Editor’s Note: This is part of a monthly series of stories by the Community History Writers, a group of area individuals committed to documenting and writing about local history and the people, places and happenings that created the various communities within Morgan County.
During Morgan County’s earliest years, there were no college-graduate veterinarians available to care for ailing animals.
In fact, veterinary medicine as a profession was extremely limited in the United States. There were only 392 veterinarians in the whole United States in 1860, according to “Chiron’s Time,” a history of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Colorado State University by J. Dennis McGuire and James E. Hansen II.
No standards
No educational standards regulating veterinary medicine existed in Colorado in those early years. Almost anyone could style himself a “veterinary surgeon” and set up a practice.
Many of the veterinary practitioners of that time were farriers (blacksmiths who shod horses), who also possessed an aptitude to treat some of the more common horse ailments.
Books on the subject of treatment of the diseases of farm animals were available to aid anyone interested in pursuing the knowledge.
One such book was “Practical Home Veterinarian” by Dr. David Roberts, D.V.S. Its original copyright is 1913, with a 15th edition revised in 1923 and a listed price of $1. It is a small book that covers the diseases and treatment of cattle, horses, swine, sheep and poultry in 184 pages and includes photos. Gayman Drug Co., a Fort Morgan pharmacy that was located in the 200 block of Main Street, was an agent for Dr. Roberts and offered for sale the prescriptions noted in the book.
Some of the book’s suggested treatments wouldn’t hold up today.
In discussing parturition under “Diseases of the Horse” the following treatment is recommended: “After colt is born, the mare should be washed out with a solution of Antisepto (two quarts), then place one pound of lard (in chunks) into the womb. Do this once daily until she has recovered.”
Antisepto was just one of almost 200 of Dr. Roberts’ prepared prescriptions that Gayman Drug Co. made available for purchase.
Early veterinarians
Chris Koenig, the father of Fort Morgan’s Chris Hobbs, was one of the non-college educated veterinarians who treated farm animals in Morgan County.
Koenig grew up in the Grover area on his father’s homestead and developed an aptitude for treating ailing animals. His wife supported his efforts by purchasing three how-to-treat sick animals books to use as references.
His personal success on his own cattle led to his being called upon to treat his neighbors’ ailing animals. One of these clients continued to call him whenever he had sick cattle even after moving to the Fort Morgan area.
P. S. Edwards, known as “Doc” Edwards, was another self-educated Morgan County horse doctor.
Being the owner of Sundance F-500, a prized Appaloosa stallion, Edwards is briefly mentioned in the book, “Spotted Pride” by Frank Holmes. It states that the nickname ‘Doc’ was given to Edwards due to the fact that he was a highly respected local ‘country vet.’
When he first purchased the stallion around 1947, Edwards and his wife were schoolteachers at Woodrow who also farmed and raised cattle and horses.
David Wood, who personally knew him said, “Doc Edwards was just sort of one of those guys that had horses, and sort of was the local expert on anything horse related.”
Woods related that the Edwardses moved from Woodrow to a farm east of Fort Morgan on County Road 22 north of U.S. Highway 34.
More livestock means more demand for veterinarians
According to “Chiron’s Time,” the population growth of the mid 1800s in the United States increased the demand for food, which included animal products of meat, eggs and dairy. Much of this population growth was leaving the family farms for jobs in the cities.
Since man’s physical well-being is affected by the quality of the food he eats, as animal disease specialists, veterinarians also influence human health. Thus was created the need for competent veterinarians to assure the soundness of animal products for human consumption.
The education of these trained veterinarians was delegated to the land grant colleges.
The Morrill Land Grant Act passed by U.S. Congress and signed by Pres. Abraham Lincoln in 1862 created a unique system of education, research and service in agriculture and the mechanical arts. Most states took up the option of accepting a grant of federal land in return for creation of an institution of higher education.
College set up in Colorado
Colorado Agriculture College (today Colorado State University) was founded in 1870 in Fort Collins under the Morrill-Act. Actual college instruction didn’t begin until Feb. 16, 1880, with 42 students (18 were women) and three professors. All of the students at the time were required to take the one veterinary class offered in the curriculum.
A full-fledged three-year degree veterinary program was not established at the college until 1907, one year after the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.
According to “Chiron’s Time,” the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was the result of Upton Sinclair’s novel, “The Jungle.” The book’s gruesome description of meat-packing practices greatly aroused public opinion and prompted Pres. Theodore Roosevelt to demand Congress do something. The Meat Inspection Act created a demand for veterinarians to oversee meat inspection, and thus elevated the profession’s value and esteem in the public.
