The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  April 5, 1851:

  Called on a Mrs. Oscar Theobald, aged 40. Symtoms: extensive warmth of rectum, sharp, lancinating pain near anus, red, modulating mass protruding from same, also uneasiness, constitutional disturbance. Diagnosis: Haemorrhoids exterior of the sphincter ani. Treatment: application of ice water, tannic acid, Persulphate of Iron; lessening of constipation by having patient drink several glasses water in morning, also kneading of abdomen, thighs and pelvis plus salt hip bath to relax perineal structures. Lastly, anointed Haemorrhoids locally by introducing wet cigar in rectum.

  April 7, 1851:

  Called on Swen Nordlund, widower, aged 73. Symptoms: dizziness, sensation of anxiety at praecordia, vertigo, singing in the ears, abnormal pulse—hard, sharp, quick, dicrotous, intermittent; tenderness on pressure over first and second cervical vertebrae; complaint of dull, aching pain in back of head. Problem: whether symptoms from dyspepsia, chronic inflammation of lungs, severe mental labor, troubled mind from want of success, or sexual excesses, notably masturbation. Diagnosis: irregular heart from last-named cause. Treatment: tincture of Cactus, teaspoon every four hours, together with recommendation patient move from his boardinghouse, where the 17-year-old daughter of proprietor undresses and lolls Narcissistically on bed, nude, within patient’s view from window each evening upon retirement.

  I should say here, before continuing, that these cases are exactly the way my father wrote them, but now and then, as only a fool could help but see, he was unable to avoid touching on the humor of certain ones. I think he tried not to, but it crept in, though I’m convinced he kept everything wholly accurate and in line, because I’m sure he felt that people were going to read these Journals someday.

  For instance:

  April 7, 1851:

  Called upstairs to United States Hotel, patient, “Slick” Carstairs, aged around 35, occupation cardsharp. Symptoms: absence of heartbeat, small round blue hole in center of forehead. Diagnosis: Dead. (Of revolver bullet.) Treatment: Placed 3-cent copper coins on eyelids, folded arms on chest, summoned undertaker.

  And:

  April 17, 1851:

  Called on Ralph Kobler, aged 45, well-known journalist and poet of this city. Symptoms: excitement of nervous system proceeding to prostration, pulse slow, acute thirst, no appetite, anxiety and dejection, frequent sighs, increasing restlessness and vigilance. Condition complicated by patient’s insistence that a devil with a red nose and dragon’s tail is sitting on end of bed prodding him with pitchfork. In short passage of time, tongue dry and furred, tremor of muscles, wild threshing of limbs, persecution of patient heightened when devil reinforced by several parti-colored snakes, a Chinese mandarin, 2 lizards, racoon answering to name of Shakespeare, 1 alligator, Gila monster, Unicorn, and a three-legged fox.

  Diagnosis: Delirium tremens. Treatment: Iodine pill every three hours, Iron, Quinine and Strychnine in powder, beef-tea enema, small dosage of whiskey (doled out) plus Chloroform if Kobler grows in violence.

  Sometimes these San Francisco gamblers and miners tried to play pranks on my father, being rough, frolicsome men, and he went right ahead and wrote up such cases along with the others:

  April 20, 1851:

  Visited at tent by 2 seamen, Second Mate and Bosun of trading schooner Voluta. They carrying parcel in brown paper and said.

  “Doc, are you acquainted with a disease called ‘itchycosis’?” “Ichthyosis,” I replied, “an ailment in which the skin becomes scaly and fishlike.”

  “We hearn about it in the islands,” they said. “And on the way home, dog if our old mate Bill didn’t tune up with just such an eruption. It wasn’t hardly human; he only lingered about a week. We feel right bad about it, doc. We’d perk up if you’d figure out what caused him to go like that. And so would his folks. Natcherly we didn’t have the refrigeration to keep him intact, but we peeled off a stretch of skin, some of the scaliest part, and applied salt. Look her over, will you, doc, and see if you can run it down. Bill was a robust man till this turned up and blistered his hull.”

  One of these worthies then had the effrontery to take out a faded bandana and conceal a tear, after which he sniffed loudly.

