Volume 4 Number 1
October 1964

by Richard Dunlop
(Reprinted courtesy of Today’s Health)

The English soldiers and fur traders stood disdainfully at their ease outside the impregnable stockade of Fort Michilimackinac. They watched the Chippewas line up before a goal at one end of the meadow and the Sauks cluster before a goal at the other end. The Indians had promised to play baggitiway, that game of the North American forests in which whole villages of bronze-skinned players opposed one another. It was to be a primordial game of lacrosse in which warriors would try to throw the ball over their opponents’ goal with the help of netted sticks.

The sunlight sparkled on the blue waters of the strait that connects Lake Michigan to Lake Huron and dappled the crowding forest. It was June 2, 1763, a day of spring, of birdsong, of a wanton breeze that toyed with the officers’ ruffles and stocks as they made their bets.

Inside the fort store where winter still reigned, 22-year-old Alexander Henry sat at his desk and scribbled in his record book. He had come from New Jersey to this last outpost of civilization. From here he sent agents to trade the white man’s goods for the Indian’s furs. Here, he received pelts, sorted and packed them for shipment back to the East.

Fierce whoops from outside told Henry that the game had started. Men of the two tribes were surging back and forth after the ball, whacking at one another with their sticks, shouting with savage triumph at each score while the squaws sat on the sidelines and guarded their husbands’ weapons.

Henry’s pen paused over the ledger; he listened. In this wilderness, war and sport had the same sickening sound. He listened, but without alarm as he had paddled his canoe alone into the Indian forests and was used to dealing with these savage people outside the gate. Every spring they brought their furs to the fort and stood before him, ridiculous, half-naked, and tried ineffectively to bargain.

Half-child, half-man, unkempt, and rancid to the nose, an Indian filled Henry with repugnance. There was Wawatam, a Chippewa medicine man, who came to him to trade and went away. Wawatarn came again, bringing his family with him so they could hear his speech—an Indian speech, full of dreams and portents. Wawatam had once had a dream, a demonic dream of adopting an Englishman for his son, his brother, his friend. He had recognized Henry instantly as the Englishman, and now he offered him presents and pleaded that the young white man become blood brother to the coppery family gathered about him. At first Henry refused with disgust. But finally, to rid himself of the savages, he agreed. He gave Wawatani cheap trade goods in return, and the Indian contentedly took his family away.

Now the game became wilder; the crack of sticks on skulls. The fearful screams brought Henry to the window. A Chippewa caught the ball and flung it over the stockade. Shouting, the warriors poured into the fort in pursuit.

Once inside, they threw down their sticks. Without warning, baggitiway became war as they swooped up tomahawks and knives from their squaws and attacked the Englishmen inside and outside the pallisade. Henry saw an Indian fling Ensign John Jamet to the ground. He held Jamet’s head between his knees, tore off his scalp, and waved it aloft. He whooped his triumph. Henry froze. Curiously, the French-Canadians in the place were not being injured.

Knowing that his resistance would not prevent the fan of the fort, he dashed out the rear door of the store, leaped a fence, and rushed into the house of Langlade, a French-Canadian neighbor. He begged the Frenchman to bide him. Langlade, looking out the window at the terrible scene, shrugged.

"What do you want me to do?"

He shook his head, but an Indian girl servant led Henry to an attic and hid him behind a pile of birchbark buckets the family used in collecting maple sap. Soon, four Indians entered the attic. They peered about in the dark and then went away.

Next day, the Indians returned. They had looked for Henry’s body among the dead and not finding it, knew he must be hiding in the fort. They demanded to know if he was in the house, until Langlade, fearing for his family, led the Indians to the attic. Wermiway, a huge brave, grabbed Henry and raised his knife. Then he relented.

"I won’t kill you" he said. His brother was dead, and he would make Henry his brother.In the days that followed Henry was almost murdered by drunken braves, stripped of clothing, and dressed in Indian castoffs. He was paddled over the lake in a canoe, and seized by the Ottawas, who overwhelmed the Chippewas, but later was retaken by the Chippewas. One night, a Chippewa war chief, vexed because he had missed the capture of the fort, strode into the lodge where the English were confined and stabbed five of them to death.

Henry expected to die, but then Wawatani returned from a hunt. "Take courage," he whispered. Wawatain stood up before the council lodge, and eloquently argued that his white brother be given to him. He placed rich presents before Wermiway to buy off his claim. The presents were accepted and Henry was freed. That night, in Wawatam’s lodge, he was fed for the first time in several days. He was dressed and painted like an Indian, and his hair was cut.

