by Ann Parker
Location and historical events led the way in creating the story of Mercury’s Rise. My interest in Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs was initially piqued by my research into William Jackson Palmer, a general on the Union side in the Civil War and founder of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, for my second Silver Rush book, Iron Ties. From Palmer, it was a natural progression to his friend and business partner, Dr. William Bell. Palmer is usually credited with founding the town of Colorado Springs, and Bell with founding Manitou Springs. As I nosed about, getting my bearings, I became intrigued with the “selling” of the area—particularly of Manitou Springs—as a health resort and tourist destination in the mid-to-late 1800s. Promotion and puffery was hot and heavy in nearly every period piece of documentation I read, from the backs of cabinet cards (such as the one I possess of Williams Canyon taken by Mrs. Galbreaith) to books such as Tourist Guide to Colorado in 1879 by Frank Fossett and New Colorado and the Santa Fe Trail by A.A. Hayes, Jr., published 1880. Here’s a sample from the latter book (for which I owe many thanks to George McCluny for sending to me):
“Of course we went to Manitou, for every one goes thither. It is called the ‘Saratoga of the West’—an appellation which pleases Manitou and does not hurt Saratoga. There are some baths and some mineral springs there…Manitou is a ‘health resort,’‘Why, they keep me here for an example of the effects of the climate,’ said a worthy and busy man at Colorado Springs. ‘I came here from Chicago on a mattress.’”
Many more did come to this growing health and spa resort area, hoping that the mineral waters, the climate, and the location would cure what ailed them. For those interested in learning more about Manitou Springs, the Cliff House, and Colorado Springs, Images of America: Manitou Springs by Deborah Harrison, Images of America: Colorado Springs by Elizabeth Wallace, Selected Colorado Writings by Helen Hunt Jackson, and The Cliff House: Pikes Peak Hospitality by Betty Jo Cardona and Deborah Harrison are very accessible. In addition, through the magic of Google books, you can read effervescent promotional patter about Manitou Springs, its resorts, scenery, and healthful attributes, as well as enthusiastic descriptions of the area’s natural wonders as it was written in the 1870s and 1880s. I recommend Marvels of the New West by William M. Thayer (1887), which also includes some mighty fine engravings; The National Magazine: A Monthly Journal of American History, Vol. 11 (1889–1890); and My first holiday: or, Letters home from Colorado, Utah, and California by Caroline H. Dall (1881), for starters. As an author of promotional patter myself in the not-so-distant past, I recognized and appreciated (in a professional way) the verbal sleight of hand employed by these writers to lure those east of the Hudson to visit and mayhap to stay in the West.
The tourist and health resort boom in Manitou Springs had not quite arrived in 1880, but it was coming. As I explored the area, I heard over and over, “Oh, if only you could set your story a little later!” In 1880, there was no cog railroad up Pike’s Peak, no Broadmoor Hotel, not even the Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs (1880 was one year too early). But that’s okay: in fiction, one can always have characters who see the opportunities coming. Other real historical tidbits: from the 1870s on, the big resorts in Manitou engaged in an escalating competition for visitors through frequent redecorating, adding rooms and entire floors, increasing amenities, adding ever more lavish entertainments, and increasing the luxury of their accommodations, with ruinous results when expenses outpaced income. Burros were used to go up Pike’s Peak and to explore the area. Runaway buggies were a common cause of death (if you discount dying of consumption and related diseases), and rockfall was common.
