The Diary
Ramblings of a Cow Town Doctor.
This story is different. It is neither adventure nor plot nor romance. It is more about people – seen through the eyes of Doc Adams – my favorite character. I'm not sure if anyone else will like it, but I had to write it.
It was about six months ago when a young doctor, almost fresh out of school rode into town. He came up to my office, clean faced and enthusiastic. He said one of his professors in Baltimore had told him that I might be in need some help. He wanted to learn and perfect his skills.
His name was Ben Hollister.
He worked alongside me for over a month asking nothing more than that I share my knowledge with him. I started to let him see patients on his own. He was competent and the patients liked him.
At my age, riding over the prairie – even in a buggy – in the dead of night, to deliver babies, set broken limbs and so on, is getting to be too much for me. Gradually Ben was able to take some of that responsibility from my shoulders, so I took him on as a junior partner.
I had never had much free time before. Usually I would have to read my journals in the dead of night. Now I can afford time to go fishing or take a book and sit under a shade tree and just relax these old bones. It is well past time for me to retire and this may be my chance. Most of my friends, those I looked on as my family for all those years, have finally moved on. I think my time has come to do the same.
Ben tells me, one day, that the way of life that had been the Dodge City of my time, was changing, and eventually would be gone forever. Someone needed to document the events that happened in the lives of a cow town doctor and the other people who made this place their home. How did we live? What were our hopes and dreams? How did we survive in this rough and untamed frontier town? I had never had time to keep a real diary, but some of the records I kept on a few of my more frequent customers were enough to bring events back to my mind as clearly as if they had taken place yesterday. With their permission I record some of the incidents that stand out in my mind, some parts of their lives and some of my own.
I think the first thing I should tell is how I came to be in Dodge at all. Why on earth would anyone want to come to, let alone stay, in this so-called Gomorrah of the plains? It is a question that many people, including myself, have asked.
1. In which Dodge becomes home.
I grew up in Baltimore, the son of older, middle class parents, an only and somewhat lonely child. Like many children raised in a large city I had a yearning for the wide-open spaces of the countryside.
Forced to spend a good deal of my time by myself, I took to reading. I read everything I could find. This had two consequences, I did well at school and I developed an interest in medicine. This latter started when I came across a faded copy of "A treatise on Surgical Anatomy" by Abraham Colles. How it had found its way into my father's collection I will never know. Father was a lot older than my mother and had died when I was only 9 years of age, so he was not around for me to ask. He had been an auctioneer down at the stockyards. Not a very illustrious career, but he was good at it. He knew a lot about horses and cattle, and made himself a tidy sum off of commissions.
After finishing school with a good academic record I managed to gain the required study under a qualified physician in order to enter the medical school there in Baltimore. Money was not too much of a problem since my father had saved and invested wisely.
My mother stayed on this earth until I reached my eighteenth year, and then she, too, passed away to join my father in whatever kind of after life that existed for them. I can't say I missed either of them very much. We were not a very warm close family. In fact to my mind we never seemed to be a family at all. Yes they were my parents and had provided for my physical needs, but their marriage was cold and I think one of social convenience rather than love. When it came down to it, I doubt they ever wanted to be burdened with children but sometimes mistakes happen – and I was one of those.
By the time I had finished all the requirements for a diploma saying I was qualified to practice the 'Healing Arts,' I had just passed my twenty sixth birthday. I joined a friend of mine from the university in opening a practice in one of the more affluent neighbourhoods of Baltimore. We did remarkably well considering we were two young men with very recent medical degrees.
I met a young lady, Louise Elizabeth Fry. I courted her for a year and finally she consented to be my wife. Those were blissful heady days. I was making money, I had a profession I loved and a woman by my side that I adored. I bought a small house, not far from my office. After a year of marriage she became pregnant with our first child. For the first time in my life I felt that I was about to become part of a real family. My happiness was to last only for another nine months. The baby was stillborn – a son – and my beautiful Louise, who gave so much meaning to my life, succumbed to puerperal fever. I felt it was my fault, not because of lack of obstetrical care, heaven knows I had got her the best doctor I knew, but because I was the one that was the cause of the child within her, the child that ultimately brought about her death.
