 | CHAPTER XIV Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] |  |
14. CHAPTER XIV
So this time it was Nebraska. You could never tell
where they'd send you next. I've never been to the northwest,
Reed thought, and my southern blood chills at the idea of going
there in mid-winter. It was November, 1882.
Omaha for a month, and then Fort Omaha, the infantry
post near the city. A daughter, Emilie Lawrence Reed, was born
there on July 12th, 1883.
“She looks like a little angel,” Reed exclaimed, touch-
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“Dr. Reed! how you exaggerate!” his wife teased him. “Angel,
indeed. She looks more like a little lobster.”
“Angel, lobster -it's all the same thing,” he said cheer-
fully. “I'm so glad it was a girl! I think I'm going to like
her a lot.”
“Do you really think so? She is rather sweet, at that,”
Mrs. Reed said complacently.
* * *
And then, in October, 1883, to Fort Sidney, an infantry
post on the Union Pacific, over toward the western border of
the state.
It wasn't long before the settlers for miles around found
out: you could always call on the post doctor; he never failed
the sick or distressed. He had been known to come out on a
pressing call -these lonely people rarely sent for the doctor
until it was an emergency -when he was so ill himself that he
had to lie down on arriving and rest before seeing the patient.
He made a sick person feel better the moment he came in the room.
He joked and played with the children. The women, drab and stringy
from overwork, were touched as much by the hint of chivalry in
his manner toward them as by his painstaking care. A man might,
at first sight, underestimate him for his thin mustache, his
quick, slender figure and his quiet manner, but only at first
glance. There was an endurance and courage in the Army doctor of
which the toughest settler might have been proud.
* * *
The sturdy post horse wanted to turn his tail to the wind,
heavy with biting snow, that whipped in his face, but his rider
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Reed was glad of the buffalo overcoat, and the cap with
muskrat ear-flaps. A man could freeze solid in this sub-zero
weather before he realized it, if he weren't well protected. The
boy who had come on snowshoes to fetch him had cheeks and hands
badly frostbitten. He had been most of the day covering the
dozen miles that took only a couple of hours in less dreadful
weather. He had begged to be allowed to start back with the doc-
tor, but Reed had made him go to bed in the post hospital.
“I've made a call on your mother before,” he assured him.
“I know the way, and I'll take a steward with me.”
The fearful cold, and the sparkling white loneliness out
here did something to people. The boy had been almost hysterical
as well as exhausted when he floundered into the post. He'd be
all right with a little rest, but sometimes, after a more severe
ordeal by snow and silence, a man would come out crazy as -they
had a word for it here -as a shitepoke, the big awkward heron
that seemed to have no sense at all.
Reed and the steward pushed on through the whirling white-
ness that muffled their vision. They had been out several hours,
and it was getting dark. Both were anxious to reach the sick wo-
man; their own safety was involved, too. People who got lost in
a plains blizzard were usually found the next spring -when the
circling buzzards drew attention to them. Reed recognized the
danger, but did not dwell on it: it was just one of the chances
you had to take.
This snow storm reminded him of the toy that the major's
wife had brought back to little Emilie from the east. It was a
hollow glass ball, holding a miniature snow-covered landscape,
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church with a pointed steeple. When you shook the ball the snow
flew up and whirled about, obscuring for a few moments the people
and the church, and then settled down leaving the little scene
clear and serene again. Reed felt that he and the steward, like
the little people at the center of the glass ball, were plodding
through the whilring snowflakes at the heart if a shut-off world
exclusively their own.
Then, thank heaven, they were no longer in a private world!
There, peering dimly through the growing darkness, was a light!
“Ma's mighty bad,” the settler said in a hoarse whisper
as he helped the cold, stiff doctor out of his overcoat, “and
fretting something terrible about Tom, gone to get you in this
blizzard.”
The steward, who had carried in Reed's saddle-bags, was
gathering pans full of snow to heat on the rickety stove.
Reed washed his hands and stepped over to the bed. Ma was,
as her husband had said, mighty bad. Her face was gray, but she
had made a pathetic effort to fix her hair, which was damp with
sweat.
“Your Tom's a fine boy,” Reed cheered her. “He came
through like a soldier, and he's snug in bed now. He certainly
thinks the world of his mother.”
She smiled wanly. “Now,” Reed took her wrist and lightly
felt the pulse, “let's have a look at you.”