  “I see,” I replied with what I hope was a wary look. “I’ll be happy to give the case my best attention.”

  Upon their return, two days later, they said, “What is it, doc? Did you track her down?”

  “According to my diagnosis, confirmed by two other physicians and a scallop dragger, it is, or was, a silver tarpon, a very nice specimen, probably weighing around 140 pounds. That will be two dollars, if you please.”

  April 29, 1851:

  Called to home of Mr. and Mrs. Ivor Beddows, parents of patient, Franklin, aged 9.

  Symptoms diffuse, child poorly nourished, muscles soft and flabby, leaded tongue, bad breath, derangement of secretions. Fever paroxysms afternoon and evening, skin hot and dry, pulse fast, marked irritability and restlessness, frequent voracious appetite, occasional convulsion. Also sleeps poorly, abdomen tumid, frequent picking of nose, swelling of upper lip, and white line appearing around mouth, together with itching of arms. Also, more infrequently, abdominal spasms, convulsive cough, disordered digestion, irregular evacuation, vertigo, defects in speech, upward undulatory movement of abdomen.

  Diagnosis: Reached result after several visits, proceeding by method of exclusion, passing the entire system in review, using ordinary nosological classification, analyzing by the standard of excess, defect, and perversion.

  Final diagnosis: Examination of faeces showed positive presence of 4 species of intestinal worms: ascaris lumbricoides, or long round worm, ascaris vermicularis, small threadworm, tricocephalus dispar, long threadworm, and taenia solium, tapeworm. All species presumably introduced into intestines through eating of raw pork, possibly bacon.

  Treatment: For first-named species, infusion of Pink and Senna plus vermifuge Oil of Wormwood, causing worms to leave nest in bowels. Then Santonate of Soda followed by Castor Oil sprinkled on bread and butter. Follow with Jalap and Senna.

  For tapeworm, Turpentine beaten up in yolks of 3 eggs, followed by Castor Oil. Also Pomegranate bark (Punica granatum) boiled in water. Also Male Fern in mucilage. Also Pumpkin Seed in sugar and water. Tapeworm heads appeared in faeces after 3 days, followed by other portions day later. Full recovery indicated.

  The main trouble with doctoring was, nobody really felt inclined to pay their bill. It was the last thing on their list. And just like Louisville, my father hadn’t any stomach to send out statements. Finally, urged on by friends in the casinos, he got some forms printed up, by a man with a hand press in a basement that was used mainly to print a small, blackmail newspaper he was slipping under people’s doors in the mornings. Everyone knew who it was, but it made such enjoyable reading that nobody cared to stop it.

  Anyway, my father had the forms, but he often didn’t bother putting them to use, so we still had to make out mainly from the stand. Even so, he was inching along, and hoped to have a good paying practice soon.

  Then, on May fourth, the most profitable part of our lives here came to an end. We were asleep in our tent, and shortly after dawn, of an unusually windy morning, heard a cry from across the Plaza of “Fire! fire!” Now San Francisco had already had several fires in the last few years, some of them destructive, but this one put the clincher on everything.

  We piled out in a hurry, jumping into our clothes, but before we were halfway across the Plaza, we saw that nothing was going to work—bucket line, wet blankets, hose pump, anything. These buildings around the Square were pasteboard-flimsy, and with the wind to fan things, we had a roarer going in about fifteen minutes. People were yelling and running whichever way, and others piled out of the hotels, wearing anything they could grab, even curtains in some cases. All that day (and it was about the worst in the city’s history) nobody got any more serious a hurt than singed eyebrows or skinned-up elbows, though I heard somebody say a man had broken his leg by jumping out of a sec
ond-storey window into a mortar box which looked wet but wasn’t—that concrete had been standing there two weeks and was harder than iron.

  The fire broke out on the east side of the Square; before eight o’clock it had wiped out the four main gambling halls, and one of the biggest boardinghouses. By afternoon the Square was, as the paper said next day, reduced to ashes except for two houses of 72-foot frontage at the southwest comer and a solitary brick house at the northeast corner. That wind did zip along! From Washington Street down to Montgomery, all leveled off—gambling houses, stores, residences, everything. Sparks and burning cloth swept over the Plaza on a level line close to the ground, like a blizzard of snow, and you had to look sharp to keep from getting your clothes afire. My father wrote in his Journals: “It was an awful and sublime scene. The smoke made the brilliant sun as though seen through a piece of black bottle glass.”

