The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West (14 page)

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Authors: Chris Enss

BOOK: The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West
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The Navajo Reservation at Fort Defiance, Arizona, would be Franc’s home for more than two years. Her situation paid $25 a month and included room and board at the local mission and trading post. Not long after she arrived in the Southwest, she met the man who would become her husband, Arthur Newcomb. Arthur was the trading post clerk, and he and Franc crossed paths daily. After a brief courtship, the pair married on June 30, 1914. Arthur then purchased a half interest in a New Mexico trading post and moved his bride to their new home on the Navajo Reservation, where the Pesh-do-Clish trading post was located.
When Franc first saw the business, a brilliant sun was washing over the adobe structure. A wooden sign hanging next to the building read PESH-DO-CLISH TRADING POST, and it swayed back and forth in the hot breeze. Gila monsters and jackrabbits were traveling the same desert path Franc and Arthur were using to get to their new home, nestled at the foot of the Blue Mesa Mountains. Arthur stopped the carriage in front of the two-room trading post and helped his wife out of the vehicle. Franc smiled a hopeful smile as she drank in the sight before her.
 
FRANC JOHNSON NEWCOMB ON HER WEDDING DAY IN 1914.
 
The post was located 13 miles from the nearest white settler, and was without any direct means of communication. Mule teams brought supplies and the mail to them once a month. Franc was apprehensive at first about the remote setting of their business, but believed in time her life at the trading post would prove to be an amazing adventure.
She wasted no time in transforming the poorly maintained structure into a livable home. After she had dusted and swept, and filled the cracks in the walls, she battled an army of insects that fought to invade the post. A mixture of linseed oil and kerosene, generously applied to the log walls, kept the tarantulas, wood ticks, and centipedes at bay.
The Newcombs’ Navajo neighbors were kind and genuinely glad to have them on the reservation. Franc became friends with most of the Indians who shopped at the post and, when needed, she helped care for their children and the elderly. Moved by Franc’s compassion toward his people, a medicine man named Hosteen Klah befriended the young teacher and introduced her to the Navajo’s traditional way of dealing with health issues. Franc was fascinated with the religious art of healing and attentively listened to Klah’s remedies for a variety of ailments.
Klah’s process of diagnosis was of particular interest to Franc because the questions asked of a patient went beyond the realm of physical symptoms. “Why is he sick?” Klah would inquire. “What does he eat? What does he hide from himself?” he would further probe. “The patient may move too fast, too quick,” Klah explained to Franc. “The body will describe and reveal what the mind is doing.”
Klah spent many evenings at the Newcombs’ home, dining with them and teaching Franc not only about medicine, but how to better speak the language. He was a wise man who respected traditions of other cultures, even bringing Franc a gift on her wedding day as was the custom among the settlers.
Franc’s association with Hosteen Klah elevated her position with the Navajo people. She was seen as a member of the tribe, and she and Arthur were asked to attend weddings, horse races, and feasts. As Klah’s apprentice of sorts, Franc was granted access to healing ceremonies too. Such a privilege was rarely granted to women, especially white women. Franc’s first experience at such a ceremony left a lasting impression, one that she would write about quite extensively later in her life.
The elaborate healing ceremony is held inside a dome-shaped hogan. The medicine man is seated in a place of honor, near a fire burning in the center of the room. He is surrounded by twelve or so chanters, medicine bags, prayer plumes, and rattles. Tiny particles of ground sand in a variety of colors are placed before the healer. The sand is used to create a special painting.
The medicine man sifts the powdered sand through his fingers, making designs and images on the ground. All the images have significant meanings. Some represent animals or insects; others represent thunder or lighting. Made to strict specifications, the sand painting acts as a homing beacon, drawing out Navajo ancestors and infusing the sacred space with healing powers.
Prayers are offered, rattles are shaken, and chants are sung. The ailing patient is then placed in the center of the complex artwork, where he rubs himself with the various grains from the images. The Navajo people believe the sand paintings helped to restore a cosmic balance to the body.
After the ritual Franc sketched the people involved with the ceremony and made note of their various duties. She also drew the sand paintings, although she felt she could not do justice to the vibrant hues and intricate patterns she witnessed. Klah helped her not only to re-create the sand paintings, but also to understand the meaning behind each figure and image, and how it could heal the sick or hurting. In time she was able to perform the ceremony herself, which added to the respect the Navajo tribe had for her.
In February 1920, a fierce winter storm assaulted the area. Food was scarce due to the harsh freeze that had destroyed livestock and vegetation. Sickness spread throughout the sixteen million acres of Indian land, and hundreds were dying as a result. Franc acquired medical supplies from a government doctor, along with instructions on how to handle such an epidemic. She combined that knowledge with Klah’s teachings and set out to make the sick better. In her book,
Navajo Folk Tales,
Franc described the dismal situation:
It has been estimated that one-tenth of the Navajo population died that winter, and I believe the estimate is far too low. After the epidemic had passed its peak, the agent at Shiprock sent out teams of men to bury the corpses and burn the death hogans.
 
