Trail Dust: Pioneer Remedies Not Always the Most Helpful

By MARC SIMMONS, ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF MARC SIMMONS

Remedies: Frontier medicine guesswork

Modern medicine has come so far, so fast that it’s difficult to remember that just a few generations ago physicians were still trying to cure patients by bleeding, while traveling quacks were prospering by the sale of snake oil and magic elixirs.

An ancestor of mine was a “doctor” in Mississippi just before the Civil War. His hand-written book of medicinal recipes has come down to me, and I find it filled with the most outrageous prescriptions.

Here is a sample designed to relieve malarial fever, or ague, as it was often termed then:

“Take a lump of cow excrement as large as a hen egg from a cowpie dropped in the month of May. Wrap it in a rag and put it in a pitcher with a little sage, horsemint and other sweating herbs. This will produce a half-gallon of strong tea, but not so strong as to make the patient sick. Drink plenty to cause sweating.”

My ancestor, it seems, also dabbled in veterinary medicine. Mixed in with his recipes for humans is a sure cure for removing warts on livestock.

Here, the job required Faith, with a capital F, on the part of the owner. He was instructed to give each of the warts on his pigs and cows a name. But each name had to begin, like the word Faith, with an F. After bestowal of the names, the pesky warts would dry up and fall off.

Such absurd remedies as these were not all that rare a century and a half ago, when the nature and causes of disease were unknown.

At the head of the Santa Fe Trail, for example, cholera, which had recently been introduced from Asia, was thought to be caused by impure air. Trade caravans setting out for New Mexico often departed from Independence, Mo., or Fort Leavenworth, Kan., under clouds of black smoke. Municipal authorities regularly ordered barrels of tar burned in the streets, believing the acrid fumes would purify the air and control the spread of cholera. Only much later was it learned the disease was transmitted by polluted water.

Pioneers heading west always carried a generous stock of homemade cures as well as knowledge of ways to prevent illness. Where they were going, doctors were as scarce as Bible salesmen, which meant each family had to rely on its own resources.

Here are a few medical tricks of the day that I have encountered:

* For a sore throat, wrap a stocking around the neck, the dirtier the better.

* For chronic alcoholism, secretly sprinkle powdered buffalo horn in the drunkard’s whiskey. Guaranteed to cure or kill!

* For tired blood, soak a half dozen tenpenny nails in a bottle of strong vinegar. After the nails have dissolved, take a teaspoonful of this tonic each night before retiring, to put iron in the blood.

* A cold door key, dropped suddenly down a person’s back, will stop a nosebleed when all else has failed.

* And, among the fur-trapping mountain men of the Southwest, a person bothered with an earache asked a companion to blow tobacco smoke in his ear. That was supposed to relieve the pain.

Knowledge of first aid was about as primitive as that which went into the preparation of medicines. Anyone who suffered a severe injury on the western prairies or deserts was doomed to excruciating pain before he got better or died.

There are a number of cases of frontiersmen undergoing amputations in the middle of the wilderness. Sometimes whiskey was available as a painkiller. Often not. Victims not uncommonly withstood the shock of this rude surgery and lived to tell the tale.

Snakebite was another peril that took its toll. As a matter of course, whiskey was given as soon as possible after the bite. We know now, as they didn’t then, that stimulants should be avoided as they speed up the spread of venom through the body.

Lawman Nelson Lee, struck in the ankle by a huge diamondback rattlesnake, was saved by his Mexican scout. The scout at once killed the snake, cut out pieces of its flesh and applied them to the bite.

“I could feel it draw,” said Lee, “and in a few minutes the white snake meat turned to a perfect green. The scout continued until the entire body of the snake was used. I suffered nothing from it afterward save a slight soreness.”

Like much early-day medical practice, that would have to be regarded as a highly unscientific procedure, but for Lee, at least it seemed to have worked. And that’s what frontier medicine was all about — making do with guesswork, luck and hardihood of the patient.

Historian Marc Simmons is author of numerous books on New Mexico and the Southwest. His column appears Saturdays.