Dark Valley Destiny (7 page)

Despite this seeming prosperity, the Howards did not choose an ideal time to start their farm in Texas. January of 1886 ushered in the worst winter in recorded history, and this harsh weather was followed by a dry spring and summer. By the autumn of 1886, West Texas was in the midst of a drouth. Crops were failing all over the state, and the movement westward had reversed itself.

Down in Austin, people were squabbling over the new state capitol building, to be modeled on the plan of the National Capitol. It was to be fireproof, so that it should not burn as had the old capitol building. Contrary to the design of the contractors, it was to be built of limestone, granite, and marble quarried in Texas. The very construction of the building was fraught with controversy. When the structure was finished in 1888, many were amazed at its vastness; they wondered whether all that space would ever be needed to run the government of Texas.

In the last decade of the century, the State of Texas came of age. In 1891 James S. Hogg became governor, the first native son to attain this office; and thus, for the first time, Texas showed herself capable of producing her own.

In that same year, Isaac Mordecai Howard became his own man. Tired of playing second fiddle to his brother David—described as a stern man who was hard to work for—and knowing little and caring less about working a Texas farm, Isaac decided to sell his share in the property to his brother and become a physician.
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Frontier medicine consisted mainly of on-the-job training. People of all kinds practiced medicine of some sort to survive in those isolated and sparsely-settled places where they were likely to find themselves. As little towns began to sprout along the lines of the railroads' western expansion, more physicians appeared, some searching for health, some for wealth, and some for excitement; but all bearing their medical knowledge as a passport to the Wild West.

And the West—make no mistake—was wild in those days. All the states and territories of the West were wild, and Texas was one of the wildest. One physician, planning to settle in Pioche, Nevada, in 1872 visited the local cemetery, assuming that the causes of death there recorded would provide an adequate sample of the health problems he might be called upon to treat. But among the 108 graves, only three belonged to persons who had died of natural—that is, nonviolent— causes.

These frontier practitioners were a mixed lot. Included in their ranks were many tubercular men who had traveled west hoping to cure the dreaded "scrofula" attacking their lungs. Military surgeons who stayed on after their tours of duty were completed, railroad surgeons, medical missionaries, physicians attached to Indian agencies, and physicians-in-training composed the rest of the group. In addition, on the periphery, there were always many wanderers—men of questionable background seeking a new start, and a few wife-deserters, drug addicts, and alcoholics.

Like the military surgeons before them at the frontier outposts, pioneer physicians experienced every kind of medical challenge: the bites of snakes, gila monsters, and rabid animals, and the stings of scorpions. They treated frozen feet, frostbitten fingers, and snow blindness. There were always the routine diseases posing the threat of epidemics: diphtheria, cholera, smallpox, malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and typhoid, as well as measles, mumps, whooping cough, scarlet fever, tetanus, and the ubiquitous pneumonia. Gunshot wounds and Indian arrowheads kept them probing and patching. As if these problems were not enough, the doctors also had to deal with stabbings, whippings, fist fights, suicides, and now and then a fatal duel. Between the midwives and the doctors, babies managed to get born, but the toll on mother and child was extreme.
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Almost all these early physicians had interests other than medicine, They could file a claim, pan for gold, prospect for oil, speculate in land or in cattle, and even farm a little if they had to. Isaac Howard likewise chased his rainbows. There is little doubt that he chose to practice medicine along the Texas-Oklahoma border because of the land boom in the Oklahoma Territory, which had been opened for settlement in 1889, two years before he had sold out to his brother.

Indeed, one of Dr. Howard's living relatives described him as a "promoter type," given to visionary schemes.
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In his middle years he talked about his "oil deals," although none of these seems ever to have profited him much.
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And in Cross Plains his son wove many of his plots around the search for a fabulous horde of jewels or other treasure.