 
Franc’s reputation as a legitimate medicine woman was further enhanced by her administration of such safe products as cough syrup, cod-liver oil, and zinc ointment. Her efforts helped save thousands of Navajo lives.
Having proven herself to be a successful healer, Franc was welcome to all sand-painting ceremonies. In 1920, six years after she had come to live on the reservation, she was officially inducted into the tribe.
Franc was proud of her adopted family and desired to share the beauty of Navajo sand paintings with people outside of the reservation. During her time at the Pesh-do-Clish trading post, Franc had collected many ceremonial artifacts, written down hundreds of religious chants, and drawn more than 700 sand-painting drawings and watercolors. A visiting friend persuaded Franc to display the pieces in a museum. That idea blossomed into the creation of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico (now known as the Wheelwright Museum). Franc was not content to share the collection only with museum visitors so she wrote a series of books featuring sand paintings, Navajo folk tales, and facts about the culture.
In 1935, Franc and Arthur purchased a home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Arthur commuted back and forth from home to the trading post, and Franc launched a career as a writer and lecturer on Navajo history, legends, and religion. Disaster struck the Newcombs the following year when a fire broke out at the trading post. The building and all its contents burned to the ground. The store was rebuilt, but Arthur could never get past the emotional impact left behind from the blaze.
Ten years after the inferno destroyed some of his most precious belongings, Arthur died of cirrhosis of the liver. Franc then sold the trading post and devoted her time and money to philanthropic ventures such as the Albuquerque Little Theatre and the New Mexico Museum. She continued to author books about the Navajo influence on the Southwest, and she contributed poetry to various regional publications on the same subject.
Diabetes and cancer ravaged Franc’s body when she was in her late seventies, and painful arthritis limited her ability to write. The last book she penned about the Indian tribe to which she proudly belonged was published on July 23, 1970. Franc Johnson Newcomb, the Navajo Medicine Woman, died on July 25, 1970. She was eighty-four years old.
FLORA HAYWARD STANFORD
 
FIRST WOMAN DOCTOR OF DEADWOOD
 
 
Dr. Stanford visited Mr. Inman at the mouth of Nevada Gulch
yesterday, and today she again went to visit Mr. Inman, who was
very low. Dr. Stanford has hopes of his pulling through if he can
hang on for a few days.
—
Black Hills Daily Times,
August 1893
 
 
The rough-and-tumble town of Deadwood, South Dakota, was home to a variety of notorious western characters in the mid-1800s. Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane were just a few of the infamous names associated with the gold-mining camp. These three legends of the West were at one time patients of the first woman doctor in the area, Doctor Flora Hayward Stanford.
Doctor Stanford opened a practice in Deadwood in 1888 and began seeing to the healthcare needs of hundreds of prospectors, prostitutes, business owners, and their families. She entered the medical profession late in her life, receiving her degree from Boston University School of Medicine in 1878, at the age of forty. Doctor Stanford established her first practice in Washington, D.C., where she lived with her husband, Valentine Stanford, and their two children, Emma and Victor.
Having a doctor for a wife upset Valentine’s traditional sense of family. He did not agree with his wife’s work and considered it “unseemly for a woman to be a doctor.”
The Stanfords decided to separate after their daughter was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Convinced the dry South Dakota climate would help restore Emma’s health, Doctor Stanford decided to move to Deadwood. She left her marriage and her son behind in Pennsylvania.
According to historical records, Doctor Stanford was a well-respected physician and the only female doctor in Deadwood at the time. She would travel to patients’ homes in a horse and buggy and administer treatment, often for little or no pay. Her standard fee was two to three dollars for an office visit and three to six dollars for a house call. Given the town’s proclivity for violence, it wasn’t uncommon for Doctor Stanford to be called upon to patch up citizens involved in gunfights. In a letter to her son Victor, she described a particularly brutal incident that left a lasting impression. “A nameless man burst into the office badly shot up,” she wrote. “I removed three bullets from his body, dressed his wounds, and permitted him to leave via the rear door of my office,” she added. Moments after the man made his getaway, the county sheriff appeared at her door, inquiring after him.
Once the sheriff disclosed the notorious gunfighter’s identity to her, he took off after the injured man. “On several occasions,” Doctor Stanford confessed to her son, “I had removed one bullet from a man, but this was the first time I had ever removed three at one time.”
In spite of the expert care Doctor Stanford lavished on her daughter, Emma’s health did not improve. In hopes that a move further west would help her condition, Doctor Stanford closed her office and relocated to Southern California. Emma’s condition continued to deteriorate however, and she died in 1893.
Grieving and alone, Doctor Stanford returned to Deadwood, the place she called home, and resumed her practice. She simultaneously operated a second practice in Sundance, Wyoming, as well. The distance between Sundance and Deadwood was 50 miles, and Doctor Stanford traveled back and forth on horseback to tend to patients in both locations.

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