[music playing] Doc Susie Anderson was
never the inspiration for "Dr. Quinn, Medicine
Woman," but she might as well have been. Everyone in Fraser
called her Doc Susie. She was just a fixture here. I think Doc Susie holds a
special place in Colorado history, because she was one
of the pioneering doctors. When she had to deal with
railroaders and the timber workers, she could be tough. She was probably
the most responsible medical practitioner
that anybody in trouble could turn to here. She was it. Doc Susie practiced for
half a century really. That shows her dedication,
her willingness to help people and
her love of medicine. She was a pioneer in the
field and, of course, the adored her for it. This program was generously
made possible by by the History Colorado
State Historical Fund. Supporting projects
throughout the state to preserve protect
and interpret Colorado's architectural and archeological
treasures. History Colorado
State Historical Fund, create the future,
honor the past. With support from the
Denver Public Library History Colorado and the Colorado Office
of Film, Television and Media With additional funding
and support from these fine organizations and viewers like you.
from thesThank you.anizations and viewers like you.
Thank you. [music playing] [music playing] [music playing] [music playing] At the start of
the 20th century, good health care was
difficult to find no matter where you were. But it was an exceptional
challenge in the Rocky Mountain west. Though a woman
doctor wasn't rare, as the profession was
associated with caregivers, a good doctor was hard to find. Medicine back in
the end of the 1800s was very different than
it is today obviously. As a matter of fact,
most of modern medicine has been created
since World War II. And by the time
we got to 1900, we entered a more
scientific kind of age. And that was when Doc Susie
was going to medical school. Susan Anderson was born
in Indiana in 1870. Her parents,
Midwestern, divorced. She and her brother end up
having to rely on each other. I don't think there
was anybody in life that Susan Anderson loved
more than her brother John. John meant everything to her. And because they didn't
have a mother, in many ways I suspect that Susan became
John's surrogate mother and helped raise him as
much as their father did. Susan was a very,
very bright child. She loved to learn. From a very young
age she was reading and reading and reading. Her father did
have the good sense to know he had a very
talented daughter. "What Can Women Do?" I think that was a book
that she cherished. It was given to her in
1885 by her teacher. It was a book that
described professions that women could belong to,
other than just homemaker. And one of the
chapters was physician. I have a feeling that
was inspiring for her. When we look at women
as doctors around 1900, this was still a
fairly new thing. Women were not encouraged
to go into medical practice. They were allowed to be nurses. They were allowed, in some
cases, to be midwives. The first woman to receive a
medical degree in the United States was Elizabeth Blackwell,
who received hers in New York in 1849. When Elizabeth Blackwell
began her classes, she was completely ostracized. And it wasn't until she
began to prove herself, she ended up graduating
in the top of her class, became an extremely
well-respected physician, that the doors began
to open a little bit. By about 1900, about 25% of the
medical students were women. Although women became doctors,
it wasn't expected of women to pursue this practice. Susan Anderson
completed medical school at the end of the
19th century, just as news of rich gold
discoveries in Cripple Creek spread throughout the country. The Anderson family
packed up and headed west. And newly minted Dr. Anderson,
went along with them, opening her first
doctor's office in the busy,
bustling mining camp. Cripple Creek is in the
middle of a massive gold rush. And Doc Susie's father decides
he's going to cash in on it. She grew to maturity in this
very rough and tumble mining camp, where these miners
worked hard and played hard. Dr. Anderson sets up
shop in Cripple Creek. But the truth is, there were a
lot of doctors in Cripple Creek already, and she
was finding that she wasn't very successful. And miners are a very
superstitious people. They have a problem with
having women around mines, because they're bad luck. They're going to
cause a cave-in. In fact, most
miners would prefer to go to a male doctor
than a female doctor. There was one time that
she got a lot of attention in her career at Cripple Creek. A young miner injured his arm. When Dr. Susan Anderson was
responding to the emergency, there was another doctor that
wanted to amputate the arm. At the time,
amputation was still being used as a cure for
damage to particularly the extremities. There were a couple
of reasons for this. Perhaps on a crushed arm,
there wasn't the technology to be able to put that back
together like there is today. The other major reason, and
one that's more important, was infection. So the idea behind
amputation was take the limb off, take all
