The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  The Marietta death toll was such as had never been known. Scarcely a family had not been struck by the fever and for those still in good health, the worry over family and friends, and the grief over the losses, was dreadful, as expressed in a letter written by William Woodbridge, a son of Lucy Woodbridge, to his brother Dudley Jr., who was away.

  Maj. Lincoln is dead and his wife is at the point of death. Holt is dead. Old Thornily and his wife are dead, a girl that lived at old Mrs. Gilman’s is dead. Mr. Fearing is very sick. Miss Gilman has been dangerous and her brother also. . . . Mr. Munn is very sick. . . . Mrs. Brough, Moses McFarland and his wife are all supposed [to be] at the point of death.

  Somewhere between fifty and sixty men, women, and children died.

  Of the 100 cases under young Hildreth’s care at Belpre, only two or three were to die, and his reputation soared. He earned an unimaginable $1,400 in fees.

  The son of a physician, Samuel Prescott Hildreth had grown up with five sisters and a younger brother in the small town of Methuen, Massachusetts. For a time he attended Phillips Academy at Andover, a six-mile hike from home, where in addition to his concentration on Latin and English grammar, he “paid considerable attention to drawing and painting in water colors” and became quite accomplished at both.

  Thanks to an uncle who had an extensive private library, he also became “extravagantly fond of reading” and in the course of four or five years read nearly all the books the library contained.

  He was also, as he would later say, “passionately fond” of amusement, and “indulged” himself at every opportunity. He loved parties, loved to dance. He was never to forget the three black musicians who lived nearby and provided “very fine music,” one on the bassoon, another the clarinet, the third on the violin. “All combined, they animated our youthful hearts with such life and spirit as made even the heaviest feet light.”

  At age eighteen, with the encouragement of his father, he began the study of medicine, first with his father, then, along with five other young men, under Dr. Thomas Kittredge of Andover, a much celebrated surgeon and “a perfect model in dress and manners of a New England gentleman of that day.”

  “I generally read about ten hours every day,” Hildreth would recall. “The last year of the pupilage we were allowed to ride with the doctor in his practice, our journeys extending into all the neighboring towns, especially in surgical operations.”

  In the winter of 1803–04 he taught school to some 120 students, “a severe task.” He also kept up with his medical studies, reading six hours a day, and to do this had to rise at four in the morning and read by candlelight.

  In the fall of 1804, he began an eight-week course of medical lectures at Harvard (what he called Cambridge College), and the following February, examined by the Massachusetts Medical Society, he received a diploma to practice physic and surgery. That spring he was trying to figure where to “cast my lot.” In New England there was an oversupply of medical practitioners.

  He was in fine health, of medium height, physically strong, noticeably handsome, and of cheerful disposition, clearly a young man of promise, and he was ready to move on. A local pastor named Wardsworth, whose advice he greatly valued, told him to go west, and that as the country grew, he would grow with it.

  Another older man he knew and liked, the keeper of a general store named John True, told him about a brother of his, a doctor, Jabez True, who lived in Marietta, and spoke of it as a most favorably growing town and a good place to practice medicine. After a short while Dr. True invited Samuel to come west, promising to help him get started.

  As it happened, Samuel had heard about Marietta since boyhood, when his father, encouraged by the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, purchased two shares of Ohio Company land, and so, like the many others before, he made up his mind.

  He gathered what money he had, some $120, and after paying his bills, still had $50, which along with his horse and all the clothes he could jam into his portmanteau, he said goodbye to his mother and father, sisters and brother, and on September 9, 1806, at age twenty-three, headed off on his own. In Boston, he stopped briefly to purchase a brace of pistols for $9.50, thinking he might need them on the road.

  The journey took twenty-five days, during which he experienced one violent rainstorm, lost his way several times, spent one night by the Susquehanna River in a bed that was not only highly uncomfortable but well-stocked with bugs, rode forty miles another day, passed another night in the Allegheny Mountains in what he judged to be the dirtiest house he ever saw, “the beds most wretched and sheets very black.”

