Welton Novels

                   Frontier Doctors

                            of

                 Indian Territory Oklahoma

                   ISBN: 1-60813-023-1

                   Publish America.com

On the western frontier, most of the doctors had very little medical training. Some of the men that did the doctoring were Dentist, Barbers and Veterinarians. They did there best with what knowledge that they possessed. In today’s world, the Emergency Medical Technician most commonly called EMT’s, has more training then the doctors of the 1800’s or even over into the early 1900’s. The doctors of the late 1800’s knew how to do very simple surgery, dig for bullets, sew up cuts and to maybe set broken bones, and treat very little of the diseases that confronted them. There medical knowledge of medicine to give to people was very limited, to say the least, but the Doctor’s were valued in any community.

The stories told in this novel were told to me by Doctor Mullins. In 1961, Doc was 90 years old and had quit practicing medicine at the time. In his early years, he had treated people in the late 1800’s and for his pay had received barter goods more times than money. The doctors of old at times didn’t make enough money to buy medicine to replace what they used and had to resort to trading what they received as payment for money or other means.

This is the story of Tanner the members of the community, and how they made the town a better place to live by making Tanner a thriving town. Even though Tanner became one of the ghost towns of the old west because the railroad missed the town by thirty miles and the people moved to the railroad.

                                   Doc Lightfoot

Ben Colder was known to do a little of everything to make money. He took on a job of finding a lost husband for a lady. When the price for finding a lost husband was upped to $1000 dollars, all Ben could think about was a cattle ranch in the Chickasaw Nation. The lost husband turned out to be the only Doctor in the Ouachita Mountain Range. The Butler Gang had taken the Doc known as Lightfoot under their wing and didn’t want him to be taken from the mountains. After being shot in the back he recovered at the place where the lady that had taken him in when he was only 10 years old. He asked her daughter to marry him as soon as he got the Doctor back to his wife and he could collect his bounty money.

Ben was held prisoner by the Butler gang, with the aid of the town law at Reams town and Doc Lightfoot, they were able to kill the Butler gang and rescue the Doctor. Ben collected the reward and moved his wife and her mother south from the mountains and out into the Chickasaw Nation to raise cattle.