The typical 19th-century fur trapper relied on his own medical ingenuity to survive in the wild and outlived civilized folks by more than two decades.
In August 1823, Hugh Glass, a member of a small party of mountain men in quest of beaver pelts, happened upon a grizzly bear near the present-day town of Grand River, South Dakota. He fired his single-shot musket but only wounded the animal. Before Glass could reload, the bear charged and slashed him from head to foot. Other trappers arrived and killed the bear, but Glass, bleeding profusely, appeared to be near death. Two trappers—John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger—were left behind to carry him in a litter. After he went into a coma, they grabbed his rifle, powder and gear and rushed to catch up with their companions.
Glass did not die. When he came out of the coma and realized Fitzgerald and Bridger had abandoned him, his anger got his adrenaline pumping. Although weak, he discovered he could crawl, but the wounds on his back had become infected. Knowing something about folk medicine, Glass rolled over onto a rotting log and let the maggots eat the infection out of his back. He then crawled along the Grand River, where he could easily get water. He lived on the meat of dead animals and rattlesnakes until he regained enough strength to walk and was befriended by some Sioux Indians, who had great respect for anyone who survived a bear attack.
Glass and other mountain men who were drawn to the lucrative fur trade in the West during the early 1800s were a hardened breed that rarely had access to doctors or a ready supply of drugs and developed their own brand of frontier medicine. Not known for paying much attention to personal hygiene, they learned to delouse their clothes by spreading them over an anthill. Each mountain man relied on his own knowledge of home herbal remedies and other makeshift measures to deal with a variety of ailments. Many knew how to use a lancet, spread a plaster and even give an enema. Others carried nothing more than a dose of Epsom salts for use as a purgative and a bottle or two of Turlington’s balsam, a concoction of 26 herbal ingredients mixed in alcohol touted as “a Remedy for every Malady.” They all shared a remarkable capacity to survive illnesses, accidents and attacks in the wilderness and typically lived to be toothless, but healthy old men.
Encounters with un friendly Indians constituted the biggest threat to the health and well-being of mountain men. In 1827 a wandering band of Apaches confronted Thomas L. Smith, who had left his hunting party to set beaver traps in North Park on the North Platte River, in what is now Colorado. Smith agreed to leave the area, and when he caught up with his fellow trappers a few days later he learned that the group’s leader, Sylvester S. Pratte, had been killed by Indians. Nonetheless, the group decided to continue trapping and one morning, as Smith left camp, he was shot in his left leg. The bullet struck him just above the ankle, shattering the bones. He grabbed his gun and fired into some nearby bushes where he’d seen a puff of smoke. An hour-long battle ensued, during which time Smith used a buckskin thong to tie off the wound and control the bleeding.
When the fighting stopped, the trappers counted nine Indians dead, including the one who had shot Smith from the bushes. In pain, Smith told his fellow trappers to cut off his foot. They refused. Smith then called to Joseph Bejux, the party’s cook, to give him his knife. Smith cut the torn muscles at the point where the bones were fractured; the Achilles’ tendon was all that was left to hold the shattered foot on the leg. Milton Sublette took the knife and severed the tendon and suggested using a hot iron to stop the bleeding. Smith refused the iron and bound the wound with a dirty shirt and his buckskin thongs.
Everyone expected Smith to bleed to death, but they assured him they would not leave him. Since it was October and cold weather was approaching, the party decided to spend the winter in a sheltered valley on the Green River some distance away. Two men carried Smith on a litter for a couple of days until he was able to ride his horse. When the party arrived at the Green River a month later, Smith was still recovering. One bone protruded from his stump. It was loose and Smith could wiggle it. He used a pair of bullet molds as forceps, and with the help of Sublette, the bone was pulled out.
A few days later, a friendly party of Ute Indians joined the trappers and carried out a healing ritual on his behalf that lasted for several days. They chanted, cried, wailed and recited incantations. Indian women and children began chewing roots and spit the contents on the wound. Soon the last remaining bone fragment protruding from Smith’s leg was loose enough to be removed. By March 1828, Smith was walking on a wooden leg made by his fellow trappers, who took to calling him “Peg-leg.” He continued trapping until the early 1840s, when he opened a trading post in Bear Lake Valley on the Oregon Trail. The California gold rush attracted him during the early 1850s, but he apparently found little gold. He ended up in San Francisco begging on a street corner, where an old friend saw him and arranged for him to be admitted to a hospital. There Peg-leg Smith lived until his death at the age of 65 in 1866.