  He spent another night in a backwoods farmhouse watching two old cronies drink more Monongahela whiskey at a single sitting than he had ever witnessed and listened happily as they went on about their adventures of earlier days.

  At Wheeling, at about noon the first day of October, he first saw “the beautiful Ohio.” As he rode on down the banks of the river, his horse’s back became extremely swollen and tender, so he let the horse walk free much of the way. He reached Marietta Saturday, October 4, about mid-afternoon, and stopped first for something to eat at the Englishman John Brough’s new brick tavern.

  He knew not a soul. He had no relatives or friends of his parents who had come to Marietta before him, no friends of his own from home. Not a familiar face was to be seen. But the welcome he received from Dr. Jabez True that evening was all he could have hoped for.

  Dr. True, Marietta’s first physician, had a long-standing interest in the advancement of young people. For a number of years, at the time of the Indian Wars, he had taught school students the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic at one of the blockhouses on the Point.

  The day after Hildreth’s arrival, a Sunday, Dr. True took him to the Congregational services held in the academy building where the young newcomer saw plainly that most Mariettans were New Englanders like himself. He even shared acquaintances with some he met.

  Dr. True told Hildreth of the need for a physician at Belpre and the following day rode with him down the river to look Belpre over, and on both the ride down and the ride back talked with him on a wide range of subjects.

  Despite all the stress and tragedy of the epidemic summer, the flow of life quite naturally went on, and even for the young physician. That same August at Belpre he was married to Rhoda Cook, the beautiful daughter of a proper “New England lady” who kept the boardinghouse where he was staying.

  Not only had he acquired a partner for life, he had purchased from the sale of Harman Blennerhassett’s library six volumes of the Medical Repository. They were his first purchase for what was to be his medical library. They were also his first exposure to the most important scientific periodical of the time and the one in which he was to publish and distinguish himself throughout his profession with scores of his own contributions, the first of which, published in 1808, was about the influenza epidemic at Belpre.

  In little time he and his bride began thinking about leaving Belpre and talked of moving downriver to Cincinnati, but as her mother was opposed to the idea, they concluded to settle in Marietta, where all seemed to be going well, and where the New England atmosphere was much to their liking.

  Though Marietta had still to go a long way to become the idealized “City upon the Hill,” the same plan of the town as laid out by Rufus Putnam held in place. Welcome improvements were to be seen nearly everywhere and the growth of the economy, if not up to that of Cincinnati, remained strong. Openly pleased by all he saw, one visitor from the east was to declare, “Marietta may be considered as New England in miniature.”

  Far the most conspicuous evidence of this was the importance shipbuilding had become to the whole way of life, just as it had for so long in New England and just as Rufus Putnam and Manasseh Cutler and others had foreseen. “Shipbuilding will be a capital branch of business on the Ohio and its confluent streams,” Manasseh Cutler had written in 1787, now twenty years past.

  In the six years since Commodore W
hipple sailed the first fully rigged ship, the St. Clair, down the Ohio to the Mississippi and on to New Orleans, the shipyards at Marietta and upstream on the Muskingum had continued to produce and prosper, just as traffic on the river increased steadily, as did the volume of trade, the main items of which were: flour, whiskey, apples, cider, peach and apple brandy, beer, iron and castings, tin and copper wares, glass, cabinet work, Windsor chairs, boots, shoes, millstones, grindstones, bacon, beef, pork, lumber, and nails. The main articles brought up the Ohio in keelboats were cotton and furs, hemp and tobacco.

  The Marietta shipyards, along with Greene & Company, which built the St. Clair, were those of Jonathan Devol, Joseph Barker, Benjamin Ives Gilman, Colonel Abner Lord, and were all highly active. It had become an enterprise of greatest importance. “This part of the country owes much to those gentlemen, who, in a new and experimental line, have set this example of enterprise and perseverance.”

