Mary Sarah Forrest and Peter Luke Forrest were born on October 11, 1870. While Elizabeth generally cooperated with Harvey and Dodd, she was a strong-willed woman and thought she knew her body well enough to know that complete bed rest was not necessary. Dodd knew from her horse riding and mountain climbing exploits that she was aware of her limits, and he and Harvey both soon realized that she was probably a better judge of her condition then either of them were. She would get up to prepare meals for Dodd, but took time to rest in morning and afternoon. She was not being stubborn, simply logical. The twins and Elizabeth came through the birth strong and healthy.
Dodd found that he was definitely a Forrest when it came to fathering. He was extremely proud of them, and took great joy in cuddling and otherwise helping with the care of the babies. Elizabeth, too, found herself to be of the doting kind. Cuddling her babies put her in an absolute state of bliss. Both parents were aware, however, that these were people, not toys, and in order to assure the children of happy, productive lives they had to be treated as such. It was hard, and Dodd and Elizabeth both struggled to be objective in their parenting.
Pete insisted that his family go to Carson City as soon as the wire had been received. He loved his parents deeply, but he could not explain his feeling for Dodd any more than Dodd could explain his feeling for the boy. Pete loved Dodd and he had learned to love Elizabeth. These babies were just more of Dodd and Elizabeth to love. As they grew and Pete got to know them, they would be loved for themselves, but for now they were extensions of Dodd and Elizabeth.
Although Pete knew the biology involved, he had a sense of ownership. Those children were as much his as Dodd’s and Elizabeth’s. He held and cuddled them. He wanted to help bathe and learn to change them and he did become quite proficient. He felt such a responsibility for them that when it came time, he didn’t want to go home. He gave special instructions, especially regarding his namesake, Peter, to ensure that the children were properly cared for. His fatherly-brotherly concerns amused Dodd and Elizabeth, but they were graciously received so as not to belittle or embarrass the boy.
Pete had brought with him a secret ulterior motive for wanting to learn to care for the babies. The joy provided by the twins was not to be the only joy the Forrest family was to experience just then. Libby had not come with Jared and the boys, and Jared, with cautious pride, announced that other joy. Libby was pregnant and halfway through her seventh month, much longer than she had carried any of her others. They had said nothing to the family because of her past history but there was now cautious optimism. On the advice of her doctor she did not make the trip. Her past history made that a logical decision.
Pete and Ervie had been told only when their mother’s appearance no longer allowed her condition to be kept from them. They had not been told sooner to avoid the disappointment they would feel should she again miscarry.
They had, however, been told of the brothers and sisters who had not grown inside their mother long enough to live outside her. Pete was sure that had they lived, he would not know the love and security that were now his. He loved those babies and often visited their tiny graves. In his mind, they had laid down their lives so that he and Ervie could have a family. This baby would be a living connection to them, a touchable, palpable recipient of the love he had for all of them.
Life quickly settled into a joyous routine for Dodd and Elizabeth. Both loved their roles as parents, and while Elizabeth was still used as a legal consultant by Pick and Josh, her real interest and love now was her home, her husband and her children. Dodd, whose yearning to know more of his science never waned, found the foibles of medical life much less frustrating. Home and family had done for him what he was sure they would.
Dodd’s pride in his children grew with them. By the time the twins were two years old, they had been joined by a new sister, Emilia Elizabeth, and within a year and a half, that baby had a new little brother, Matthew Jerod. Elizabeth met her domestic responsibilities as she had always met life. Things occasionally became chaotic with so many young children but Elizabeth was just as calm and efficient a mother as she had been a lawyer. She did hire out her laundry and house cleaning, and occasionally help with the children if one of them or she herself were ill, but there was no nanny. They were Elizabeth’s children and she wanted to do for them. The home of Doctor and Mrs. Forrest was a busy, noisy, happy, loving place.
There was some mild chagrin among the Forrest sisters-in-law when Libby delivered a fine, healthy boy, but there was none in the Jared Forrest home. Libby agreed that it would have been nice to have a girl, but God had allowed her to know the exhilaration of the love of a child with her older sons. Now He had given her the wonder of having actually given birth to a new life. Jared and the older boys wanted only a healthy new life, and Heinrick Luke was the joy of their lives. The baby had been named after his two grandfathers. Some thought had been given to anglicizing Libby’s German immigrant father’s name to Henry but they stuck with the original. As the child grew, however, he became, Hank.
The sisters-in-laws’ desire that Libby’s family contain both sexes was satisfied two years later. The little girl could only have one name. It was by the grace of God that Libby had her older sons and that same grace had allowed her to experience the joy of giving birth. Grace Joy was the only possible appropriate name for the beautifully healthy little girl.