My heart and my life went from the heights of bliss to the depths of despair in the space of a few days.
I could not bear to see Baltimore, its streets, and especially the house where I had experienced such happiness and then such sorrow.
I took the only course open to me and left that place to go to another smaller town where I knew nobody, and likewise nobody knew me. I tried to find some solace at the bottom of a whisky bottle, but deep down I knew it would not be there. Before I could even think about another practice the cannons were fired from Fort Sumter and the War Between the States had begun.
Needless to say I joined the fight. In some ways it gave me respite from my own misery, but pretty soon I saw the misery of others and it horrified me equally.
My war experiences are not relevant to this account. Suffice it to say that once the fighting was over, and this new country of ours tried to get back on its feet, I found myself back where I started, without an aim in life. I was a fairly proficient surgeon by this time, and well read in the medical arts. I just needed some place to set down roots and allow my life to start over.
I made several attempts in different towns from Baltimore to Richmond. I knew my problem was that Louise was still in my heart. I could not give my affections to another woman. In my mind I was scared of hurting her or bringing that pain upon myself again. I decided I would stand alone, no family, no close friends, no way to suffer that hurt for a second time.
I had read that there were wagon trains leaving St. Louis, taking settlers to California to start new lives. I was told that, as a doctor traveling on the train, I would get a reduced fare. Maybe that was what I needed to do.
I headed out that way, but by the time I arrived in St. Louis the last wagons of the year had pulled out. The season was wrong. The wagons did not travel in winter.
I decided to make my way west by stage, since the railroads were still awaiting completion.
I stopped in several small towns. Sometimes working for other physicians while they took weeks off to go fishing or visit relatives. One especially hot humid morning I was awakened from dozing to find that the hot dirty stagecoach I was traveling in had arrived in a town called Dodge City. How it had the name city I could not imagine. It was a collection of rundown wooden buildings, dusty unpaved streets and apparently one saloon for every ten members of the adult population. I intended to move on in a couple of days, just staying long enough for a few hot meals and a chance to wash the dust and dirt from my body and my clothes. I got a room at the so-called Dodge House, and went to eat across the street in a café called Delmonico's. The food wasn't bad, and surprisingly the hotel room turned out to be clean and the bed comfortable.
The second morning I was there, I was eating breakfast, again at Delmonico's, when a well dressed man who I would judge to be in his mid fifties came and introduced himself to me as the town doctor. He needed someone to cover his practice for about six weeks while he went to visit an ailing relative back east. He would pay me up front for my six-week stint and I could keep any money I made on top of that. He took me and showed me his office. He told me the city elders subsidized his rent to encourage him to stay. The only draw back was the office was located above a general store, meaning that there was a long flight of stairs to climb to get to it. He would leave all his instruments, furnishings and even his buggy at my disposal. He left town the next morning and I never saw him again.
The first week or so was pretty mundane. Coughs, colds, a baby or two to deliver and a bullet to be removed. Then tragedy struck the town.
The Sheriff was a pleasant man of about my own age. He had kept order in the town for about two years – a long time, by all accounts, for a lawman to survive in this part of the country. The spring cattle drives arrived and a whole company of drovers came into town, looking for whisky, women and card games. That night it got rough. The Sheriff tried to maintain order but he lost, not only the battle, but his life as well. I managed to remove the bullet from his chest, but in the night he started coughing a large quantity of blood and by morning he was dead. There had been nothing I could do.
For a whole month the town was without law. Cowboys, rustlers and buffalo hunters took over. I was counting the days until the Doctor returned, but as I crossed them off from the calendar on the wall and turned page after page, the weeks and then months went by and I realized he was not coming back. I guess I could have up and left, but what of the people in this lawless place. They needed someone to tend to their needs.