of possibly infected area away with it. Susan Anderson would
not hear of that. She was convinced that
she could save the arm. That an amputation
was very unnecessary. You can imagine the reaction
from the other miners, not to mention the one miner
himself that had his arm saved. There's this lady doc that
was able to successfully treat one of the miners and
have a very good outcome. So that enhanced her reputation. As Dr. Anderson was building
up her career in Cripple Creek, she also became
involved with a fella. She fell in love with a young man, who's only
known in her diaries as WR. And WR and Susan
Anderson became engaged. But WR left Anderson
at the altar, literally abandoned
her on her wedding day. It's believed that Susan's
father didn't care for the guy. So he manipulated him into
leaving Susan at the altar. And within just a
few days of that, her brother became very ill with
pneumonia and died soon after. So she lost probably
the two men, who at that point in her
life, meant the most to her. Her fiance and then her
beloved brother, John. When Susan was young,
she and her father got along really well. But as Susan became older,
the tension between them became more and more palpable. To the point where Susan and her
father really became estranged. Her father seems, this
is a technical term I guess you could
say, her father seems to have been a
jerk some of the time. And so she left
Cripple Creek, not only because her practice was failing
and because of the heartbreak she had experienced there,
but she really no longer felt welcome in her own family. There was this brief
interlude between her journeys in the west. And she goes out east. After that brief time, Susan
Anderson returns to Colorado and she comes to Denver
and starts a practice again. But the competition
in Denver is far worse than it was in Cripple Creek. Ultimately, she
moved to Greeley, where again, she couldn't
find work as a doctor. And out of desperation, turned
to nursing as a profession. Think about that for a moment. This is a woman who
was trained in one of the best state
medical colleges in the country at the time. And yet, because of
her gender, she's relegated to changing bedpans,
taking temperatures, prepping patients. But then something else
happens that's even harder, and she gets tuberculosis. Before antibiotics
were developed, tuberculosis was one of
the very common diseases. And at the time, there's
no way to cure it. So her doctors felt
that the best thing was a good course of rest
and a warm, sunny climate. In the late 19th and early
20th century, tens of thousands of tuberculosis patients
moved to Colorado. They were told by
their physicians that coming to Colorado was
a sure cure for tuberculosis. Dr. Susan Anderson decides she
needs to move to the mountains and either die or survive. Doc Susie, small, frail
and coughing up blood, boarded a train to Fraser with
all of her worldly possessions and her fluffy white dog. The journey took her over
the Continental Divide, as construction of
the Moffat Tunnel would not begin for
another 16 years. After arriving in the
small mountain town, Doc Susie took up
residence in a tiny shack next to the railroad
tracks and hoped the champagne of
atmospheres would end her battle with consumption. Fraser, Colorado is a
beautiful, beautiful place. It's in this gorgeous
inter-mountain valley in Colorado, but it is
in every way, remote. Grand County considers itself
the gateway to the northwest Colorado. It's a high altitude valley
surrounded by higher mountains. You have to cross over
10,000-plus-foot passes in order to get in here. Fraser, Colorado has
always had a reputation as one of the cold
spots in the nation. They get tremendous
storms up there. The snow is deep. The winters are extremely cold. And I'm not sure
that I would have cared to live there myself. When Doc Susie comes
in here in 1907, that is after the railroad. You've got a fairly large
population in Fraser. It boomed to 350 people, if you
can believe that that's a boom. She would spend a lot of
her time sleeping outdoors under piles and piles of
blankets in the cold Fraser air, with the idea of
restoring her health. She exercised, she was
vigorous, and she walked a lot and she got quite fit. She was about as
healthy as anybody here. When Susan came to
Fraser, she wasn't looking to hang up
her shingle and resume her medical practice. And at first, she got a job
working in a general store and kept the fact that she was a
doctor more or less to herself. Well, one day she's
working and somehow word gets out that maybe this
Susan Anderson is a physician. This rancher comes
running into the store and he's pleading
with her to save Dave. Dave is injured, please
help me save Dave. And when she got there, she
realized that Dave wasn't another cowboy, he was a horse. But he was all that this cowboy
had and he had become entangled in barbed wire and
in his thrashing, had cut himself deeply. And so Susan Anderson
and the cowboy very carefully began
removing the barbed wire, cleaning out all of the
wounds and then stitching Dave's wounds. And so Susie's secret was out. She goes from being Susan to Dr.