  I guess it was around noon, with the sky all dark that way and burning bits swirling past, when we thought about the stand. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to us before, except that our things were a hundred yards away from the main area of flames. But when we got there, the tent was all but gone and the stand was on fire in three places. We kicked it over, and my father snatched up his bag, but we couldn’t stamp out the flames. A big piece of burning calico—a ceiling from somewhere, likely—had blown against it, giving it a very good start. We’d lost everything except the clothes we stood up in, but they included my father’s new suit, thanks to goodness.

  By twilight, the Square was like something out of a nightmare. Where before rickety wooden buildings had reared up on all four sides, ugly but familiar and warm and homey, now only chimneys were standing, along with that solitary brick building shell. Everything else was a mass of turnbled-down char, smoking, with now and then a little crash as something settled deeper, sending a plume of sparks, and even flame, shooting upward. All across the Plaza people stood and talked, uneasy, the gamblers and women distressed maybe the worst of all, because their reputation wasn’t so good, you see, and none of the “decent” element was anxious to take them in. Piles of furniture every few feet, especially on Jackson and Washington streets down to Montgomery, where a few sticks had been hauled out in a hurry, but not many, because this fire had gone very, fast, like a blaze sweeping over dry prairie, once it started. And where did it start? That was a mystery. The best reports said that a man who had turned in late at the United States smoked a last cigar of the night and went to sleep with it hanging from his fingers. But he declined to admit it later, so I guess they’ll never know.

  One dead. The man that jumped into the mortar trough developed complications on the third day and died of pneumonia. With nothing better to do, we and everyone else trooped up to the public burying grounds, two miles off, and laid him to rest. The Reverend Ebersohl preached the funeral sermon, from the text, “O Generation of Vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” and did a good, careful job, only referring to gambling directly four or five times and whiskey not at all, except once, and didn’t dwell on it. The only awkwardness came when nobody knew the man’s name. He had checked into one of the hotels, a silent, unfriendly fellow, and the register burned. At the City Hospital he’d said, “Just call me Slim,” and refused to amplify things. So Reverend Ebersohl made his death kind of stand for the death of gambling halls in San Francisco and merely referred to him, when necessary, as “our late, esteemed friend of the mortar box,” or “him who lies here,” and finally, having worked those threadbare, just used the handier “Corpse,” as if it was a name.

  One thing the sermon accomplished, it cleared up who was to blame for the fire. Reverend Ebersohl had taken some little trouble to run it down, and it was the Devil.

  Viewed from all angles, it was a very satisfactory sermon, and put the capper on the great fire of May fourth.

  The people went back to work to build up bigger and better structures, and life hurried on.

  But not so good for us. We moved into a back room of the Powell Street Church, but we hadn’t any stand, now, and no money to get a new one made, or buy provisions with. So it was up to my father to go it alone for a while. All the responsibility was his; everything depended on medicine. His face grew more and more haggard, and his hopes were ground down into the dirt. He never talked much in this period; he seemed to have run entirely out of Plans. But he gritted his teeth and held on. I was proud of him, and to help out got a number of odd jobs, wheeling dirt on the streets and such like.

  Then one afternoon in late June he came home whistling, his face pink and happy, swinging his bag and kicking a tin along. He was drunk. Who could blame him? Not me, not this time; I was growing up a little, I guess. And not the Reverend Ebersohl, either. He only looked sorrowful, and quiet, and said, “My friend, let’s sleep it away. Out of sight and out of mind. One swallow does not a summer make, nor even a habit of drinking.”

  But it wasn’t any use. From that day forward he went steadily downhill. And the same as before, he never mentioned it; got up every morning cheerful, even a little pompous, but never again came home quite sober. He’d stopped the really bad times, the outright drunkenness and the gambling, but he was working on whiskey now and not on nerve. And of course, he lost most of his custom. The gamblers and miners still called him in, and generally paid off, but the others no longer cared to chance a man with whiskey on his breath. Moreover, there was a suggestion of a scandal, having to do with a baby delivery that he may have bungled while drinking; everybody felt bad about it, but they were a little suspicious, too.