  In addition three rope-works were in operation to supply rigging and cordage. The summer of 1807 saw two ships, three brigs, and two schooners being built at one time.

  The local supply of the best timber, all that was needed, remained at hand. Jervis Cutler, still active in the fur trade and now an officer in the Ohio militia, had studied closely the situation on the Muskingum while at work on his ambitious A Topographical Description of the State of Ohio, Indiana Territory, and Louisiana, particularly the work at Captain Devol’s shipyard. Jervis would write admiringly that “the workmanship and timber of these vessels are said not to be inferior to any that have been built in the United States.

  Their frames were black walnut, which is said to be as durable as the live oak and is much lighter. The plank of these vessels are said to be of an unusual length and firmness. The forests here abound with the best of timber, such as white oak, black walnut and locust, and the prodigious height and size of the trees, admit of the selection of any dimensions which can be wanted. Excellent masts of yellow pine are easily procured.

  Nor was there any reason to doubt that the need for such resources and productivity would continue far into the future. As said, “Ship building was carried on with considerable spirit.”

  But then, in the last weeks of the year 1807, came still another blow, this like no other before it.

  President Jefferson, with the immediate support of Congress, had put through the Embargo Act, in the hope of strangling English commerce at sea, as a way of avoiding all-out war. American ships were now forbidden to carry exports. The act went into effect immediately with the result that shipbuilding on the Ohio and Muskingum came to an abrupt halt.

  One of the prominent local shipbuilders was to inscribe for his children on a page of the family Bible what he hoped would “bear testimony against the cruel policy of Jefferson . . . which has been destructive as to our interest and lives.” Shipbuilder Abner Lord himself had been so hard hit by the blow he gave up his enterprise and moved away.

  The local economy went into a slump from which it was not to recover for several years. Nor did the east escape the blow. A number of small eastern seaports like Newburyport, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut, suffered severely.

  Marietta was extremely hard hit. Town property, as well as farm land, sank in value. A halt was made in the improvement of buildings. As Samuel Hildreth was to write, Marietta “retrograded.” Cincinnati was now seen as the future “Queen City” of the west.

  But if Hildreth and his wife, Rhoda, then or later, had any second thoughts about having chosen Marietta over Cincinnati as their home, there is no evidence of it. Their love for the town and attachment to its surroundings only increased and there he would achieve an outstanding role as a dedicated local physician and loyal citizen, but was also to become a ranking trailblazer in the field of natural history, as well as one of the pioneer American scientists of the time.

  For $70 a year the Hildreths rented the large, comfortable house in Marietta that had been the home of Colonel Ebenezer Sproat, “Old Buckeye,” who had died quite suddenly and “in the full vigor of health,” in 1805.

  On April 20, 1808, an advertisement on the front page of Marietta’s The Ohio Gazette, and Virginia Herald announced:

  Physician and Surgeon—Samuel P. Hildreth—respectfully informs the inhabitants of Marietta and the vicinity, that he practices in the above branches. The strictest attention will be paid to all who may favor him with their commands and as little expense as possible. He may be found at any hour by calling at the mansion of the late Col. Sproat.

  In May the Hildreths’ first child, Mary Ann, was born. He had become a father, Hildreth would write, and felt that “new responsibilities had fallen upon me. It also strengthened the bond of union between me and my wife, making it still more tender and enduring.” Five more children were to follow.

  As a way of getting to know his new location and also out of natural inquisitiveness, Hildreth worked up his own concise description of the town and its surroundings.

  “Marietta, at present, contains about 180 dwelling houses, and nearly 1500 inhabitants,” he noted.

  Many of the houses are large and elegant, and nearly half of them are brick. About 20 houses have been built within a year. The public buildings are a court house, jail, academy and two meeting houses; one of wood, large and very elegant; the other of brick, not finished—both begun since 1807. The public offices are, a post office, a receiver’s office, and recorder’s office. A bank, the capital which is $100,000 was established in 1807.