Now, Henry was an Indian who migrated through the woods with the seasons, hunted deer, and learned to secure the meat from the wolves by placing it on a scaffold in the trees. He shot a bear, made maple sugar, fished and invoked the Great Spirit in moments of question. Wawatam gave him $160 worth of furs as his share of a winter’s trapping and from French traders he bought new clothes, ammunition, and tobacco.

One day, Wawatarn’s daughter-in-law was in labor but could not bring forth a baby. Wawatam and Henry searched the woods for a garter snake. As it coiled around his arm, the Indian took the snake by the neck and cut off its head. He caught the blood in a cup, mixed it with water, and ladled it into the tortured woman. Within an hour the baby was born.

Henry learned other medicinal ways of Wawatam, learned the herbs he kept in his pouch of healing. Soon he, too, enjoyed a reputation among the Chippewa as a medicine man. He was skilled with a lancet and was in demand for letting blood, a common Chippewa practice. He discovered that squaws particularly enjoyed being bled, whether ill or well.

"I have bled sometimes a dozen women in a morning as they sat in a row, along a fallen tree," he wrote later in life, "beginning with the first, opening the vein, then proceeding to the second, and so on, having three or four individuals bleeding at the same time."

Alexander Henry, enterprising young trader, was now blood brother to the Indians he had despised. As did thousands of other white captives taken on the westering North American frontier, he became a white Indian, versed in medicinal skills of the dark forest, one of countless men, women, and children adopted into Indian families to replace members dead of disease or war. To some, taking the Indian way did not mean learning Indian medicine. To most it meant learning only what an average Indian brave or squaw knew. To a few it meant seeking out the secrets of the Indian medicine man.

White Indians, particularly those taken as children and raised in Indian villages, never could become completely white again. They could not feel at home in the settlements, even though few of them were ever completely content among the Indians. They were men caught up in the interplay of two alien cultures. From them we have learned much about Indian life and the medicinal practices of the forest. The Indians, in turn, learned something of white medicine.

Alexander Henry sat with the Chippewas as they consulted their guardian spirit, the Great Turtle. He helped to build a huge wigwam of five logs, each 10 feet long and eight inches thick, covered by moose skins. He watched Indians light the sacred fires within the tent, saw the naked medicine man enter alone. Mystified and awed, he saw the great tent shake in a titanic ague. He listened to the terrible sound of voices, of animal cries and screams that came from the tent. Then there was the silence of the eye of a psychic cyclone.

At last the Indians clapped their hands with joy at what he described as "a low and feeble voice, resembling the cry of a young puppy." This was the Great Turtle’s voice, the spirit that always told the truth. The medicine man interpreted, and the tribe listened. Henry asked the Turtle if he would ever see his native land again. Yes, replied the Turtle, you will return to your friends.

White Indians learned that the medicine man was at once an herbalist, a rude surgeon, and a religious leader with what sometimes seemed supernatural powers. Their surgical methods were peculiar, indeed, when judged from a white man’s viewpoint. Near Sault de Sainte Marie, a man received an ax blow in the side which was so violent that the ax head could not be pulled out and had to be left in the wound.

As Alexander Henry watched, the medicine man ran for his pouch of healing. He took out a bony white substance, scraped it into water, forced open the wounded man’s jaws with a stick and poured the mixture down his throat. The man opened his eyes and vomited up a lump of clotted blood.

Henry nursed the man daily. In six days he walked about. In a month he was fully recovered, and 20 years later, Henry learned, he was enjoying good health.

In 1764, Alexander Henry, fulfilled the prophecy of the Great Turtle, and safely returned to his people. He became a far-ranging trader on the northwest frontier, a man who could bargain for pelts, or compound an herbal remedy for disease with equal skill.

Certainly, Alexander Henry was not the first white captive to become an Indian medicine man. Very likely three Spaniards shared this distinction. Fleeing from the disastrous Panfilo de Narvaez expedition which first landed on the west coast of Florida near modern Tampa, Cabeza de Vaca, Capt. Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and Andres Dorantes de Carranga, and his Moorish Negro slave, Estebanico, made their way west to the coast of Texas where, in 1527, they were shipwrecked on what is now Galveston Island. There, a cannibal tribe of Indians captured them and demanded that they be their medicine men or die. The Spaniards, moreover, must use Indian methods.

"They cure by blowing upon the sick, and with that breath and imposing of hands, they cast out infirmity," wrote de Vaca, many years later in his Relacion.