Hours later, numb with fatigue, he sat in a chair by the
stove. The steward was asleep on the floor and the settler, hag-
gard from another sleepless night, was making coffee. Ma was
resting comfortably, and the baby had an excellent chance to
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deliveries I've ever handled, and I was fortunate to pull them
both through, Reed thought gratefully. It wasn't just skill,
either. That's never enough, by itself. It takes something extra.
Some call it luck. Maybe, the minister's son speculated, God's
help ins a better name for it.
Drowsily he watched the grangersettler pour the coffee. The stew-
ard smelt it and sat up. How on earth do these people stand the
wracking, nerve-splitting loneliness of these winters? Reed won-
dered. It had stopped snowing, and out the window through
which the lantern had shone, the view was an unbroken white mono-
tony. Inside, the only reading matter he could see was a few
well-worn government panphlets on agriculture. Although he tired
to the point of exhaustion, he was burning to get back to the post-
the post with its four companies of noisy young soldiers, the mil-
itary band, the railroad station, his family and his journals -
to escape the crushing white silence that lay like death all a-
round this speck of a house.
The grangersettler handed him his coffee and gave some to the sol-
dier. This skinny young doctor was a real man, tough as a whip
and not scared of weather. His wife was going to be all right, amnd
he had a new son. He was feeling better now.
“Doctor,” he said sociably, “we sure do feel sorry for you
young fellows shut up on the post all winter. It must get pow-
erful lonely sometimes.”
The soldier spluttered into his cup. Dr. Reed was not
too tired to smile.
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* * *
In August, 1884, they packed up again, furnityure, dogs,
two children and the Indian girl Susie, and traveled
in a wagon train four days across Nebraska's panhandle to Fort
Robinson.
It was toward sundown one day that fall that a wagon,
moving at a cautious walk, pulled into the post. Swooning and
swearing, the disheveled invalid with the fierce eyes was helped
out by the driver and his companion and carried into the log hos-
pital. Reed examined the crushed ankle, horribly discolored and
swollen, and whistled softly. The man must have the courage and
vitality of a tiger, he thought.
“This injury has been neglected so long,” he said,
“I'm very much afraid you will have to lose your foot.”
The settler, his mind filmed with pain and opiates,
clung savagely to consciousness long enough to promise the
doctor in profane and broken English that he would kill him if he
amputated. Reed believed him; those burning eyes didn't lie.
If he wanted to take a chance on dying with his foot on,
rather than make sure of recovering with it off, Reed told him
calmly, no one would interfere with his choice. He might even
get well. The patient, dimly impressed by the quiet officer who
yielded to his wish in ignoring his threat, went under the ether
without further protest. Reed operated, removing the dead flesh
and loose bone fragments. He put a drain through the joint,
dressed the wound antiseptically and put it in a plaster of Paris
splint. The hospital was full, so he had his patient settled com-
fortably in a tent.
Later the same evening, Sturgeon and Scribner, who had
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Mirage Flats on the Niobrara River to the Army post, dropped in
to see whohow their friend Jules Sandoz had stood the operation.
Bathed, shaved and clothed in a clean nightshirt, he was a very
different looking person from the ragged and semi-delirious
wild man they had carried in earlier. The doctor, who was
with him, beckoned them outside. Their friend, he told them, was
tough. He would probably recover, but he would be lame. He lis-
tened while they explained that Jules had been injured in a fall
down a forty-foot well jus almost two weeks before. He was a
stubborn fellow who had had part of a medical education before im-
migrating from Switzerland; he had thought he could take care of
the injury himself. They had tried to nurse him, then persuaded
him to let them bring him to the post doctor. They had been two
days on the road, walking the team every step of the way.
Then they said good night to the doctor. Afterwards,
half way home, they wished that they had thought to ask him his
name.
Jules, soon transferred to the post hospital, turned out
to be a bright spot in Reed's winter. When he had time after
dressing the ankle, he would stay with him to discuss politics,
science, the shortcomings of American medical education and the
possibilites and promise of this harsh and fertile territory
about which Jules was enthusiastic.
Only the most tenacious, like this Swiss immigrant, were
equal to its challenge. Storms and blizzards swept fiercely over
it. The sun, blazing like and evil eye, glared unwinkingly for
weeks, and the rain, when it came, came too late and in floods.