Anderson over an injured horse. As a woman physician,
she was automatically more comfortable
with female patients. Ranchers' wives, women
in the community, prostitutes would
come to Doc Susie with what they delicately
called feminine complaints, reproductive issues,
pregnancy, child-birthing. It was really the ranch wives
and the ranch women who kind of broke the ice for Doc Susie Being a doctor out in
the west at that time was typically a rural practice. Either the doctor went
to the patient or else the patient would
come into his office. So if you had a
patient 30 miles away. It may take you four
hours to get there. Treat the patient and then
another four hours coming back. She would walk for
many, many miles to take care of a patient,
through the snow and rain and sunshine. Susan Anderson did not own a
horse, she does not own a car, she walked or she
snowshoed or she skied. When it was 50 below
she dressed warm, because sometimes she walked
out to ranches to treat people. And she'd have her wool
stockings and a couple of petticoats and heavy dress
and a wool coat, and always a hat. You get to see who everybody is. And you get to see
loggers, and you get to see storekeepers,
who are subject to pneumonia. In a mountain town
in the winter there's no refuge from
a respiratory infection going poorly. She was very well known for
her pneumonia treatment. Ralph Phillips
and his wife Ruth, they recall their
treatment for pneumonia. She would put you
in boiling water. And Ralph Phillips
would say, Doc Susie was literally cooking me. All the windows were
opened up, so that the air could blow through. When the fever would go away,
she take you out and then tenderly tuck you into
bed and make you warm. We are really used to a
different sense of cleanliness. By about the early 1900s,
people realized that infection was being caused by germs. But all I could do
was really wash it out with some sort of
antiseptic substance until antibiotics
were developed. Doc Susie was a
hawk for sanitation. She believed strongly
in cleanliness as a way to prevent these
endemic diseases, which would sweep through
mountain communities. In many ways, she
appointed herself as the health officer
of the community. And she would teach people
on how to live cleaner. She insisted on
scrubbing her hands before every medical inspection,
before she stitched up wounds. Many people died of
infection, because they were infected by the physician
that was attending to them. She boiled her
instruments to make sure that they were all sterile. She put on a large apron, and
then she would tie her hair up in a turban to keep the hair
from stringing out and perhaps contaminating the medical arena. She didn't have the
facilities available to her in Fraser that a doctor in the
city would have had available. If somebody was very badly
injured in a place like Fraser, there weren't a lot of options. Doc Susie would have to take
some of the severe patients to Denver by rail. On at least one, case
she diagnosed a young boy with a case of appendicitis. And she knew that
there was nothing that she could do for him
in this remote location. She told the boy's
parents that he needed to go to
Denver for surgery, but neither of the
hardworking parents could accompany the boy. Doc Susie got him on the
train, got him over the pass into Denver. Rumor goes that when she
arrived at the hospital, this young physician refused to
admit the patient because they have to be admitted by
a certified physician. Doc Susie, wearing
her mountain clothing, probably looked pretty
ratty to this guy. Did not at all think that she
could possibly be a doctor. Well, immediately
he was admonished by a doctor friend of Doc
Susie's at the hospital, and immediately admitted
the patient to surgery. A burst appendix in a place
like Fraser at the time was a death sentence. But Doc Susie stuck
with her patient and insisted that he
receive the proper care, even if that care was on the
other side of the mountain. And as a result of that,
the young boy lived. [train whistle] One of the dangers of
living in a rural community around the turn
of the century is that there could be a lot
of industrial accidents. Where Doc Susie was, there was a
lot of logging and railroading, of course. And both of these were subject
to all sorts of accidents. Doc Susie would
be on call to help these lumberjacks with their
strains and bumps and bruises and gashes and broken bones. Doc Susie was kind of revered
by the loggers in Fraser, these giant Swedish loggers. I mean, these guys were big
guys working in the forest. It must have been something else
to be in one of these lumber camps when Doc Susie arrived to
look at an injured lumberjack, or maybe take care of one
of the lumberjack's wives or even their children. Doc Susie was about 5' 1". Not a real sturdy person,
but not frail either. But she's so sure of herself. These big burly
lumberjacks, they kind of cowered away from her,
that they were so impressed by her knowledge
and her expertise and really, her self-confidence. Doc Susie lived in Fraser. At first she lived in kind of a
shack near the railroad tracks. She had a little
office in there, but it was pretty cramped. And then the railroad was
expanding its right of way. And so it was going
to take out her shack. So Doc Susie had to find
another place to live. But Doc Susie didn't
have a lot of money. In providing medical
services for a local rancher, she arranged a trade. He gave Doc Susie
his barn for her to reconvert into a new house. The problem was, the
barn was on a ranch relatively far away from Fraser. The story goes, is that
she recruited lumberjacks to come out and disassemble
the barn and remove it all the way into Fraser. Because she was very meticulous. She labeled all the logs
as to how to re-erect it. Then mostly Swedish
loggers came out and they tore down the barn,
moved all the logs into Fraser and put it back up according
to the specifications that Doc Susie had given them. She didn't buy much
food at the store because she would go
to different families. They never knew
when she was coming, but they'd always set a
place for her, if she came. A lot of these people
didn't pay her. They could pay her. So I think that was her way
of maybe getting repaid. Doc Susie arrived in Fraser
alone with a broken heart from her unlucky romantic
