John.
John what?
He said, “Just John. That’s all the name you need to make nails.”
This was somewhat irregular, but they needed nails, so the local officials put their heads together and listed him on the town rolls as John B. Smith, the middle initial standing for “Black”.
When Longfellow wrote “The smith a mighty man is he,” he might have been writing about John B. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with large and sinewy hands, and his muscles were strong as iron bands. No one dared criticize his long hair. Furthermore, he was twenty-two and good-looking, and all the young women in town were after him.
It was not long before he married Emma, who could read and write. They had six children, although only three reached adulthood—not an unusual situation in those days. He built them a house of quarry stone with a front of feldspar that sparkled like diamonds on a sunny day. It was much admired by the other settlers, who liked novelty.
The smithy was in the backyard, and there John worked industriously, turning out tools, wagon wheels, cookpots, horseshoes, and nails. He was a good provider and went to chapel with his family twice a week. Emma was the envy of most women in town.
Once in a while he told her he had to visit his old 쑽쑽쑽
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Short & Tall Tales mother in Lockmaster, and he would get on his horse and ride south, staying a week or more. The local gossips said he had another wife down there, but Emma trusted him, and he always brought her a pretty shawl or a nice piece of cloth to make into a dress.
Then came a time when he failed to return. There was no way of tracing his whereabouts, but Emma was sure he had been killed by highwaymen who wanted to steal his horse and gold watch. Lockmaster—with its fur-trading and gold-mining—offered rich pickings for robbers. Someone from the next town wanted to buy John’s anvil and tools, but Emma refused to sell.
Yet as time went on and she thought about his past be-havior, she remembered how he used to go out into the yard in the middle of the night without a lantern. She never asked questions, and he never explained, but she could hear the sound of digging. That was not so unusual; there were no banks, and valuables were often buried.
Then she recalled that it always happened after a visit to his old mother.
Emma was fired by curiosity, and she went out to the smithy with a shovel. It was dark, but she went without a lantern rather than arouse further gossip. Most of the yard was trampled hard as a rock. There was one spot near the big tree where she tried digging. There were tree roots. She found another spot.
Then, just as she was about to give up, her shovel 쑽쑽쑽
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Lilian Jackson Braun struck metal. She dropped to her knees and began scraping the soil furiously with her bare hands, gradually exposing an iron chest. With her hands trembling and heart pound-ing, she opened the lid. The chest was filled with gold coins! Frightened by the sight, she closed the lid and knelt there, hugging her arms in thought—deep thought. There had been a dark rag on top of the gold. Once more she opened the lid—just a few inches—and reached in stealth-ily as if afraid to touch the coins. Pulling out the rag, she took it indoors to examine by lamplight.
It was bright red. It was the red bandanna that a pirate tied around his head.
She went back to the yard, covered the chest with soil, stamping it down with her feet. The next day she had the yard paved with cobblestones.
Emma had always wondered where her husband had acquired his gold watch.
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3.
Housecalls on
Horseback
A Look at the Medical Profession—
A Long Time Ago
What was it like to be a doctor—or a patient—
in the early days of Moose County? Descendants of pioneer physicians contributed some astounding facts for the “Qwill Pen” column.
—JMQ
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Aknock on the door in the middle of the night! A farmer standing on the doorstep.
“Doctor, come quick! My wife—she’s got the fever!
She’s ravin’ like a madwoman!”
No time to lose. Throw on some clothes. Saddle the horse. Grab the medical bag with the long shoulder strap.
And off into the dark night at a gallop, to a crude log cabin in the woods.
Physicians were needed desperately in Moose County 150 years ago—not only to treat fevers, smallpox, and lung disease, but to rush to the scene of accidents. Pioneer life was filled with hazards. Widespread forest fires caused great suffering. Spring floods, poisonous snakes, runaway horses, kicking mules, hunting mishaps, shipwrecks, and mining accidents increased the casualty list. Moreover, a major industry—lumbering—was a dangerous one. Lumbermen 쑽쑽쑽
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Lilian Jackson Braun were injured horribly in the woods, on the river during spring log drives, and around the sawmills that operated at the river’s mouth. Amputations were a frequent necessity in the risky business of cutting, milling, and shipping lumber—not to mention the casual amputation of an ear in a saloon brawl on a Saturday night.
The local physician, if the community happened to have one, responded to calls for help day or night, in any weather. No wonder the pioneers referred to him as “the good doctor.” In the spring he rode his horse through deep mud and swollen streams. In the summer he fought the mosquitoes that infested the swampland. In the winter he rode against biting winds from the lake and through blind-ing blizzards, sometimes a few yards ahead of a howling pack of wolves. Or he trudged cross-country on snowshoes and struggled through snowdrifts to reach the door of a re-mote cabin.
At the patient’s bedside he administered the simple remedies carried in his knapsack. He might have to use crude material for bandages and make splints from what-ever boards were at hand.
The pioneer doctor carried his drugstore in his shoulder bag or in the saddlebags on his horse. There were powders for colds and fevers and rheumatism. There were potions in corked bottles for use as tonics or as remedies for croup or snakebite. His miracle drugs were rhubarb powder, quinine flakes, digitalis, arnica, capsicum, nux vomica, and the like, many of which had been used in healing for cen-
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Short & Tall Tales turies. The backwoods physician also carried a pair of
“twisters” for pulling teeth.
He might put arnica lotion on a wound while fighting off the flies and perform surgery by candlelight in a cabin that was as dark in daytime as it was at night. Then he probably prescribed rest and a diet of gruel for the patient, before riding back to town on his horse. If it was still daylight, he let the horse find its way home while he himself rocked in the saddle and caught up with his reading of the latest medical journals.
For his labor the pioneer doctor was often paid in eggs and homemade butter, or a scrawny hen. Later, a patient might take a bushel of apples to the doctor’s house or a piece of fresh pork when the pig was slaughtered. Another would offer to plow his field or chop a cord of wood in return for medical care.