Many of those coming to Colorado were “chasing the cure,” looking for relief, hoping for a cure from tuberculosis, also known as consumption, the white plague, the wasting disease, and so on. You need only read about the scourge of the disease, before the discovery of antibiotics effected a true cure, to shudder and pray that “superbug” tuberculosis does not breach the current spectrum of antibiotics. For histories on the disease, I turned to Katherine Ott’s Fevered Lives, Sheila M. Rothman’s Living in the Shadow of Death, and René and Jean Dubos’ The White Plague. If you want to gain a sense of the desperation of doctors during this time, go online for the Transactions of the American Medical Association, 1880, and even later documents such as the JAMA Society Proceedings, 1888. As a science writer, I appreciate the power of metaphor and analogy to make a point, and found this passage in the Transactions from Ephraim Cutter, M.D., to his colleagues a real eye-opener:
“It is estimated that one-quarter of the human deaths is caused directly or indirectly by what is commonly called consumption…I find I can write my name readily ten times in one minute…it would take 1 year, 213 days, and 16 hours of unintermitted writing to inscribe the names of this host, if on the average they consisted of thirteen letters. Suppose the vast company could be marshaled in rows four deep and two feet apart, this host would reach 770 miles in length, and occupy 10 days and 17 hours in passing a given point at a continuous rate of three miles an hour.” These particular transactions are full of papers on tuberculosis, treatment and research, such as “The Salisbury Plans in Consumption—Production in Animals—Rationale and Treatment,” “Artificial Inflation as a Remedial Agent in Diseases of the Lungs,” A Further Contribution to the Local Treatment of Pulmonary Cavities,” “Some Remarks on the Lesions of the Larynx in Phthisis,” etc.
The so-called causes and cures ranged far and wide. For instance, in 1881 in the textbook The Principles and Practice of Medicine, some of the causes put forth were hereditary disposition, unfavorable climate, sedentary indoor life, defective ventilation, deficiency of light and “depressing emotions.” Cure routines ranged from reliance on nourishing food, fresh air, and exercise, to the “slaughterhouse cure,” i.e., drinking the blood of freshly slaughtered oxen and cows (reported in Denver in 1879), to patent medicines and nostrums containing such ingredients as cod-liver oil, lime, arsenic, chloroform, the ever-present alcohol, and yes, mercury, even into the 1920s. Nostrums and Quackery by Arthur J. Cramp, M.D. is very disturbing, particularly since it was published in 1921, long after Robert Koch’s discovery that tuberculosis is caused by a bacterium. Another “cure” proposed by a well-respected physician in 1875 was—I kid you not—growing a beard. (See Addison Porter Dutcher’s Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Its Pathology, Nature, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Causes, Hygiene, and Medical Treatment, “Chapter 30: A Plea for the Beards; Its Influence in Protecting the Throat and Lungs from Disease,” pg. 304.)
So, for those of you who are shocked that, at the end of Mercury’s Rise, Inez allows her son to stay with her consumptive sister, keep in mind the state of medical knowledge of the day. Scientists as early as the late 1700s were theorizing about what became the basis for germ theory. By the time of the Civil War, the best minds were conscious of the dangers of sepsis, and Robert Lister had begun using carbolic acid as an antibacterial agent (hence Listerine). However, that did not prevent the re-use of bandages, and horribly septic conditions in medicine in general. Physicians after the War and into the 1880s were generally aware of the idea of contagion, but the idea of bacteria spreading disease really did not become commonly accepted among doctors until much later. Even with Koch’s 1882 discovery of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis (if you knew this, you probably guessed correctly that Dr. Prochazka wasn’t going to make it out alive in Mercury’s Rise), it took until 1920 for the first human trials of the BCG vaccine to occur and until 1944 for streptomycin—the first antibiotic to successfully treat tuberculosis—to be discovered. There are photos taken in the 1890s, showing people at the various springs in Manitou all sharing the same public tin cup to drink the waters. Makes you shudder to think of it. So please, do not judge Inez’s decision harshly; she’s doing the best that she can, given the era in which she lives.
For information on poisons and nasty plants, I turned to Book of Poisons, by Serita Stevens and Anne Bannon, This Will Kill You, by H. P. Newquist
and Rich Maloof, Wicked Plants, by Amy Stewart, Deadly Doses, by Serita Deborah Stevens with Anne Klarner, Murder and Mayhem by D.P. Lyle, M.D. For what grows where, I used Manitou Springs Wildflowers by Nicholas D. Weiner and Brent I. Weiner, Rocky Mountain Wildflowers by Ronald J. Taylor, Colorado Trees and Wildflowers by Waterford Press, and a whole lot of online references to see if particular plants existed in Colorado in 1880 and what they were called at the time. (I did the best I could, folks, but sometimes, you just have to know when to call it quits.)