Eventually a young man rode into town on a large buckskin horse. A US Marshal. He was just a kid really, a tall, skinny young man, proudly wearing a new, shiny metal star on his shirt. Apparently the Marshals Service had seen fit to send a raw recruit to this godforsaken outpost on the prairie. People were placing bets on how long he would survive. A year was considered an outside chance.
Soldiers came from Fort Dodge bringing bricks and timbers, and in a week they had replaced the old dilapidated wooden building that had been the sheriff's office with a new brick US marshals office complete with jail.
A couple of days after his arrival the young Marshal came to my office. His name was Mathew Dillon. That's about all he told me about himself. He was going around the town trying to get to know all the inhabitants, businessmen, community leaders and private citizens alike. He invited me to join him for a drink that evening in the Long Branch, which was reputed to be one of the better saloons on Front Street.
The Long Branch was owned by Bill Pence and already, he and the young Marshal seemed to have struck up a friendship.
That night we sat there at a table at the back of the saloon, just talking and getting to know each other. It seemed he was as reluctant to talk about his past as I was, so we settle on discussing the trivialities of the day. Dodge was like that. Everyone here seemed to have something he wanted to forget, but the city was willing to give you a clean slate, you could start afresh from the day you arrived.
After a couple of drinks, two drovers standing at the bar got into an argument, a fight started. The tall skinny lawman waded in without hesitation. He was quick with his backhanded punches and his height gave him the advantage of intimidation. In no time the cowboys were lying in the street and both their pistols were in the Marshal's hands.
"You can go sleep that liquor off and come and pick up your guns from my office in the morning," I heard him tell them.
I was impressed by his strength and speed, but also by his ability to break up a situation before it got out of hand. For such a young man he had an unusual maturity.
He returned to the table where we had been sitting and continued the conversation like nothing had happened.
I spent several evenings in his company over the next few weeks. I found him to be educated and articulate, but at the same time reluctant to talk about himself and quiet around any large group of people unless, of course, he needed to take charge of a situation. In return he never asked about my background or what I wanted from life. I told him that I was not planning to stay in Dodge. I thought, when I arrived that I was just staying for six weeks, now almost six months had passed. I needed to be moving on to California.
He would sometimes seek me out to ask advice or discuss a problem. A couple of times he took me fishing. Looking back those fishing trips were some of the best times I remember from those early days. Over time we developed a mutual friendship and respect even though I assumed that I was just about old enough to be his father.
One morning a stranger rode into town. I don't know what had gone on before but an hour or two later I saw the man and Dillon facing off on Front Street. There was going to be a confrontation and I feared for my young friend. I watched as they drew their guns and fired. I need not have worried. I have never seen a man so cool, so fast and so accurate. I was beginning to think that Marshal Matt Dillon might manage to defy the odds.
It was several weeks later and I had decided I was definitely leaving this dusty, noisy excuse for a town. I had no sick patients under my care at the moment so it was a good time to bow out. I would miss the one or two friends I had made here but even so I had bought a stage fare as far as Denver. The stage was due to leave at noon.
Early that morning, just around daybreak there was the sound of gunfire in the street. It came from the direction of the bank.
I looked at my two packed bags; whatever was going on out there was none of my business. I was leaving.
A few minutes later there is a knock at the office door. Freddie – the barkeep from the Long Branch was standing there in an agitated state.
"You've gotta come Doc. There was a hold up at the bank, three men. One got away the Marshal shot two of them, but he's hurt bad.
Where is he? I asked
He's out there on the street, we didn't want to move him till you got there. I look despairingly at my two packed bags, then grab my medical bag and follow Freddie to the bank.
Looking back that was the start of what would be my accepting Dodge as my home. It took all my skills and two weeks of my life before my young friend was back on his feet. During that time I temporarily unpacked my bags. For good or bad they never got
packed again.