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Prairie fires swept the earth clean of pasturage and game. Horse-
thieves and highwaymen hid in the broken hills to the north. Cat-
tlemen tore up the government section markers, cut the settlers'
fences, and sometimes shot them. The law was not highly regarded;
nearly everyone adjusted his grievances personally. The ground,
however, was fertile and the homesteaders were determined. Fighting the
cattlemen, the elements and the land itself, theymen like Jules were settling
the country. Reed, too, saw a future in the forbidding country
and remarkably, because an Army captain rarely had spare cash,
invested in a town lot in Chadron, the settlement rising near the
post.
Under Reed's careful treatment the infection in Jules'
crushed ankle slowly dri drained away, and by spring the settler
was well enough to return to his deserted dugout on his claim at
Mirage Flats. He was permanently lamed, but he knew enough medi-
cine to realize that the post doctor had worked what was almost
a miracle in saving his mangled foot.
* * *
Reed had been right when he thought he was going to
like his new daughter. He adored her. They became inseparable
companions. The dignified young doctor played games with her on
the floor, held her on his lap to tell her stories and recite
Mother Goose rhymes, gravely attended her kittens in their make-
believe illnesses and took unfailing interest in her small world.
“Little daughter,” he always called her. She had a different name
for herself.
“What's your name, little girl?” an officer, seeing
the doctor's small daughter playing in the yard, had asked her.
Twiddling a mangled flower, she had looked at him
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“Blossom,” she informed him. The direct glance stopped him
on the point of protesting that he knew better.
“Well!” he said helplessly. “Blossom -that's a pretty name.”
Reed thought it was a pretty name, too. From that time on
she was never called anything else.
* * *
The doctor who succeeded Reed at Fort Robinson in July, 1887,
heard much about him from the soldiers and settlers. His warm
smile, his blue eyes, his fine brown hair, his skill and kindness
and studious habits, all became familiar by hearsay to Jefferson
Randolph Kean. The little boy whom the librarian, Mr. Werten-
baker, had mentioned to Reed while he was still a student at the
University of Virginia had followed Reed, at a decade's distance,
through the same school, like him had entered the Army and now was
hearing, for the first time, of the man with whom he was to become
so closely associated.
* * *
The Alabama summers were hot, the winters mild, and spring
came in, not with the noisy bursting of ice-locked streams as in
Nebraska, but easily and softly as though it had no need to force
its way in this congenial climate. Many of Reed's recollections
of his three years from 1887 to 1890 at Mount Vernon Barracks, a
small coast artillery post fifteen miles above Mobile, were pleas-
ant ones.
He knew that his work in Nebraska was not forgotten when
Jules sent him a handsome otter pelt which he had prepared himself.
Pleased at being remembered, Reed sent the settler a small bag of
tobacco with a five dollar bill, squeezed from his slim captain's
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He enjoyed his gardens, vegetable and flower, and espec-
ially admired the splendid avenue of magnolia trees on which the
line of officers' quarters faced. Mischieviously flaunting the
local belief that whoever transplanted a magnolia tree that
lived would have a death in his family within the year, he dug
some out of the woods and set them out in the hospital yard. The
trees lived, Reed's family flourished, nor was the vitality of
the tradition impaired.
Reed was a medicine man once more, too. Geronimo and his
Chiricahua Apaches, who had left San Carlos again in a flurry of
murder and surrendered in the fall of 1886 to United States troops,
were being held then as prinsoners of war at Mount Vernon Barracks.
They lived, several hundred of them, in a teepee village flanking
the post. Reed treated their sick -there was considerable bron-
chial trouble among them -and Lawrence rode his pony with
the Indian boys, swam with them in the Tombiggbee River
three miles from the barracks, played Apache games and learned
a little of their language. He even knew Geronimo and proudly
pointed him out to visitors.
It was hard to believe that anyone had even been afraid
of this tolid, wrinkled old man who, on Sundays and holidays,
squatted quietly near the main entrance of the little artillery
station and sold curious sightseers toy bows and arrows he had
made during the week, and picture post cards of himself.
Not long ago his name had been enough to spread panic in the
scattered ranch houses on either side of the border, but now he
was through with the war-path. He was old, and he was comfort-
able, sitting in the sun and selling trinkets to awestruck white
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| CHAPTER XIV Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] | |