At first the Spaniards laughed at the preposterous idea. But when it became necessary to do or die, they did.

"Our method was to bless the sick, breathing upon them and recite a Paternoster and an Ave Maria," said de Vaca.

Death was also to be the price of failure. Fortunately, their patients survived, and the Indians gave their white medicine men food and skins. Making their way among a people so primitive that the men wore no clothing whatsoever (the women decked themselves in Spanish moss), they pushed towards Mexico. Indian messengers sped ahead to tell the tribes that the "children of the sun" were coming and that they would treat their illnesses and injuries. As many as 3000 savages accompanied them in a strange medicinal pilgrimage across the vast empty plains.

"They fetched a man to me and stated that a long time since he had been wounded by an arrow in the right shoulder," said de Vaca, "and that the point of the shaft was lodged above his heart."

De Vaca probed the wound and found that the arrowhead had passed through the cartilage. He opened the sufferer’s breast with a knife and removed the arrowhead. With a bone of a deer he made "two stitches that threw blood over me." He used hair from the deerskin to staunch the flow of blood. The Indians, pleased with this surgical success, put on a festival and showed the arrowhead around as if it were a prize trophy of war.

After nine years among the Indians, de Vaca and his friends reached Mexico safely. Unknown to them, one other survivor of the Narvaez expedition was still an Indian captive. This was Juan Ortiz, who was held in Florida by a tribe which gave him the miserable job of keeping the wolves away from their burial place.

Captives taken on the Anglo-American frontier knew something of de Vaca’s trail of hardship, but generally found themselves learning medicine from the Indians instead of teaching it to them. John Dunlap was seized by Indians as a boy and raised by the tribal medicine man, who taught him how to collect herbs in the woods to cure the afflictions of the body.

Apply the leaf of a yellow flowered water lily to the skin and give the patient a large dose of an infusion made from its leaves and his fever will abate. Boil the bark of red oak and give it for disorders of the lung and intestines. To soothe a toothache, rub the inside bark of elm or prickly ash to the tooth and gums. Puffballs or prairie mushrooms will staunch the flow of blood from wounds. The boiled inside bark of pine or boiled roots of the wild plum will cure the flux.

The white boy sat in the wigwam of his tawny preceptor. He helped to collect the herbs in the forest, and sought for the juniper because he was taught its fruit and leaves could be boiled to stop a cough. When an Indian playmate suffered from the gas, he found mint for him to chew. In the winter camp he saw scurvy make its appearance. Following his teacher into the woods, he stripped the bark and needles from the hemlock to make tea which magically restored health. For tonic, he gave sassafras or ginseng.

John Dunlap learned well. When he was released by the Indians, he continued to practice on the white side of the frontier. Early settlers, venturing into southern Illinois around 1810, found four cabins surrounded by a stockade. One of the cabins belonged to Dr. John Dunlap. He was counted the first white doctor in Williamson County, and he maintained to his death that he had a perfect right to treat the sick because of his education in the medical arts given by Indians.

Another early Illinois doctor, Basil Greenwood, first learned medicine among the Indians. He was captured at Illinoistown, now East St. Louis, in 1814, when only four years old. From the start the squaws of the tribe treated him tenderly, and he left the Indians with sorrow when 10 years later the government ransomed him. Sometime ox-driver, millwright, Indian interpreter, and medicine man, Greenwood augmented his Indian herbal knowledge by attending the Missouri Medical College, from which he was graduated in 1847. He became a friend of both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas and, in 1849, went on the John C. Fremont expedition into the far West as its doctor.

They were strange men, these whites raised by the Indians, so Indian beneath their white skin that they even had the redskin’s strange prophetic dreams. John McCullough, kidnapped by the Delaware in 1776, was hauled into a canoe by two young braves who paddled to the center of the stream. There, they plunged him beneath the water until he was almost smothered. Bringing the gasping boy ashore, they dressed him ceremonially in a ruffed shirt. They shaved his head, painted him, and told him that now he was an Indian.

Throughout his boyhood McCullough’s Indian "uncle" awoke him at daylight and made him sit in a creek up to his chin so that he would grow up hardy. He was not allowed to go near the fire until he was dry.

Often, white men and women were adopted by an Indian tribe. Col. John Smith, a redoubtable Kentucky frontiersman, was seized by the Caughnawaga in 1757 while making his way through the trackless forests north of the Ohio. He learned Indian medicinal practices. Later his knowledge saved his life. Crippled deep in the wilderness by a wicked stab he received when he tumbled into a canebrake, he pulled out a long splinter from the wound with the aid of his bullet mold. Then he beat the bark of a linden root on a stone and boiled it well.

