Name/Title
Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944)Entry/Object ID
MAR015Description
Charles Erskine Scott Wood was an 1874 graduate of West Point. As a young army officer in Washington Territory in 1877, he took part in the campaign against the Nez Pierce Indian tribe led by Chief Joseph, a tragic episode in American history. It was Wood who recorded Chief Joseph's famous words of surrender, "I will fight no more forever!" The two men became friends in later life and even "traded sons" for a summer. Wood had a successful career as an attorney in Portland, Oregon. Among his clients were birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, anarchist Emma Goldman and James J. Hill, railroad tycoon. C.E.S. Wood married Baltimore belle Nannie Smith in 1878, and they had six children. Nannie Wood chose not to acknowledge her husband's many affairs with other women and would never agree to a divorce, even after Wood left Portland to begin a new life with poet and suffragette Sara Bard Field Ehrgott. Wood and Field came to Los Gatos in 1919, looking for a place to settle. They purchased 34 acres just south of town, and their home was completed in 1925. They called it "The Cats." The couple entertained the literati of their day at The Cats, including Lincoln Steffens, Robinson Jeffers, Fremont Older, William Rose Benet, Yehudi Menuhin and Clarence Darrow. Nannie Wood died in 1933, and Wood married Field in 1938, six years before his death in 1944. Sara Bard Field Wood stayed at the estate for a number of years, but then sold it to a private party in the 1950s. The estate remains in private hands and is not open to the public. MAR015Collection
Smith Sara Wood CollectionLocation
* Untyped Location
Sara Wood Smith CollectionCopyright
Notes
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