Sometimes friendly Indians came to the rescue of trappers and traders when the white man’s medicine failed to find a cure. William Bent, who suffered a mild case of smallpox during the 1830s, later contracted diphtheria at his post, Bent’s Fort, in what is now eastern Colorado. Bent could neither swallow nor talk. His Cheyenne wife forced a hollow quill down his swollen throat and fed him by blowing broth from her own mouth through the quill. A Cheyenne medicine man was called. After examining Bent’s throat with the handle of a spoon, the medicine man collected several small sandburs about the size of pears, each covered with tiny, sharp barbs. He then knotted the end of a thread-sized sinew and ran it through a hole he’d poked in a sandbur with an awl. He rolled the bur in marrow grease and asked Bent to open his mouth. The medicine man forced the bur down Bent’s throat. When the fat melted, he pulled it out bringing with it hard, dry matter. The medicine man did this several times until he had removed the diphtheritic membrane. Bent soon found he could swallow soup. Within a few days, he was well enough to eat solid food.
More often than not, mountain men were left to their own devices to cope with illnesses and treat wounds. That was the case with John Simpson Smith, who put the painkiller laudanum to unorthodox but effective use about 1833. Having witnessed too many other mountain men lose a year’s worth of pelts to gambling and carousing at the annual fur-trade rendezvous, Smith chose to float his pelts down the Missouri River and sell them at a good price in St. Louis. He built a bullboat of buffalo robes over a willow framework and started downriver. Somewhere downstream his boat struck a snag and turned over. He was able to recover both the boat and his pelts, which were securely tied to the boat’s ribs. But he was left chilled and wet and pulled his boat ashore to dry his clothes and spend the night.
Because he was in Blackfoot country, Smith did not want to attract attention by building a fire. He curled up on the riverbank and went to sleep, but by the next morning he had a severe toothache. His head was racked with pain. He decided to seek help at Fort McKenzie, an American Fur Company trading post located some miles downstream near modern Loma, Mont. When he reached the post, he traded a few beaver pelts for a jug of liquor and a bottle of laudanum. He immediately took a swig of the laudanum, returned to his boat and continued downstream. The painkiller worked. In the morning sun Smith became drowsy as his boat drifted down the curving river.
When his boat rounded a bend in the river, Smith heard a shot and saw five Blackfoot Indians signaling for him to come to shore. Since they could easily kill him if he did not comply, Smith beached his boat where they were standing. He was dragged out of the boat, and the Indians then helped themselves to its contents, including some meat. Next, they slit the bullboat apart with their knives before letting it drift and sink in the river. The Indians took Smith a short distance, stopped and built a fire to roast the meat. Smith suspected they would kill him after they had eaten. When one of them brought out his jug of liquor, Smith hoped they would get drunk so he could escape.
About that time the laudanum was wearing off. When he took another dose, the Indians tried to snatch the bottle away, but Smith kept it. Perhaps thinking it was liquor, they did not object when he gave each of them a strong dose. Soon the laudanum and liquor kicked in, and the Indians fell asleep. Smith gathered the Indians’ lead, powder and buffalo robes, cleaned and reloaded his guns, and then took the best horse the Indians had. He filled bags with meat and was preparing to leave when two more Blackfoot rode over a hill and into camp. The newcomers sensed trouble and pulled their weapons when they saw their friends lying on the ground. Smith shot one Indian dead, then shot the other’s horse. The second Indian fell to the ground and, before he could get up, Smith stabbed him to death. Smith then scalped all seven Blackfoot, wrapping their scalps in a buffalo robe. Atop the best horse and leading the others, he rode south. Using the laudanum to dull his aches and pains, Smith was able to ride day and night toward civilization, stopping only when the horses needed to rest.
When laudanum was not available for killing pain, mountain men used alcohol in any form. They also made poultices for boils using plug tobacco. Broken bones were sometimes set with splints of sticks and leaves as bandages, or with old pieces of clothing. They made a salve from sugar and soap or beaver oil and the herb cestrum to treat wounds and cuts, and rattlesnake bites were sometimes cauterized by burning small amounts of gunpowder on the open wound. Ingenuity and endurance became their trademarks.