Because Dr. Howard was of two minds about his ambitions, he was middle-aged before he became fully committed to any of his pursuits. He avoided the larger cities and instead, hovering on the edges of the excitement, selected relatively small, isolated communities in which to practice. Christian, which had fifty houses when he practiced there, has now shrunk to a single house. Graford, in which he had his office in 1926, then harbored twenty-four souls. Now it is almost a ghost town, with half its buildings boarded up or falling down.

Perhaps it was an uneasiness about the quality of his training and the prestige of his credentials that led Dr. Howard to live on the thin edge of his world. This underlying anxiety about Isaac Howard's competence was another of the family's unspoken secrets. Robert had high praise for his father as a medical practitioner—so high in fact that one suspects he did protest too much. Robert portrayed his father as a frontier saint or superman. Dr. Howard, said Robert, was far better educated than his son—a practical scientist and the best physician in Texas. He had few financial rewards because of his altruism in treating nonpaying patients and his devotion to the scientific side of his work at the expense of the financial.

Dr. Howard, Robert went on, had always striven to keep up with the latest developments in medicine, attending clinics and buying textbooks. Hundreds of people, including many unable to pay, owed their lives to Isaac Howard. He had delivered thousands of babies and never lost a mother in childbirth. Neither had he ever lost a snakebite victim. And the eulogy continued in the same vein.
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True, Isaac M. Howard had many virtues. That he was generous in treating patients who could pay in potatoes or not at all, that he was intelligent and energetic beyond the general run of men, and that he constantly tried to update his medical knowledge are confirmed by others who knew him. But where his son's description makes him sound like the hero of a medical television series, research on the doctor's career and personality makes it plain that he was nonetheless a highly fallible human being, with more than his share of quirks, oddities, and blind spots. His personality, moreover, contributed in no small measure to the tragedy of his son.

When Isaac Howard decided to study medicine, he was following a family precedent. His uncle J. T. Henry, a great favorite of Isaac's mother, Eliza Howard, was a distinguished physician who was graduated from the University of Nashville in Tennessee in 1883. In practice near the Arkansas-Missouri line, Dr. Henry became a role model for his nephew Isaac, who doubtless sought Dr. Henry's advice and may have studied under him.

Physicians of that day often welcomed their kin as medical students. Such associations with older physicians afforded young would-be doctors opportunities for observation, access to medical books, and such didactic sessions as the preceptor thought necessary in exchange for the apprentice's help in maintaining the dispensary, cleaning the office, and tending the horse and buggy if there was one. After a few years, when the older man deemed his candidate worthy, he would issue him a certificate to practice medicine. For an ethical man with strong family lies, the certification by a kinsman would be a real throwing of the torch.

Polk's Medical and Surgical Register
gives its first listing of "I.

Howard" in 1896 as practicing in Forsyth, Missouri, in Taney County, just over the Missouri line, a short distance from his uncle's home in Bentonville, Arkansas. It is unclear whether Isaac Howard apprenticed himself to his uncle or whether Dr. Henry had passed him on to another doctor in Forsyth. The dates suggest the former. If Isaac Howard had; left Texas in the early nineties, when he turned twenty-one, he could have finished his training and been ready to set up his own practice by ! 1896.

The young physician did not long remain in Missouri. Perhaps he was homesick. Whatever his reasons, on April 19, 1899, Isaac M. Howard of Limestone County, Texas, was examined by the State Board of Medical Examiners in Texarkana, Texas, and awarded a certificate of qualification to practice medicine. Then he went home.

In July 1899 the newly certified Dr. Howard presented his credentials at the courthouse in Fairfield, Texas, the county seat of Freestone County, adjacent to Limestone County, where his mother lived on the family farm near Delia. While his exact address is not listed, it is a good guess that he settled somewhere near Teague, Texas, at the junction of; two railroad lines. Since a country practice in these sparsely-settled areas could cover several counties, doctors traveled by train whenever possible. Thus an area with good railroad facilities was a desirable home base! for a frontier physician.

