By Kathy Brown, Groveland Yosemite Gateway Museum/Southern Tuolumne County Historical Society
Staying healthy during the Gold Rush was one of the most difficult trials that miners faced. During the earliest days the miners were often afflicted with ailments that were the result of exposure, starvation, scurvy, injuries, and exhaustive roadless treks from one primitive gold camp to another seeking a productive placer. Many had contracted malaria on their way to the gold fields through the Panama Isthmus and suffered years of recurring bouts that accompanied it.
Much of the placer mining was done in late fall and early spring standing in the icy-cold, flowing water necessary for washing and separating the gold from the other sediments. As did the native people, the miners would try to go to lower elevations in winter but they often got stranded in the mountains by early storms. Deep mud, rockfall and snow would prevent both the miners and the nearest trading posts from obtaining supplies, food and medicine needed for health and survival. The death rate among those who came for the Gold Rush was estimated to be one in five from 1848 - 1852.
Medically trained doctors were few and far between and they were often attempting to strike it rich themselves. A quote from Paden and Schlicthmann in The Big Oak Flat Road to Yosemite says, “more deadly than Indians was the fever and ague that attended the damp, steamy mining camps during summer. The ailing men would pay an ounce of gold for a visit of a medical man. They often spent three times that much for a single dose of medicine.” That is, if they could actually find a doctor with a formal education or a supply of the medicine needed. Anyone could claim to be a doctor and it was still the early days of medicine with very primitive methods for surgery and treatments. Cholera, scurvy, dysentery, typhoid and pneumonia were rampant.
Opium for pain and diarrhea, quinine for malaria, mercury for syphilis, and morphine for
dysentery were routinely prescribed cures. Quack medicines were common. Epidemics plagued the foothills through the years, killing both pioneers and huge numbers of indigenous people. Among the many were major outbreaks of cholera in 1849-50, diptheria in 1879, small pox in the early 1900s, and typhoid in 1913.
Early Tuolumne County records list an N.T. Cody and a Colonel Roote as running what may have been the first apothecary in Big Oak Flat in a frame building attached to the west side of the Gamble/Wells Fargo building. The 1860 census lists a Nelson Cody living in Big Oak Flat, with the 1880 census listing that he was a dentist and druggist. The nearest doctors for the Big Oak Flat-Groveland area generally lived in Chinese Camp, providing medical care from there to the most remote places along the Big Oak Flat Road up to the Yosemite border. Dr. Benjamin Conyers served the area before 1870, with Dr. R.M. Lampson then taking over for him. Austin Mecartea, a second generation blacksmith in Big Oak Flat related, “There was a Dr. C.V. Williamson in the early days when mining was good but in my time [b.1871-d.1945] Dr.
Lampson of Chinese Camp would have to ride up here in a great emergency. But the women
folk could handle most kinds of sickness.” Lampson was said to be “respected, loved and
overworked.”
In the late 1800s Dr. Daniel Stratton arrived to visit his sister who ran Crimea House near
Chinese Camp, and to see the wonders of Yosemite. He had completed his medical degree in
Iowa with a specialty in orthopedics in an era when X-rays did not exist. He took over Dr.
Lampson’s home and practice in the 1890s and never returned to the job awaiting him at Boston Medical Hospital. He spent the rest of his life in Tuolumne County, providing medical services as physician, surgeon, dentist and pharmacist to those in need from Chinese Camp to Groveland and eastward to Yosemite’s border. Just as today, there was no hospital in the area Stratton served. When hospitalization was necessary he collaborated with Dr. Innis Bromely, a skilled surgeon who had been practicing in the Sonora area since 1887 who began a hospital there in 1903.
Was there ever a hospital in Groveland? Find out in part 2, still to come.
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