"With the ooze I bathed my foot and leg," he said. "What remained I boiled to a jelly and made a poultice thereof." He used moss for a bandage, all wrapped around with elm bark. Following this Indian treatment, the swelling and inflammation soon left his wound.

As the frontier advanced beyond the Mississippi, hostile Indians continued to capture whites, making Indian medicine men out of some of them. Edwin Eastman and his wife, his father, mother, and brother were treking west from Independence in a covered wagon when they came across a band of Comanches under Chief Lone Wolf who were returning from plundering Mexican settlements. The Indians killed and scalped his father, mother, and brother, but spared Eastman and his wife. Later they traded his wife to an Apache Indian chief together with several captured Mexican women and children. He was turned over to the medicine man, who put him to work collecting herbs, and pounding and brewing them. He became adept at medicinal practice, filling an honored position in the tribe.

Longing to find his lost wife, Eastman, nevertheless, persuaded the medicine man to ask a sub-chief—a Mexican raised by the Comanches from boyhood—to let him join a war party. Dressed in full regalia, Eastman rode out for horses and scalps. On a raid against the Arapahos, the Comanches were driven back onto some rocky bluffs. The leader dispatched Eastman and a warrior to the top of a cliff to send a smoke signal for help.

Certain that this was his last chance to escape, Eastman sent no signal, but instead wrestled his companion, knifing him to death. Taking parched corn and two horses, he rode off into the plains. With the hope of finding his wife, he went to the Southwest, where he worked in the mines. Sometimes Eastman used his medicinal skills to cure miners who had stomach disorders or who were bitten by snakes. At last he went on a daring raid to the Apache village where his wife was kept prisoner and freed her. "Doctor" Eastman, as the miners called him, and his wife were reunited after nine years of savage life.

Jim and Jane Kimball were a more fortunate pair of captives. In the spring of 1848, 19-year-old Jim and his bride, who was the half-sister of Kit Carson, were with 61 other settlers on their way to Oregon in a wagon train, which was surprised at Chillicothe Mountain in Utah by a war party of Snakes and Shoshones. The warriors killed everybody but the Kimballs, whom the Snakes took to their mountain fastnesses along the Columbia.

The Snakes, as did many Indian tribes from the forests of the east to the mountains of the west, put prisoners they intended to spare through a grim gauntlet in which many died. In the Snake village women and children, armed with knives, rocks, and tomahawks formed two vindictive lines facing one another. Kimball was told to run between the lines so that the screaming women and children could cut and hack at him. Racing the cruel path as his wife looked on helplessly, he some how arrived at the far end, bloody and beaten.

When the Indians prepared to put his wife through the same ordeal, he demanded the right to run again in her place. The Snakes gave this right to the brave man, and once again he ran down the gauntlet of death to safety. His bravery caused the Snakes to turn Jim Kimball over to the medicine man’s care.

After four years of tutelage, young Kimball was acclaimed a medicine man in his own right. Kimball and his wife lived with the Snakes for 15 years, when they accompanied the Indians on a foray against an army fort. During the attack they gave themselves up to a Lieutenant Wyman of the 18^th U.S. Infantry and rejoined white society.

About the time the Kimballs were returning to the white side of the frontier, a red-headed boy of 17, who was to become one of the most famous men of the old West, was forcibly crossing the frontier to the Indian side. On the farm near Winslow, Illinois where he lived, he cut Jimson weed to make poultices for injured farmyard animals. His father called him Little Doc. His father also beat him unmercifully. In 1857, he ran away, crossing the Mississippi above Dubuque on a ferry propelled by sweeps before making his way through the forests.

The boy kept himself supplied with prairie hens as he traveled with the aid of his small-caliber, muzzle-loading Hawken rifle. But he knew better than to use the rifle when a war party of Santee Sioux surrounded him suddenly. He gave up without a fight.

The Indians took him to their camp, where they threatened to burn him at the stake and then prepared to put him through the dread gauntlet of squaws and children. This was a big encampment of 500 tepees, and the bloodthirsty crowd, waiting to hack at him, stretched for a quarter of a mile. His death seemed certain; his tormentors waited.

When everything was ready, the chiefs went into a lodge and brought out a wrinkled old sachem on a litter and put him in a place of honor from where he could see the white youth die. This ancient was Chief Red Wing, then almost 100 years old. He roused himself and stared at the boy.

