animal breeding pursuits, traveled widely, and gave lectures. He was a lifelong lover of animals and of country living; he not only raised horses, but also exotic poultry and other animals. He died in 1912 of pneumonia, which he contracted after going to the docks of New York City to watch and chronicle the arrival of survivors of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Childhood and early career Davenport was born in 1867 in the Waldo Hills, several miles south of Silverton, Oregon. His parents were Timothy Woodbridge and Florinda Willard (Geer) Davenport, The family had deep progressive roots; Davenport's grandfather, Benjamin, had been a doctor and abolitionist whose home in Ohio was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Davenport's parents, who had married in 1854, previously lost two other children in infancy to diphtheria, but Homer and his older sister, Orla, lived to adulthood. Timothy Davenport trained in medicine, but became a surveyor and writer later dubbed "The Sage of Silverton". He had been the Indian agent for the Umatilla Agency in 1862, surveyor of Marion County in 1864, and later in his life, Oregon Land Agent (1895–1899). He was one of the founders of the Republican Party in Oregon, served as an Oregon state representative from 1868 to 1872 and was elected a state senator in 1882. He ran unsuccessfully for the United States House of Representatives on the Independent Party ticket in 1874. Florinda Davenport was an admirer of the political cartoons of Thomas Nast that appeared in Harper's Weekly. While pregnant with Homer, she developed a belief, which she viewed as a prophecy, that her child would become as famous a cartoonist as Nast. She was also influenced by the essay "How To Born A Genius", by Russell Trall, and closely followed his recommendations for diet and "concentration" during her pregnancy. She died of smallpox in 1870, when Homer was three years old, and on her deathbed asked her husband to give Homer "every opportunity" to become a cartoonist. Young Davenport was given a box of paints as a Christmas gift. At this stage of his youth, as his father later stated, Homer also had "horse on the brain". Cooped up inside during the winter of 1870–1871, in part because the entire family was quarantined on account of the smallpox outbreak that had killed Florinda, Timothy told Homer stories of Arab people and their horses. Soon