Morgan County gets college-trained vets
It is possible that the first college-trained veterinarian in Morgan County was Dr. George Teeple.
“Looking Back – A Pictorial History of Morgan County, Colorado,” compiled by Roy G. Robinson and Darlene Doane in 1997, has a photo in its 1910s section of a Dr. Teeple taken in front of his home in the 600 block of Ensign Street in Fort Morgan. He is shown with his horse that he hitched to a two-wheeled sulky to make his veterinary calls. His daughter, Georgia Teeple, is pictured as a junior in the 1912 Fort Morgan High School yearbook. Since his name does not appear in the Fort Morgan Museum’s Obituary Files or the cemetery listing, it is assumed that Dr Teeple later moved elsewhere.
A well-known local veterinarian was Dr. Cecil Port Lamb, a 1912 Fort Morgan High School graduate. He graduated from Colorado Agriculture College with a three-year Doctor of Veterinary Science degree in 1915.
(Beginning with the new enrollees in 1913, the college’s veterinary course required four years, and the Department of Veterinary Science became the Department of Veterinary Medicine.)
Following his graduation in 1915, Dr. Lamb immediately set up a veterinary practice in Brush. (It could be that he did not choose to practice in Fort Morgan because Dr. Teeple was already established there, although that is not certain.)
Veterinarians need for war effort
In 1917, the United States became involved in World War I, and there was a dire need for veterinarians – not only to care for the horses and mules used to transport munitions to the Allied trenches, but to assure the wholesomeness of the food for the soldiers.
The first Veterinary Corps of the U.S. Army was established in May 1917, and Dr. Lamb was one of over 10 percent of the graduate veterinarians in the United States who enlisted and served.
Following his military service, he returned to Morgan County, and from 1923-24 he managed his wife’s (Josephine Girardot) family ranch in Orchard.
In 1925, Dr. Lamb returned to his Brush veterinary practice, which he kept going until he was forced to retire in l952 after developing an allergy to animal dander.
Vet enters politics
Having been exposed to politics when his father, Silas C. Lamb, served several terms as Morgan County sheriff, Dr. Lamb ran a successful campaign to be Morgan County’s representative in the Colorado legislature. He served 20 years in that capacity.
He told The Fort Morgan Times that his hardest personal battle during that time was revising the Colorado Veterinary Practice Act and getting it passed into law.
He introduced his bill during his first term, but it wasn’t passed until almost 16 years later in 1968. With a predominately rural representation in the Colorado legislature at that time, the ranchers and farmers were not eager to accept state regulations regulating them in the care of their animals.
Family memories
Tom Chesney, Dr. Lamb’s grandson, offered some wonderful memories of his grandfather:
“Doc always wore cowboy boots, a bolo tie, and a gray Stetson cowboy hat. I remember a specific time when he took me to lunch at a restaurant near the capitol. This was a popular eat-place for the legislators, capitol staff and lobbyists. We were seated near the cash register. I was about 12 or so, and I observed someone standing at the register to pay, and the hostess would say, ‘Mr. so and so picked up your tab.’ The individual would say, ‘How nice,’ and look around the room to spot someone else, and then say, ‘Well then, pick up old Joe’s tab for me.’ It seemed as though they all paid, but never for their own bill. The lesson I learned then was that sometimes it is who you know that is every bit as important as what you know.
“Since Granddad was a veterinarian who often made house calls to farms and ranches, he ate very quickly so he could get a meal in before he headed out on calls. I was a senior at Fort Morgan High School and was seated across from him at Sunday dinner. As he was shoveling in the food, he paused for a moment and asked me what my plans were for college. I told him I really liked Colorado College because they had this neat block system where you took one course at a time, immersed yourself in it for about three weeks, and the course was finished. Doc fixed me with a steely-eyed glare and said, ‘I’ll be (expletive) if any grandson of mine is going to a private college when I’ve been paying taxes all my life in this state!’ Needless to say, I was redirected to the University of Colorado, where both my parents had graduated.
“Now fast forward one year and I am a freshman at CU. I had let my hair grow a little long. We were seated again at Sunday dinner, and the only thing Doc said to me the whole time was, ‘My god, you look just like hell!’ I had to return the following week for some reason, so I got my hair cut. I was seated again across from him. As he quickly ate, he looked me over, and then said, ‘Now you look like my grandson. I want to buy that haircut,’ and he handed me a ten-dollar bill.
“My point in telling these stories is, that was a generation that spoke candidly. They weren’t worried about being politically correct, and if you didn’t like what they said, or the way they said it, that was your problem to deal with, not theirs. There was nothing personal about it. They just expressed their feelings and you knew where you stood. Both of my grandparents were larger-than-life characters to me.”