A few physicians made their way west during the era of the mountain man. One was Dr. Jacob Wyeth, who accompanied his brother Nathaniel Wyeth, a Boston entrepreneur, and a small party in search of fur-trading opportunities in the Northwest in 1832. Dr. Wyeth, accustomed to life in Boston and not in the best physical condition, struggled to keep up with the others. It did not help that he became the first member of the group to fall ill, with diarrhea, as they followed the Platte River west. He eventually left the party and with a few others returned east, while his brother Nathaniel continued west with his expedition.
In 1834 Nathaniel Wyeth organized another trading expedition in St. Louis. He asked Milton Sublette, the seasoned mountain man who’d helped Peg-leg Smith, to guide him and a party of 70 men to an event known as the annual rendezvous, when trappers and traders would gather at a designated point in the West to deliver a year’s worth of pelts to the fur companies and collect all their supplies for the coming year.
Unfortunately, Sublette was suffering from a fungus infection in one of his legs caused by a wound received 10 years earlier in an Indian fight. Sublette’s leg became very painful, and he left Wyeth before the party reached the rendezvous and returned to St. Louis for medical help. Dr. Bernard Farrar attempted to stop the spread of infection in the leg, but within a year he had to amputate it. Patients undergoing surgery in that era often died, but Sublette survived the shock and pain of one, possibly two, operations and recovered. He was able to return to the fur trade and attended the 1834 rendezvous with a cork leg that Hugh Campbell, a mountain man friend, had made for him in Philadelphia.
One Canadian trapper, Alexis St. Martin, made a significant contribution to medicine after he was accidentally shot in the stomach in 1822. Dr. William Beaumont, a U.S. Army surgeon at Fort Mackinac, Michigan Territory, treated the wound but was repeatedly unable to close the 2 1/2 inch hole in St. Martin’s stomach, so he covered it with a tent compress and bandage. Since his patient was unable to return to trapping, Beaumont hired him as the family’s live-in handyman in 1823.
Eventually the doctor recognized the unique opportunity St. Martin’s condition afforded to observe the digestion of food and conducted a series of experiments that revealed gastric juice has solvent properties. Even after St. Martin left Beaumont’s employ to get married and start a family, Beaumont followed him to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin Territory, where he began a new series of experiments to determine if there was any relationship between digestion and weather. By the spring of 1831, Beaumont concluded that dry weather increases stomach temperature, humid weather lowers it, and a healthy stomach is 100 degrees. He also learned that vegetables are less digestible than other foods, and that milk coagulates before the digestive process. Moreover, anger hinders a human’s digestion. A year later Beaumont and St. Martin traveled to Washington, D.C., and conducted a variety of other experiments that revealed strenuous physical exercise helps the production and release of gastric juice.
Beaumont’s findings were published in 1832 and lauded as the greatest single contribution to the knowledge of gastric digestion up to that time, thanks in part to his patient. St. Martin died in Canada in 1880 at the age of 86. His family believed he had suffered enough indignities in the name of science and let his body rot in the sun before being buried in an unmarked grave so no further experiments could be performed. Later a marker was placed near the grave in St. Thomas de Joliette, Canada, relating St. Martin’s history and noting that “through his affliction he served all humanity.” Beaumont, considered the “Father of Gastric Physiology,” died 27 years before his famous patient after falling on an icy step in St. Louis. He is buried there in Bellefontaine Cemetery.
Alexis St. Martin lived even longer than most 19th-century fur trappers, who typically survived to a ripe old age. One authority calculated that of 233 trappers whose dates of birth and death are known, the average life span was 64 years, which was well above the national average of about 40 years. More than half of those mountain men died of old age or associated physical illnesses. Four lived into their 90s, while two lived to be 100 or more. When the demand for beaver pelts disappeared and the glory years of the beaver trade ended in 1840, the mountain men drifted into other occupations including miner, guide, Indian agent or interpreter, post trader, teacher, sheepherder, carpenter, surveyor and writer. Nearly all of them maintained active lives, which probably contributed to their longevity.
Story is excerpted from David Dary’s Frontier Medicine: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
Originally published in the December 2008 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
