Moose County Legends

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 someastounding 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.