who had made Oregon meant much to him. On one occasion, learning that there was no adequate portrait of Jesse Applegate in his old age, he took great pains to have one made from memory.

Dr. Schafer in his early days rejoiced in a splendid physical constitution and worked far into the night in his researches. His first study took the form of a monograph on the early educational history of Eugene which appeared in volume II of the Oregon Historical Quarterly. Later he spent a winter in London examining the archives and papers connected with the settlement of the Oregon question. The results of this study appeared in the Quarterly and the American Historical Review. These were but typical of his indefatigable energy as a researcher. Two books resulted from these studies. The first of these, a volume in Guy Carleton Lee's History of North America covered the entire Pacific Coast. The second, The History of the Pacific Northwest, combined a sympathetic synthesis of his researches with a clear readable narrative of the outstanding events which made it for many years the most usable short history of the Oregon country.

In the stormy period of the University's history, which began in 1911, Dr. Schafer played an important role by the side of President P. L. Campbell in explaining the purposes of the institution to the public and rallying support. During the years from 1911 to 1917, he acted as head of the extension division. In academic policies, he was a liberal, having large faith in student initiative and distrusting iron-clad requirements and limitations.

In all the relations of life, Dr. Schafer was unusually direct and straightforward, generous to a fault, quick to recognize merit in others, but no man could hit harder when his confidence had been abused, or cling more tenaciously to a point when his mind was made up. Fundamentally, he was an optimist and an idealist; with difficulty could be brought to accept evidence of corruption in public men. Many of the qualities of his Rhenish ancestors were discernible in him-cheerfulness (Gemutlichkeit), frankness, firmness, patience, and energy-and yet no one could be more American in opinions and attitude. He was ideally qualified to write the history of the German contribution to American history, an enterprise which he under took only in spots as he edited the writings of Carl Schurz and other leading German-Americans.

The latter half of his professional life, 1920–1941, as superintendent of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin was given over largely to a series of valuable studies on the history of Wisconsin agriculture. In 1935, he lectured in London on the history of American agriculture and was accepted as the foremost authority on the subject. He edited the Wisconsin Magazine of History and frequently wrote critical studies of other historians, and biographies of the famous sons of Wisconsin.

Dr. Schafer's writings, in their main body, fall under four heads—those on the Pacific Northwest, the Pacific Slope, and the West generally; those on Wisconsin; those on agriculture; and those on German-American contributions to our cultural and material development, as indicated by Dr. Sheldon.

As much as Wisconsin and the states of the Pacific Northwest have reason to be grateful for such supreme talents spent in recording and interpreting their histories, it must be said, in consideration of the tremendously wider capacity of this man, that, however important regional chronicles may be regarded, he was qualified beyond all men for a particular kind of achievement of much greater significance.

He should have been the agricultural historian of America. Agriculture has had able and plentiful technological treatment, but it has never had a real history of the kind he would have written if he could have set himself to that and to no other purpose. He would have reveled in the task. He tells how as a boy he first became interested in history by having pointed out to him that there were cows and chickens at Jamestown. Old John Smith's colony came to life for him then, and always subsequently when records had an agricultural association there was a special joy and verve to his research and his writing.

His writings on Oregon, the Pacific Slope, and the West include the following books, pamphlets, and articles:

History of the Pacific Northwest, 1905

The Pacific Slope and Alaska, 1905

The Acquisition of Oregon Territory, 1908

British Attitude toward the Oregon Question, 1815–1846, 1911

Jesse Applegate: Pioneer and State Builder, 1912

Francis Parkman, 1923

Prince Lucien Campbell, 1926

He edited two important overland journals:

Across the Plains in 1850, by John Steele, 1930

Day with the Cow Column in 1843, by Jesse Applegate, 1934

Articles in the Oregon Historical Quarterly:

"Survey of Public Education in Eugene" (March, 1901)

"Notes on the Colonization of Oregon" (December, 1905)

"Documents Relative to Warre and' Vavasour's Military Reconnoissance in Oregon, 1845–46" (March, 1909)

"Career of Frederic George Young" (March, 1929)

"Harvey W. Scott, Historian" (September, 1933)

Articles in the Wisconsin Magazine of History:

"Turner's Frontier Philosophy" (June, 1933)

"Turner's America" (June, 1934)

"Turner's Early Writings" (December, 1938)

Biographies written for the Dictionary of American Biography:

George Abernethy; W. L . Adams; Jesse Applegate; G. H. Atkinson; R. P. Boise; Prince L. Campbell; H. W. Corbett; P. J. DeSmet; James R. Doolittle; James D. Doty; Lyman C. Draper; T. J. Farnham; John P. Gaines; Robert Greenhow; LaFayette Grover; Mortimer M. Jackson; Hall J. Kelley; Elisha W. Keyes; Joseph Lane; John McLoughlin; James W. Nesmith; Samuel Parker; Alexander W. Randall; Jeremiah M. Rusk; Jedediah Smith; Isaac Ingalls Stevens; Marcus Whitman; Nathaniel J. Wyeth

Besides numerous articles in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, which he edited, and other articles published in periodicals, he wrote the following seven books on Wisconsin:

A History of Agriculture in Wisconsin, 1922

Yankee and Teuton in Wisconsin, 1922–23

Wisconsin Domesday Book I, 1924

Four Wisconsin Counties, Prairie and Forest, 1927

Winnebago-Haricon Basin, 1927

Rural Life of a Western State, 1930

The Wisconsin Lead Region, 1931

Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin, 1940

Writings on the contributions of German-Americans to our national life, going with characteristic expansiveness from Germans in Wisconsin to Carl Schurz:

Yankee and Teuton in Wisconsin, 1922–23

Life of Carl Schurz, 1929

Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1929

Writings on agriculture, including the earliest and one of the latest of his books, with 34 years between—a paramount interest that never had a productive opportunity but that never died:

Origin of the System of Land Grants for Education, 1902

His various books and articles on Wisconsin agriculture

The Social History of American Agriculture, 1936 His miscellaneous writings consisted of a number of articles and two books in collaboration:

The Government of the American People, 1902 (With Dr. Frank Strong)

Democracy in Reconstruction, 1919 (With Dr. Albert Bushnell Hart)

This bibliography, though incomplete, shows an impressive product for a man with seven children for whom he had to make a living and to whom he was the jolliest and most companionable of fathers; a man who gave himself in correspondence, in lively discussion, in encouragement, and in good turns to hundreds of friends; who regularly did more than a full day's work of teaching and administration and public service; who had only a lesser quantity of the time that other men give to leisure; who from 33 to 73 worked in a study where a light burned when all the rest of the neighborhood was dark and quiet.