“Some folks accuse me of stretching truth to the breaking point in my autobiography, but the fact is I omitted many things because I believed they would be looked upon as fabrications. I had to hold a tight rein on truth, for fear it would not be believed. And even then I seem to have strained the credulity of some readers.” Charles Fox Gardiner, Colorado Springs Gazette, January 25, 1939 Doctor at Timberline is a collection of Gardiner’s first-hand experiences as a physician in the new state of Colorado. He changed the names of the towns and the people in these true stories in a gentlemanly effort to conceal their identities. Many years have passed since Caxton Printers first published this book in 1938—and so, we are confident that revealing the true locations Gardiner describes will not arouse any offense. Crested Butte (Silver Cup), in Gunnison County, was the young coal-mining town where he first opened his medical practice in 1883. He married Emma “Daisy” Palmer Monteith in November 1884 and they set up housekeeping in Meeker (Cowtown), in Rio Blanco County. By 1887, the Gardiner family relocated to Colorado Springs, where he became internationally known for his theories on the treatment of tuberculosis.

Contents; Foreword; Sources of Illustrations; Introduction; Gardiner Letter; Preface; A Tenderfoot Doctor on Ski and Bronco; First Aid Above Timberline; My Dream Horse; The Widow’s Herd; My Tenderfoot; A Tenderfoot Sheriff; A Fourth of July in Cowtown; A Hoodoo Trip; A Tumor Clinic; My Dog Czar; Rough Surgery; Coyote Basin; A Storm Baby; Mule Surgery; A Cutting Affair; “Ranch Jumping”; “Jim”; Some Hard Riding; Lawless Justice; Joe Bush and His Ride

Each chapter seems to begin with a breathless rider galloping up in a frightful hurry to tell the doc someone had been shot, or thrown from a bronco, or blown up in mining accident, or worse. One man walked into his tiny office and said, “Doc, I know you regular doctors don’t fancy doctoring mules none, but …” The short sketches pull off the rare feat of being both historically informative and enjoyable to read. Gardiner sleeps in a hut full of rattlesnakes. He even tends to a child with smallpox in the midst of a shootout. He watches as a gang of vigilantes prepares to lynch a murderer. The murderer had slit his own throat in an attempt to escape and the doctor had been called to patch him up. When the mob realized the man would still be able to breathe with the rope around his neck because of the slit in his windpipe, one yelled, “Let’s turn him over to the doctor. That’s worse than hanging.”

 

 

Doctor at Timberline: True Tales, Travails, and Triumphs of a Pioneer Colorado Physician by Charles Fox Gardiner
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