  As he did not record, and most likely because he was too new to town to know, the “very elegant” new Congregational Church was both planned and in good part paid for by Rufus Putnam, who generously contributed $800 and purchased thirty pews sold at auction. In keeping with the town’s emphasis on the New England look and ways, this handsome structure was an almost exact duplicate of the Hollis Street Congregational Church in Boston, designed by the great Charles Bulfinch, with the twin towers providing the most recognizable similarity. It stood on Front Street overlooking the Muskingum and was already a town landmark. It would be completed in 1808.

  In his survey, Hildreth went on to describe the more prevalent diseases of the area, the local climate, the crops grown, the weather, the medicinal plants to be found, the minerals, clays, the variety of stones. His curiosity about nearly everything was boundless.

  The flow of humanity westward down the Ohio River bound for Virginia or Kentucky beyond kept growing. “Ohio Fever” had become epidemic. In a single decade, from 1800 to 1810, the population of Ohio grew from 45,365 to 230,760. Noticeably greater, too, were the number of professionals joining the migration. Even in Marietta, which was not growing anything like Cincinnati, but remained still a small community, there were now five doctors besides Samuel Hildreth.

  Even so, despite the competition, he developed in no time an extremely busy and lucrative practice as a frontier physician. He was constantly in demand, rarely still, treating diseases of all kinds, tending wounds of every size, origin, and seriousness, broken bones, burns, snake and insect bites, infections, and never-ending childbirths.

  “Whoever pursues the healing art . . . is no longer master of his own time, nor of his own person, but his time and himself are at the call of another,” Hildreth would write.

  He could be only just sitting down at the table to enjoy a meal with his family, or have only laid his head on the pillow after an exhausting day and be called at a moment’s notice. There was as well the further burden, the constant anxiety, felt by anyone with heart that went with the responsibility of lives.

  His house calls, so called, often required going by horseback twenty miles or more into the dense forest and often at night. One of the first of many of these calls was to visit a patient across the Ohio River in the wilds of Virginia thirty-two miles from Marietta, most of the journey made after dark with the help of a guide. When they arrived at last at a miserable cabin about midnight, the man in distress died only minutes later.

&n
bsp; On another occasion he had to ride sixteen miles no fewer than three times to help deliver a child, all because of the expectant mother’s false tally on her “notching stick,” her way of keeping count of the months of her pregnancy.

  Few saw how extremely primitive life remained outside towns like Marietta or Belpre and fewer still put down on paper such firsthand accounts as did young Dr. Hildreth. Among the most memorable of these was a visit to a patient some thirty-four miles from Marietta, on the headwaters of Duck Creek. The settlement was quite new, clusters of log huts occupied primarily by people from the backwoods of Virginia, most of whom had the same family name.

  “The roads were deep and muddy,” Hildreth was to write, “and towards the end of the journey the trace was a mere bridle path, marked out by blazes on the trees. The streams of water had to be forded, as bridges then were of rare occurrence.”

  He arrived just at nightfall. The patient was a young woman, about sixteen or so and “much emaciated” from the discharge of a large ulcer on the bones of the sacrum, the posterior side of the pelvis, as a result of an accident of several months before. Of his method of treatment, he wrote nothing, rather the focus of his account was the crowd that gathered.

  “Soon after my arrival, quite a number of the settlers, living within three or four miles of the cabin, assembled to see the strange doctor, and where they had any disease, to get advice, as I was the first who had visited the settlement.”

  He described their attire, both men and women wearing either homespun linsey-woolsey, or dressed deer skins, their feet protected by moccasins. Every man wore his hunting shirt, secured by a leather belt, on which hung a large knife with a stout buckhorn handle. Caps made of the skins of raccoon or fox topped their heads, with the tail attached behind.