"Paleface boy, why did you come to our land, riding a pony and carrying a fire stick?" he inquired in surprising English.

"I came here from the country of Illinois. My great-grandfather was given this land by the Indians. I am a hunter. My name is Carver."

The sachem tried to get to his feet but fell back as the women and children screamed and pounded on the ground with their sticks for the death of the captive. The old chief reached out and felt the boy’s face, seeking to corroborate with his fingers the profile wavering before his failing eyes.

"It is Carver! Jonathan Carver!" he cried.

Jonathan Carver, descendant of the Governor Carver of Mayflower fame, had led an early expedition across the Mississippi. Possessed of remarkable qualities of manhood, Carver had captured the imagination and friendship of the Sioux. On the riverfront in St. Paul people still visit a cavern in which he met with Sioux chiefs and was given a tremendous grant of land. U.S. courts later declared against the claims of the Carver descendants to the land, but at that dramatic moment in the camp of the Santee Sioux it was this "right to the land" that saved the life of Jonathan’s great-grandson.

"I was a young one of 10 summers when my father, Red Wing, made his sign of the snake on the paper for Carver," said the sachem. He watched as warriors slit open veins in the forearms of the boy and of his own sons placing the bleeding openings together. The white boy was now bloodbrother to his sons and a member of the tribe.

In the next three years young Carver helped the Indians make pipes at Pipestone and hunted for the tribe. He became such an uncanny shot with his "spirit gun," as the Sioux called his Hawken, that, if in the dark of night a friend knocked a stick on a tree, he could aim at the sound and hit the stick without fail. He also learned Indian medicine, and he nursed sick children with such care that he soon became more in demand as a medicine man than the medicine man himself.

In later life Carver maintained that the Sioux drowned their medicine man and put him in his place. Most likely, the Sioux executed their medicine man for failing to make cures—a fate which generally awaited ineffective medicine men from de Vaca to the close of the frontier. In any case, he watched as warriors took the old medicine man to the river and held him under until he was dead.

Carver stayed with the Indians, although whites called him "that renegade boy." Then in 1860, when the Sioux began to bring in white scalps and were preparing for a big attack on the settlements, he placed his medicine man’s regalia against the cheers lodge, put his Hawken rifle on top, and rode away to Kansas, where he met up with another young Illinoisan, James Butler Hickok. Wild Bill Hickok, greatest pistol shot of the West, and Doc Carver, greatest rifle shot, became buffalo-hunting, gun-toting frontier friends.

Alexander Henry, John Dunlap, Basil Greenwood, and legendary Doc Carver—most of the white medicine man—discarded the mumbo jumbo that went with Indian medicine. But there was much they found useful, too. They learned how to combat rheumatism with heat, compresses, and counterirritants. They put rheumatic patients in tepees and poured water on redhot stones to give them steam baths. To help a wound drain, they filled it with bark and applied balsam to foster granulation.

More than 60 of the herbs derived by Indian medicine men from the forest are presently listed in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, although many are used for purposes other than those the Indians had in mind. Labelia, for example, was employed by the Indians to relieve asthma. Modern medicine largely uses it to cure an individual of a desire to smoke tobacco, which ironically, was introduced to the whites by the Indians.

The buckeye nut was so effective for diarrhea that Dr. Ephraim McDowell of Danville, Kentucky, one of the greatest of all frontier doctors used it on patients when he ran out of opium. Indian medicine men made a poultice for wounds from dogwood, simmered the small paleblue flowers of the flax weed and gave the fluid for asthma and coughs. The mayapple was a strong cathartic; a decoction of milkweed roots was a specific for dysentery and an emetic; the pith of sassafras shoots, steeped in cold water, made a good eyewash; tobacco leaves, steeped in bear grease, were fine for swellings and skin disease.

A white Indian medicine man, who might wear buffalo horns and an animal skin among the Indians and a top hat and frock coat when he practiced in the settlements, was much in demand by white families on the frontier. Pioneers reasoned that Indian doctors knew the herbs of the woods better than the graduates of an Eastern medical school. This conviction was so widespread that all kinds of bogus "yarb and root" doctors appeared, each claiming to have lived with the Indians. Western printing presses spewed out books such as Nature’s Method of Curing and Preventing Disease According to the Indians and The Indian Doctor’s Receipt Book.