For insight into the life of British remittance men in the West, I recommend Marmalade and Whiskey by Lee Olson.
Now, about women and women’s roles. Be glad, fellow females, that you are not a woman in the mid-to-late 1800s trying to obtain a divorce. I pity Inez, and you will too, after reading Governing the Hearth by Michael Grossberg, Man and Wife in America by Hendrik Hartog, A Judgment for Solomon by Michael Grossberg, and Ruth Rymer Miller’s dissertation Alimony and Divorce: An Historical-Comparative Study of Gender Conflict. In crafting Inez’s discussion with her lawyer, I relied heavily on Chapter 8 of Hartog’s Man and Wife in America, titled “The Right to Kill.” Hartog uses a telling quote by lawyer Edwin Stanton from the 1859 trial of Daniel E. Sickles to introduce this chapter: “By the contemplation of the law, the wife is always in the husband’s presence, always under his wing; and any movement against her person is a movement against his right and may be resisted as such.” For more about the Sickels trial, the McFarland-Richardson trial and others—in which men killed their wives’ lovers and, for the most part, got away with it—I urge you to look up this book and this particular chapter. I have more references, but will stop there. Suffice it to say, Inez has an uphill battle should she continue to pursue a divorce.
As for women in the Civil War, a fascinating look at the roles they played in the medical services (and in some cases, the disguises they employed) can be found in They Fought Like Demons by DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook. Doctors in Blue by George Worthington Adams has a sobering section on nurses in the Civil War. As Adams notes, “The war opened the gates of a great profession to women at a time when their economic opportunities were scarce.” Hand in hand with the opportunities came difficulties. Many surgeons did not take to the idea or reality of women in the nursing roll. Adams explains, “The usual attitude of medical officers was that they [female nurses] were ‘permitted nuisances,’ especially at hospitals near the front.” In my searches, I found some mention of women physicians in the Civil War, but they appeared “scarcer than hen’s teeth.” Mary Edwards Walker was one such unusual woman; you can read an online profile of her written by the St. Lawrence County, NY Branch of the American Association of University Women. Clearly, if a woman openly took that road, she had to be strong in any number of ways and ready to deal with a storm of controversy and disapproval. Fifteen years later, the situation for women in the medical field was changing, albeit very slowly. For example in the Leadville 1880 census, there were four women who were physicians/surgeons, four counted as nurses/hospital workers, and thirteen Sisters of Charity (at least some of whom were acting in the capacity of nurses in Leadville’s St. Vincent’s Hospital). That same census counted sixty-nine male physicians/surgeons, and, interestingly, only one nurse.
For mixed drinks circa 1880s, the New and Improved Bartender’s Manual: Or How to Mix Drinks of the Present Style by Harry Johnson (1888) was very handy.
In case you are curious, Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral (“Cures Colds, Coughs and all Diseases of the Throat and Lungs”) for infants, children and adults was real. Users were instructed to take liberal doses, night and morning, for a cold, and to commence with a medium dose for a cough, increasing the quantity until it produces nausea or depression. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Volume 58 (1912), Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral in its pre-1905 formulary contained morphine and alcohol.
It is tempting to keep pulling out references from my bookshelves and referring to my virtual bookmarks—I have more, many more!—but I’m thinking, no, I need to call a halt to this or I’ll end up writing a thirty-page Author’s Note. So, I’ll finish up by saying thank you to all the Leaden Skies readers who contacted me with earnest pleas for the next in the series and admonitions to be quick about it. I hope you enjoyed Mercury’s Rise. Inez and I now need to return our attentions to Leadville and contemplate her rather convoluted future. At the same time, keep in mind that, as far as William and Harmony are concerned, we are saying goodbye to them for just a while. They will be back, and that’s a promise.
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