Pete was almost sixteen when Grace was born. He’d had his home and his parents for more than five years but had not forgotten where he might have been if not for the love of his parents and Dodd. He was a typical adolescent but he retained his tender heart and his wonder at the blessings that were his. Hank and Grace had not robbed Ervin and him of love. They had provided more of it, made it more understandable, and made it a little more work but a lot more fun.
After the birth of the twins, Dodd began to take more seriously Harvey’s occasionally expressed thought that “Someday, we ought to build a hospital.” Much time was wasted traveling to the homes of very ill patients, sometimes several times a day. Dodd had not been opposed to the building of the hospital but even though they wasted time, those drives to patients’ homes were a solace to Dodd, a time to rest and not have to grapple with those haunting ambiguities of his profession.
Dodd now realized that Harvey’s comments were more than mere musing. It was home and children that caused Dodd to understand that. Driving those long distances made for very long days and cut way back on family time. Before his children had been born, Dodd would not have thought Harvey selfish to want more time for family but he would not have understood it as he did now. Dodd’s need to spend time with his family made a hospital a very logical thing. He now had two responsibilities: his home and his patients. Responsible, well-thought-out decisions had to be made so that the proper amount of time was given to each.
It was Dodd who had, or had access to, the necessary money. Harvey could not have built the hospital alone, but he had also never told Dodd his major reason for wanting the hospital. Harvey had suggested that the time saved might save some patient’s life and Dodd agreed with that, but Dodd also knew that families wanted to be with their loved ones when the possibility of death was eminent. Many lived rather long distances from Carson City and most could not afford to stay in a hotel. They probably would save some lives but Dodd was sure that most families would not place their loved ones in hospitals long distances from their homes.
Dodd knew that their lives would not be changed overnight, although he now agreed that a hospital should be built. It would take people time to accept a hospital, but that acceptance would come. The quicker it was built, the quicker its advantages would be understood and the quicker its acceptance.
Herbert Hatcher actually put the financing together. Within a week, commitments from several of the Forrest boys, Luke, Harvey, and Herbert himself, as well as other people of means in Carson City, assured the establishment of a fifteen bed hospital.
With a hospital came the need for nurses. Although, by now, another doctor had come to Carson City and another was on his way from the east, none had the time to help train nurses. Neither Dodd nor Harvey wanted to hire untrained people and there was some thought of abandoning the idea until the nurse problem could be solved. Dodd wrote to a hospital in St. Louis but did not get much encouragement.
Additional doctors did not immediately lessen Harvey’s or Dodd’s workload. As a matter-of-fact, for several months they seemed to increase the work. It had taken Harvey and Dodd some time to build trust, but—they found now—it was not trust in doctors, it was trust in them. Their patients were suspicious of the new young doctor and once again Dodd and Harvey were doing as much educating as doctoring. With some of their more reluctant patients it was almost like starting over. They had come to agree that Harvey and Dodd knew their doctoring but they weren’t so sure about this fancy young ’un from the east, even though he was a very good doctor. The one on his way was the son of one of Dodd’s professors at Harvard. The young man wanted the adventure of working in the west. He had wanted to go to California, to San Francisco, but all his parents knew about the west was what they had learned from Ned Buntline. They could not abide the thought of their refined, Boston-raised son at the mercy of savage Indians and ruthless outlaws. But the boy was determined.
Doctor Willis had admired Dodd. Since he could not prevent his son from leaving civilization he wrote Dodd, asking if the boy could join his practice. He at least knew the boy would have friends and protection. While it was not California, it was close enough, so, to allay his parents’ fears, Harold Willis agreed to accept Dodd’s offer. Still, his mother cried for months. The senior Doctor Willis could not convince her that Dodd was an intelligent, responsible man. As far as she was concerned, anyone not from Massachusetts was a savage. She was even suspicious of other Massachusettsites who did not live in Boston.
It was Henry Glenn who solved the nurse problem. Although Henry had left St. Louis and his wife some fifteen years before, they had never formally divorced. When she died, it was necessary for Henry to return to St. Louis to plan and attend the funeral, dispose of property, convert a trust fund he had left for his wife and see to details of other of his investments.
At the funeral, Henry became reacquainted with the daughter of a former neighbor. Ida Benson had been a nurse in the Civil War and had worked as a hospital nurse in St. Louis. Her husband had served in the Confederate army and was killed at Shiloh. They had no children, and although several years had passed, she still found it difficult to be surrounded by those things that reminded her of the two happy years they had spent together.
She had stayed in Saint Louis to care for her aging and infirm parents. Both had recently died and there was now nothing to hold her in St. Louis. Henry convinced her that she needed a change of scenery. He told her of the proposed hospital in Carson City, and Dodd and Harvey had their nurse, one with knowledge and experience. Not only could she practice at a high level of skill but she could also train others. By the time the building was complete, Ida Benson was settled in Carson City.