  The summer ran along. Often I had barely enough to eat. Reverend Ebersohl worked like a draft horse to take care of us, and himself, and his congregation, and keep the devil off at the same time, but it was toilsome going. Twice, Mr. Peters dropped in, both times in the morning when my father seemed sober, so he didn’t stay long, though he looked puzzled, or at least uncertain. And each time he consulted his notebook before he left, as if he was checking dates for some reason.

  On several occasions that summer, all we ate was what I bought from working on the streets. Summer is a poor time for church, as Reverend Ebersohl admitted. “The people fall listless,” he said. “Warm weather drives the Devil from their minds, so they think. But he’s there, back in the shadows, deep in the caverns of the soul, waiting for his Chance to Spring.” The turnouts at his church were scarce, and the collections worse. And what money he got, he put back into hymnals or repairs, instead of laying in food. His clothes flapped loosely on his great frame, but his eyes, made brilliant by overwork and fasting, shone out with more fire than ever.

  August dragged by, and September. My father didn’t look like himself any more. His hair was shot through with gray, and his complexion was blotched. His hands trembled, and his new suit was shiny; he wore it every day.

  I got a letter from Po-Povi:

  Dear Jaimie: Perhaps it is very wrong, but I’m glad you feel lonely for your sister. Mr. Coe says I ‘repine’ for the forests and streams and hills of my land back home. And (dear, wise friend that he is) for my people who bought me. But I am greatly educated. What a solemn procession of tutors, music masters and ladies of ruined fortune has come to fill my mind, guiding my fingers over strings and keys, showing me the arts of society. These are strange people, the English of Mr. Coe’s. They make a religion of indifference, and often, indeed, the manner of these men, if shown among the Indians of my tribe, would have sent them to work among the squaws. But woe to those who mistake their foppery for an infirm purpose. From reading their history, and from what my eyes have seen, I believe there is no way to convince them of defeat.

  Shall I come home? You must write and say the words quite openly.

  Po-Povi

  The twentieth of October was one of those sharp days with an indigo sky and air so clear you could make out each separate clapboard on houses a mile away. In the Bay, the riffled-up waves looked like something seen through a spyglass, and the islands w
ere closer in to the mainland. Still, it was just another day, a poor one for me because rain fell yesterday and no work was to be had on the streets. Same kind of a day as usual for my father, who arose slowly, trying to muster good cheer, shaved, moving the piece of mirror to a corner so dark he was unable to see his face clearly, fixed up his clothes, then stepped behind a partition where he thought he wasn’t seen and had a nip out of a bottle. He refused a breakfast of cold biscuits and tea without sugar; then he took up his kit to leave, when there came a knocking at our back door.

  “Good morning, sirs,” cried Mr. Peters as we opened it. “It is, as you perceive from this newspaper, the twentieth of October. October twenty, exactly a year from the day you arrived in San Francisco.”

  So it was, to be sure. Another year of our adventures was gone, a year of failure and disappointment, a year wasted.

  My father sat down weakly. He looked pitiful; his hands shook so at Mr. Peters’ unexpected interruption that he put them out of sight under his coat.

  “Then we are to hear at last?”

  “I have Client’s instructions,” said Mr. Peters. “Everything executed and in order.”

  “Excuse me a moment,” my father said, and stepped behind the partition again. I saw Mr. Peters’ eye gleam with something more than business, but he coughed, to bring himself back to normal, and opened his portfolio. Taking out some legal-looking papers, he said: “First of all, to ease your anxiety, although the procedure is not, strictly speaking, professional, I will depose that you have come into a handsome estate, most handsome. And in that connection, I am to give you, at this beginning stage of the transaction, a letter. Will you, doctor, be so good as to read it aloud?”

  My father took it and put on his spectacles, but he had to take them off and wipe them. Then he handed it back to Mr. Peters. The simple truth is that his hands shook so much he couldn’t do the job. “If you don’t mind—I’m not feeling well this morning. I dined injudic—”