Another veterinarian in Fort Morgan
Dr. Robert C. Swallow was 13 years older than Dr. Lamb, but he didn’t begin his veterinary practice in Fort Morgan until 1917 – about the same time that Dr. Lamb left the county to serve in World War I. The Fort Morgan Times reported that Dr. Swallow was a graduate of a veterinary school in Chicago.
According to the book “Veterinary Medicine,” by Robert H. Dunlop and David J. Williams, the Chicago Veterinary College was one of five significant private veterinary schools among the 26 that existed during the Era of Private Veterinary Colleges between 1852 and 1927. Most of these private colleges had a short life span of 14 years, due to their failure to attract students. Of the 26 in existence during that time, the Chicago Veterinary College produced the most graduates.
In the early days of operating a veterinary practice, the Fort Morgan veterinarians maintained a small business office in town. Most of the early calls were rural. They traveled with their medical equipment and supplies first by horse and buggy and later by cars and then pickups to the farms requesting their assistance. Dr. Swallow’s office was in downtown Fort Morgan on the second floor of the First National Bank located on the southwest corner of Main Street and Kiowa Avenue.
Getting medical help
Dr. Swallow became a very close friend of one of Fort Morgan’s early medical doctors, Dr. Alfred Frederick Williams. According to Dr. Williams’ biography in “One Hundred Eleven Trees,” after graduating from Fort Morgan High School in 1899, he attended CU for his pre medical training and then entered Denver and Gross Medical School (later known as CU Medical School) and graduated in 1903. At that time it took a total of only four years to become a medical doctor.
Dr. Williams had the only X-ray machine in Fort Morgan in those days. He was very generous to occasionally let Dr. Swallow bring in a dog or cat patient after hours to use the machine.
There is also a known incident in which Dr. Swallow assisted Dr. Williams with a tonsillectomy on a Sunday morning in Dr Williams’ office. The two were driving together down Main Street when Dr. Williams spotted a paperboy whom he had previously examined and had told the boy’s mother that his tonsils were in dire need of being removed, but he hadn’t seen them since. They decided to pick the boy up and took him to Dr. Williams’ office.
Dr. Swallow was experienced in administering anesthetics to animals and apparently had no difficulty doing the same on the young boy while assisting Dr. Williams in the surgery. The lad was returned to his home following the surgery, and there apparently were no repercussions.
Fort Morgan native becomes a vet
Another early Fort Morgan veterinarian was Dr. Harry P. Scott, who was born in Fort Morgan in 1895. An interesting account of his Fort Morgan childhood appears in “One Hundred Eleven Trees” in the biography of his father, Samuel Montgomery Scott.
Following in the footsteps of their two older brothers, Harry and his younger brother, John, spent their boyhood summers operating a “cow pool.” Each morning after the various family cows were milked, the Scott boys made the rounds gathering them into a herd and driving them north to the river bottom west of the South Platte River bridge. (The older brothers had driven the cows several miles to the short buffalo grass west of Fort Morgan. As homesteads were taken up, the grazing area was moved to the south until the younger boys took over.) The cows were returned to their owners in time for the evening milking. It was an all-day job of cow watching, and their pay was $1 each month, per animal. (Of course, the grass the cows consumed was free.)
Occasionally, tragedy would strike, such as the time two of the animals strayed into a cane patch and after munching a few mouthfuls, promptly dropped dead. (Cane was grown in Morgan County as cattle feed but was a poisonous crop until a hard freeze had cured it.) This experience could possibly have influenced Harry to become a veterinarian.
Following his graduation from the four-year veterinary program at Colorado Agriculture College in 1921, Harry returned to Fort Morgan and practiced in association with Dr. Swallow until 1929, when he moved to Fort Collins. He continued to practice there until his retirement.
Fort Morgan’s first vet clinic opens
Another associate of Dr. Swallow’s was Dr. John W. Smith, who graduated from Colorado A&M veterinary school in 1936. (The institution had a name change in 1935 to Colorado State College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts.)
After first spending time in the army in New Zealand, where he became a captain, and then becoming a meat inspector in Denver, he moved to Fort Morgan in 1944 and joined Dr. Swallow’s practice.
Shortly thereafter, he opened Fort Morgan’s first veterinary clinic, a facility west of Fort Morgan on Highway 34, where farmers and ranchers could bring their livestock for treatment and save the veterinarian a county call. He practiced until his untimely death from a fall in 1969.
Unusual experiences
Most country veterinarians have tales of remarkable and sometimes very unusual experiences with their animal patients.