As with the first in any town, Carson City was excited about the dedication of its new hospital. A board had been formed, with Herbert Hatcher as president. Dodd and Harvey were members of the board, along with five other business and community leaders, including Josh Forrest. At Dodd’s insistence, the board agreed to name the facility in honor of Harvey’s dead children. The actual dedication ceremony for the Marie, Alice and Little Harvey Bloom Memorial Hospital created almost as much excitement as had Dodd’s and Elizabeth’s wedding, but no one was as moved as Harvey Bloom.
The building was a wooden, two-story structure. The ground floor included a lobby area, off which were the offices of the four doctors. Also on the ground floor were five patient rooms and an operating room. The upper floor had ten patient rooms.
Harvey knew that the hospital was to be named in honor of his children and was deeply appreciative. What he did not know was that his wife, Hannah, had given Dodd some Matthew Brady photos of Harvey’s children which Harvey had kept in his New York office. They were the only possessions which remained of Harvey’s old life. Dodd sent them to a portrait artist he had met in Boston. On dedication day, beautifully painted portraits of Marie, Alice and Little Harvey hung in the lobby. Four-year-old Susie Prater, with eager pride, pulled her daddy’s hand to the memorial area and said, “See, Daddy, our sisters and brother who are with Jesus.” Harvey contained himself, but barely.
Lost in the excitement of the hospital dedication was what had become the most exciting daily event in Carson City, the arrival of the train from Virginia City, where the Virginia and Truckee Railroad connected with a branch of the Southern Pacific. Had someone been there to see it, they would have seen a rather large man with a reddish beard and a strong Scottish brogue get off the train and wonder at the absence of anyone from whom to ask directions. His name was Gordon McDuff and he was looking for Herbert Hatcher. Just before he had left Scotland to visit his son in Chicago, he had received a letter that had his entire family in Portree, Scotland, in a state of almost frenzied excitement. His Uncle Fergus had left Portree in 1811 and had never been heard from.
Now comes this letter from someone claiming to be Fergus’s son. Gordon, of course, had been born long after Fergus left, but he—as did the rest of his family—mourned this storied uncle. As a child he had heard his father and his remaining uncles and aunts, tears flowing down their cheeks, telling stories of love and the exploits of the vanished brother. They mourned his stature, because he was by far the largest of a family of very large people. They mourned his strength. Even persons who were not members of the McDuff family still told stories of Fergus’s strength. Although Gordon knew that they had probably grown with the telling he knew that the man must have been unusually powerful. They mourned his gentle nature but most of all, they mourned the man.
A strong believer in the intervention of God into the lives of men, Gordon now felt that he was on a divine mission. It had to have been God. The timing was too perfect for it to have been mere chance.
He walked some distance toward what had to be the center of town before he understood the reason for the abandoned train station. He saw a large crowd of people and he heard a man making a speech. Gordon walked toward the crowd, his eyes searching for anyone who looked Indian and when they fell on a lad of about thirteen he walked up to the boy and said, “Aye, laddie, wa be ye name?”
A startled Bruce looked at the man with awe and fear. The man sounded exactly like his father. He even looked like his father. Bruce’s first flickering thought was that it was his father’s ghost, but he just as quickly knew that could not be. Although the man was big, he was not nearly as big as Fergus, and although his mother believed in them, Bruce had long since accepted his father’s thinking on the matter of ghosts and spirits. The one thing Bear Woman could not give up from her childhood religious training was the belief in ghosts and spirits. Their discussions on the subject were the only disagreements Ian and Bruce had ever heard between their parents.
When he got his tongue back, Bruce answered, “Bruce McDuff, sir”.
Gordon McDuff wrapped his arms around the boy and lifted him from the ground in a tremendous bear hug. Bruce felt his face against the man’s and felt tears as he heard the man thanking God before he broke into uncontrollable sobs. Sarah Hatcher’s heart sank. She knew that this stranger was a relative who had come to take her ‘sons’ from her.
It was two days before the boys agreed to return to Scotland with Gordon. It was another full week before they were willing to leave. They had too many friends and, now, loved ones, to whom they had to say goodbye. They had to adjust themselves to more loss, the loss of friends and their surrogate family, and to the excitement of gaining a real family. They had to adjust themselves to the fact that they might never see these loved ones and Carson City again. Ian and Bruce McDuff left Carson City with trepidation but an unexplainable yearning made it impossible for them to stay.
Dodd missed the boys far more than he would have imagined. He had gotten a promise from Gordon that Ian would go to college and he felt some of the same separation pangs for Bruce that he had felt for Pete. Josh explained the boys’ financial situation to Gordon, and he quizzed the man until he was sure of Gordon’s integrity. Josh, too, had come to love those boys and did not want them exploited. Although he was almost nineteen, David Jantz wept when he embraced his friend and said goodbye. The McDuff boys left a very large hole in Carson City.
Copyright © 2003 Gordon L. Klopfenstein