Some regular doctors became so convinced that the Indian medicine men had effective cures to offer that they voluntarily went to live with the tribes in order to study medicine. Dr. Gideon Lincecum, who himself suffered from heart trouble, was distressed that so many of his patients died. He went to old Eliche Chito, a Choctaw medicine man, and persuaded him to teach him his skills. The Indian required him to fast for 12 days atop a black rock bluff. He finally agreed to teach him so that he could write down his knowledge. Doctor Linecum was to pay 50 cents a day and hunt game for the medicine man.

In this wilderness medical school, Eliche Chito took his pupil through the forest to gather medicinal plants, and tell of the soil where they grew, the right season in which they should be taken, what their use was, and with what other herbs they should be combined. Linecum wrote everything down. Finally, he read the paper back to the Indian so that he could correct any errors.

"How strange it is," said the old medicine man, "that this small bundle of paper contains all the knowledge I ever possessed that is really of any account."

Linecum gave the Indian $21. The old man looked at it a moment and handed him back $10.

"You are young and will need this more than I shall," he said.

Doctor Lincecum practiced in Texas and became revered for his skill. He was also remembered generations later because he played the violin at ranch parties.

During the last decades of the frontier when the Apaches were scourging the Southwest, one of the most poignant captives was taken—a captive who crossed the frontier from one culture to another to become a great doctor, an Indian captive who lived among the whites as John Dunlap and Basil Greenwood lived among the Indians. His name was Wassaja, and he was a six-year-old Apache boy. A Pima took him prisoner in 1871 and tortured him until he was bored. Then he brought the agonized child to Florence, Arizona, where he offered to trade him to the whites for six horses. There was no offer from the miners and cowpunchers, for who would want to buy a straggle-haired Indian boy?

"Two horses and a bottle of whiskey," begged the Pima.

There were no buyers among the settlers, who hated Apaches with a hatred born of guerrilla warfare. Carlos Gentile was an itinerant Italian photographer who drove his wagon filled with tintype equipment over western trails from frontier town to frontier town. At that moment he clattered down the dusty street and reined in his mules to watch the strange scene. He watched the little Apache, bravely trying to stand erect among his enemies. Carlos was a lonely man without a family.

"I have just 30 silver dollars," he said. "I will pay that for him."

The sale was made. Gentile placed a wooden tub in the middle of the street and bathed his purchase with soap and water. Then he put a white boy’s clothes on him and had the town priest baptize him Carlos Montezuma.

The photographer and his small assistant were familiar figures in western towns. Then they vanished. Gentile had discovered that his Indian son was intelligent and he determined to give him a good education. He took him east, where he put the youth through the University of Illinois, from which he was graduated cum laude, and through the Chicago Medical College, where he was given an M.D. degree.

"If I, who was a savage Apache Indian, have proved my worth in the white man’s world, then I am proof that all Indians could do so," said Dr. Carlos Montezuma. He took a job at the Dakota Indian Agency, but was discharged when he attacked the corruption of the U.S. Indian Bureau. After returning to Chicago, he rose to the top of the medical profession. Wealthy women, taken with his dark good looks, would accept no doctor but Montezuma. He married a beautiful Hungarian woman. Rich and renowned, he went back to Arizona to persuade the Apaches, now settled on reservations, to try to better their way of life.

"I am one of you," he cried at the tribal councils. "What I have done, any Apache can do."

His people laughed at him. They called him Dr. Tom Tom because he was always talking—just as a white man always talks. He was a white man beneath his copper skin. He was an Indian no longer. Carlos Montezurna went to Washington hoping that politicians would help him find ways for Indians to advance themselves within their own cultural patterns. Again, he met only laughter until one day Theodore Roosevelt asked him to the White House. President Roosevelt listened to the intense Indian and appointed him head of the Indian Bureau.

Ironically, Doctor Montezuma fell ill. He spit blood. He knew at once that he was suffering from tuberculosis and that his condition was advanced. With an Indian’s resignation to fate, he left Washington and started west. At Chicago he told his wife to pack their things and follow him to Arizona. Then he climbed aboard what, after all these years, he still felt was the white man’s train, to be carried westward to his homeland. When the train arrived in Phoenix, he hired a carriage and drove into the desert.

Alone on the mesquite wastes where road runners raced, gila monster basked and the giant saguaro raised its supplicant arms to the burnished sun he built an Apache wickiup of reeds and limbs. He stripped off his white man’s clothing. This Indian, who had spent most of his life on the white side of the frontier, wrapped himself in a blanket and lay down in his wickiup to die, alone on the desert on the Indian side of the frontier.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was adapted from the forthcoming book Doctors on the Frontier, by Richard Dunlop, to be published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., 575 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York.