The spring rains of 1899 continued into the summer, bringing Central Texas a series of gully-washers that sent the Brazos on the? rampage. In the spring of 1900, a storm swept up from the Rio Grande, that flooded millions of acres and cost many lives. But the weather was saving its knockout punch for September, when on the eighth a hurricane and tidal wave roared in from the Gulf, virtually wiping out Galveston and killing six thousand people. Stories of families separated by the'; disaster provided material for rescue and foundling phantasies for a, whole generation. People were still talking about it when Robert Howard was a grown man.

For some reason Freestone County did not seem to meet Isaac; Howard's needs. While most of Texas was rushing southeast in 1901 to Beaumont, where a gusher had blown at Spindletop, starting the first big Texas oil boom, Dr. Howard headed northwest, where he filed his credentials in Montague County, just across the Red River from Indian Territory, which later became the State of Oklahoma. Why Howard chose thi$ area for his practice is unclear. His interest in the Oklahoma Territory may have been aroused when his sister Willie married William Oscar McClung, a cattleman whose mother was a Choctaw Indian, and moved into the Indian Territory. Willie Howard McClung had lost at least one child before little Fanny was born, and she was to lose a five-year-old to diphtheria before her child-care responsibilities were past.

Perhaps these troubles and his mother's urging sent Isaac Howard into his sister's domain. Apart from his sister's need, Dr. Howard may have been attracted to Montague County by its railroads. The Fort Worth and Denver City went through Bowie; the northern part of the country was served by the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas, which had been called the Gainesville, Henrietta, and Western while it was being built. In addition, a recent extension of the Rock Island ran from the Red River directly to Fort Worth through Bowie. Such easy transportation made it possible for the young doctor to practice back and forth across the Texas-Oklahoma border.
Polk's Medical and Surgical Register for 1902
lists Dr. Howard as practicing in two places: in Graford in Palo Pinto County, Texas, and in the Indian Territory, Petersburg, Chickasaw Nation, population twenty-five.

After certification, if the young physician could afford it, further study in Europe was thought desirable. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, to have "studied in Vienna" was considered a guarantee of excellence. It had snob appeal, too; Robert Howard was not above casually mentioning in an autobiographical sketch that the father of a childhood playmate was studying in Vienna when the First World War overtook him.
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As an alternative to study in Vienna, young American physicians might undertake work in one of the many medical schools then cropping up. Although some of these schools provided excellent training from the start and became great medical centers, others did not furnish instruction of such high standards. Many students paid their tuition, attended a lecture or two on medical history, and then to their surprise received diplomas. These diploma mills, along with legitimate institutions, throve in the late nineties and persisted well into this century.

Isaac Howard seems to have fallen victim to one of these fly-by-night schools. Texas, in 1876, was the first state to establish a board of medical examiners, but the law requiring physicians to be licensed by examination was not passed until the Act of 1907. This act contained a provision, nicknamed the "grandfather clause," stating that all doctors currently in practice who could present reasonable credentials be licensed without examination, but that all subsequent physicians admitted to practice be required to pass a written examination before licensing.

In anticipation of the state's new licensing requirements, in 1902 Dr. Howard enrolled in the Gate City Medical School in Texarkana, Arkansas. He was a student there when he married Hester Jane Ervin in 1904. It is possible that he took some sort of work-training program and checked back to the school from time to time. At any rate he continued to practice in the Dark Valley area during the ensuing year.

In 1905 he graduated. Two years later, in 1907, he took the State Board examinations and received his license to practice medicine in Texas. Shortly thereafter the Gate City Medical College, which had graduated its first class in 1903, was "reported fraudulent or not in good standing." Within the next two decades it had disappeared.
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Dr. Howard's training was probably as good as that of most frontier physicians; save for military surgeons on frontier outposts, most of these medical men were poorly prepared. But times were changing. The settling of the West had begun to attract doctors of a different kind— better-trained men who were more stable in their professions. These new physicians were becoming worried about the wide range of competence among their practicing colleagues, and they built up organizations to control the quality of medical training. Although it was to Dr. Howard's credit that he chose to be licensed by examination rather than by invoking the "grandfather clause," his credentials were not such as to recommend him to city or county organizations or to the staffs of first-rate hospitals.