In the 1960s, when the Fort Morgan Veterinary Clinic was housed on Dr. Richard Simmons’ property located on South Main Street just south of Landmark Trailer Park, a local dog owner whose dog was terrified of firecrackers would bring his dog out to board every year on the Fourth of July.
One Fourth of July morning, upon arrival at the clinic, the doctors were very surprised to see the dog sitting at the office door all alone. Recognizing the dog, the animal was put in a cage where he could feel secure, and then the clinic staff tried to call his owner, but to no avail. Later in the day, they learned that the dog’s owner had taken ill during the night and was in the hospital. Obviously, at the sound of the first firecracker, the dog had somehow found his way on his own to the veterinary clinic that morning.
Animals of all kinds
Rural veterinarians learn to deal with a wide range of animals, each of which has its own specific characteristics.
Pet turtles have been brought to the Fort Morgan Veterinary Clinic with cracked shells. It didn’t take long to realize that super glue does a great job in mending turtle shells.
In 1987, being equipped with the steel pipe corrals needed to contain rather wild bison, the Fort Morgan Veterinary Clinic was called upon by the University of Colorado to TB test the new CU mascot, Ralphie III. Federal law requires most livestock to be tested before they can travel across state lines, so the CSU-educated veterinarians had the privilege to house CU’s Ralphie III for the three days required for the test.
Bob Spencer, a CU alumnus and publisher of The Fort Morgan Times, was invited to come see his alma mater’s newest mascot. He brought along a photographer, and consequently Ralphie III’s photo appeared in The Fort Morgan Times.
In the early days there was not much offered at veterinary schools on treating birds.
A classic bird experience of a local veterinarian involved a pet parakeet that was brought to his clinic with a huge lump on its rear end. The first question the veterinarian asked the client was whether the bird was male or female. The client proceeded to point out all the features making it a male. The veterinarian decided to probe the lump, and yellow fluid began to drip out. He told the client that it was the first male parakeet to lay an egg.
Sometimes the veterinary career can be both rewarding and frustrating. An example involved a pet goose named Carl, that was adored by a woman in Fort Morgan. Somehow Carl broke his drumstick (tibia), and she brought him to the clinic to get it repaired requiring the insertion of a steel pin. The surgeon, Dr. Don Ostwald, knew that he could not use the old anesthetic ether on a bird because its body has air sacks and ether being a flammable gas could blow Carl up. A new anesthetic that wasn’t flammable was used and it worked fine. The frustrating part came after Carl’s leg was mended. Being on a limited income, the lady’s husband was not happy at the prospect of a big bill on an insignificant goose. Even though the bill was cut to the bare minimum, the husband still was very much disgruntled.
Periodically a veterinarian receives a significant perk when he is able to save an otherwise doomed animal. One such incident happened years ago when a truck hit a Chihuahua dog named Sputnik, that was due to deliver puppies the next day. The owners gathered up the supposedly dead dog and rushed her to the veterinary hospital only a mile away. The veterinarian was in the process of an operation at the time but stopped to open up the Chihuahua and remove two chocolate colored puppies. He proceeded to breath in their mouths, and they were revived and able to go home an hour later. Sputnik’s owner was so inspired that she called The Fort Morgan Times and they printed her story.
Human health problems
Veterinarians aren’t licensed to deal with human health problems, but many do tend to treat their family’s minor ailments.
A favorite story of one family involved a son who signed up for the high school track team, but the week of the first race, he declared he was unable to participate because his foot was too sore. Until this time, there had been no mention of a sore foot. Thinking that the son was trying to get out of an obligation, the veterinarian father took him out to his clinic and took an X-ray of the foot.
Upon examining the X-ray, the veterinarian realized he didn’t know what a normal foot looked like, so he took a second X-ray of the other foot for a comparison. Still not sure of any abnormality, he decided that a physician needed to be involved. A quick appointment was made with the newest medical doctor in town. Not wanting to be charged for another X-ray, the father instructed the son to take the X-ray with him.
The veterinarian’s wife was the one who later received the telephone call from the physician saying, “What kind of a mother are you that sends your son to a veterinarian?” The son had three broken small bones in his foot, so was excused from the track team for several weeks.
Moving veterinary medicine into the future
Veterinary medicine today has come a long way from the late 19th century and its horse-and-buggy days; and it continues to change and grow.
One example is that CSU recently announced it has received $77.8 million to build a Translational Medicine Institute. Its purpose is to bring together veterinary and human medical professionals in regenerative medical research that will benefit both humans and animals in the future.
How times have changed in just a little more than 100 years!
