Lyman's History of old Walla Walla County, Vol. 1 / Embracing Walla Walla, Columbia, Garfield and Asotin counties

by William Denison Lyman

I remember of going to Ilia to see a patient with the disease, and before getting back home I had been called to prescribe for seventeen persons; and a few days later I took the disease myself.

The effects of this epidemic were manifest for years, there being left in its wake a multitude of cases of enlarged and suppurating cervical glands, otitis media (suppuration of the middle ear), weakened lungs, bronchitis, and a number of cases of tuberculosis.

Before the country was fenced up, when the roads were few and settlements sparse, the doctor's trips were occasionally very lonely. When going out into remote parts after nightfall, traveling an unfamiliar road and uncertain as to where it led, without a house, fence or sign of human habitation in sight, I have been startled by the weird, doleful howlings of the coyote or the melancholy hootings of the prairie owl. At such times there came over me an undefined feeling of loneliness, not real fear, but perhaps it was that instinctive dread of darkness and danger at night that has come down to us from savage and superstitious ancestors of past ages. Be that as it may, the sight of a candle or lamp gleaming across the prairie, from some settler's window, had a most welcome and cheering effect. Even the barking of a dog or the noise of domestic fowls, or any sound indicating the proximity of human beings tended to enliven the gloom and make home seem nearer.

Thirty or forty years ago we never dreamed that we should ever drive over the country in an automobile. We considered ourselves pretty "well fixed" when we had a good top buggy and a nimble team with which we could make eight or nine miles an hour. In the fine weather of spring and early summer, if there happened to be no need of special haste, it was often a real pleasure to drive out through the country. When the air was redolent with the perfume of flowers and growing vegetation, or sweet with the perfume of new mown hay, the blue sky above, the distant pine-covered mountains, the rolling, grass-covered hills and prairies, all formed a combination well calculated to exhilarate and give delight.

But night visits in the winter time, during cold, stormy weather, were altogether different, when, with darkness there was snow and mud, or strong wind and hard freezing, and the physician had to plod his way slowly along, sitting chilled through and through, feet almost frozen, hands and fingers so benumbed they could hardly clasp the lines—no play of the imagination could make it seem a pleasure trip. It was far worse, however, when there were added to these conditions the feelings and emotions caused by the consciousness that off in a little pioneer cabin on the prairie, or in some gulch, or up in the mountains, there was a patient that was lying at the point of death, with wild delirium or low muttering and stupid mental wandering, or some woman shrieking in agony and praying to God to send her relief from the suffering she was enduring to give life to another, while friends distracted were waiting and wishing the doctor would come. Spurred by these reflections I have often plied the whip and automatically pushed on the lines, to help my horses, my mind running ahead to my destination. As disagreeable as were the outward circumstances, often the state of mental torture and suspense were worse than the physical discomfort.

In those days, the physician had ample time to think while on his long trips in the country, particularly when patients presented no serious symptoms, or when returning home. Often on such occasions, I have looked up at the starlit sky and the myriads of scintillating worlds therein, and thought of the vastness of the universe, and of the aeons of ages since all these blazing worlds were set floating in space. Then came the thought of the immensity of the distance to even the nearest fixed star, and of the vast stretches of the illimitable universe beyond; and of the worlds in the outer confines of space beyond the Milky Way or the Pleiades, whose light took thousands of years to reach the earth. Then would come the thought, "Why all this stupendous illimitable, incomprehensible aggregation of worlds?" "Are any of the planets of these glowing orbs inhabited by intelligent beings?" "If not, why do they exist at all?" Thus my thoughts have run on and on, until cold, darkness, discomfort and almost everything else have been forgotten and lost in my contemplations, and time passed almost unperceived as I traversed the miles in solitude. At other times my thoughts would run upon the problems of human existence, the connection between mind and matter, the mystery of life and death.

Traveling on a moonlit night along the breaks of Snake River, Tucanon or Alpowa, watching the silvery lights and dark shadow along the escarpments and basaltic walls that border these streams and make such grand and beautiful scenery, I pictured to my mind this country when fresh from the hands of the fire gods, a seething, sizzling mass of molten basalt. Then I thought of the long years of its cooling, the gradual crumbling of the rock and the formation of the soil, the appearance of plant and animal life, and of the tropical and semi-tropical climate that must have existed; and of the wonderful extinct animals that once inhabited our hills and valleys; of the hairy mammoth, the three-toed horse and the other strange beings that roamed through the forests that one time were here.

As I looked far down into the wonderful gorge through which Snake River flows, and contemplated the many centuries it must have taken to cut the great channel, it gave me a more comprehensive conception of how the author of the universe operated in creation.

Back in the days when we drove buggies or rode horseback, we had time on the road to do a lot of thinking, as well as of freezing and scorching, or plodding through snow, mud or dust.