experiences in Cripple Creek. Doc Susie, when
she first arrived in Fraser, you can imagine,
was a pretty good catch. She was smart,
she was beautiful, she was well-educated, she
had a promising profession. And there were a lot
of unattached men. As someone who had gone to
the University of Michigan, it is isolation. And it is a shortage of
the kind of conversations to be with people who were
just unlikely to join her in that, what's new, what's
new in medical thinking. What are they thinking
about politics? What are they thinking
about Theodore Roosevelt? Doc Susie tended to gravitate
towards the managers, the white collar workers. People who were on her
professional and maybe intellectual plane. And as a result of that,
she started a relationship with a man who managed
one of the lumber camps. And it went fairly
well for a while, until Susie learned that
he was already married. And that he had been
leading her along. It's kind of typical of her
star-crossed romantic life. As the years went on, Susie
remained an integral part of Grand County. She served for a time
as a county coroner to make ends meet. And she made her voice
heard as a leading member of the community. I wouldn't say that Doc Susie
was explicitly political. However, there were some
political and social issues that meant a lot to her. And one was that the
people of Grand County received the due
credit that they were owed for the hard work and
the sacrifices that they made. The Moffat tunnel was
one political issue that meant a lot to her. That infrastructure,
people died for that. When those things are
completed, there's often a failure
in the guest list of who gets to be celebrated. Crews blasted six
miles of tunnel underneath the Continental
Divide from Rollinsville to the west portal at
today's Winter Park. This was a very
expensive endeavor that required millions
of dollars of investment. So organizations like
the "Denver Post" got involved in boosting and
soliciting investments,-- To a point where
organizations like the "Post" really began to take kind
of pride of ownership. Began to say that
this tunnel wouldn't have existed without the
advocacy of the "Denver Post." After the tunnel opened,
the "Denver Post" sponsored a special
train to go through. A bunch of people in
frock coats, top hats congratulating each other and
pounding in a golden spike. All the dignitaries that were
connected with the tunnel went on this special
excursion train. Well, Doc Susie and a few
others gathered at west portal. And as the train came
out, they held up a sign saying the "Denver Post" did
not build this tunnel, we did. And to have that
sign there mocking the manipulators of
power and more important, giving the tribute to the people
who put their lives on the line for the achievement, the
infrastructure, that's great. She wasn't pushing
for the vote, she wasn't pushing for
women's rights, she was pushing for people. Doc Susie continued to practice
into her 70s and even early 80s and when Doc Albers died,
she was the only physician remaining in Fraser. I was about five years old. My mother had a large
growth on her neck and she went to Doc Susie. And of course, I went along. We walk through the front
door and turn to the left into her office. I was so fascinated
by that table with the syringes on it
and all these doctor things and very humble, humble office. I worked at the Fraser
Market in 1948 and '49. Well, just before
closing time, she would come in and wait
for me to get off work. Then we would walk up the street
across the railroad tracks and we would chat about the
snow and people in town. In late '49 I told her I
was going to get married. And immediately she said
well, I must tell you how not to have a bushel of babies. I looked forward to her visits. Doc Susie passed away in 1960. She wished to be buried
alongside of her brother in Cripple Creek. But when they went to return
her body to Cripple Creek, the cemetery in Cripple
Creek had been so overgrown, that they couldn't
find the family plot. If you go to the Pisgah
Cemetery in Cripple Creek today, you'll find two
tombstones for Doc Susie. One next to her
brother, and another one placed by the
residents of Fraser, remembering fondly of their
country doctor who served them for so many decades. One cannot visit Fraser,
Colorado today without appreciating Doc Susie's legacy. From street signs and statues
to the towering two-story cabin that once served as a hub for
health, wellness and expert treatment, the memory of
the famous frontier doctor lives on. They still remember Doc
Susie fondly in Fraser today. She was such an important part
of the fabric of the community. To me, she's Grand County. She took care of all
the old people here. And the workers and
the railroaders. She was Grand County. Doc Susie instills
a lot of pride into Fraser and Grand County. They've been fascinated by
this strong, small woman doctor and the heart of the Rockies. The people who were doctors
around the turn of the century really had to be very
dedicated to their profession. They might be called out
in the middle of the night in a snowstorm to
travel 30 miles to attend to somebody having
a baby or a serious injury. And we have to
admire them for that. Today, women physicians
make up about 34% of the total population of
physicians in the United States. But right now as we speak,
half of the medical students who are earning their
degrees, are women. Doc Susie represents
a pioneer for what was possible for women. Yes, she had hardships. Yes, she encountered
prejudices and stereotypes. And did she let that stop her? Apparently not. But I think Doc Susie also
represents something else. She represents the extraordinary
lives of ordinary people. To live a life where you matter
in so many people's lives, and to look around
her home community and see people who lived
because of her action and her intervention,
that's a sense of achievement and meaning and
what you did with your time on the planet that
can't be diminished. I don't think Doc
Susie would have wanted to be remembered as a hero. But I think she would appreciate
the fact that her efforts made a difference in her
community and helped stitch that community together
with the same kind of talent that she used to stitch
up an open wound. [music playing]
