The Miners’ Doctor: The Many Battles of Mary Babcock Atwater

When Dr. Mary Babcock first arrived in Montana in 1891 to take up her unprecedented position as company doctor to the gold miners there, the two year old state was at the tail end of the Gold Rush that had begun in 1858, and was little interested in pushing the boundaries of social reform. Montana had the highest concentration of millionaires per capita in the nation, and the elites intended to keep it that way, flexing their economic muscle to stifle anything that might shake their chokehold on the state’s economy, including and perhaps especially anything that smacked of more autonomy for women, whom they were convinced would could consistently vote against the interests of business if given suffrage.

In the years to come Babcock, by her example and through the force of her will, would become a key actor in dragging Montana towards a less corrupt, more egalitarian future, but here in 1891 she was simply looking for a job that paid enough to keep her fed and housed, and slowly pay off her debts back East. She was, in fact, a woman on the run from her past. She had been forced into maturity early with the death of her father when she was sixteen, which put her firmly in charge of the well-being of her younger siblings. She took up teaching to put food on the table, and married a medical student named Frank Moore who appeared to support Mary’s ambitions of practicing medicine. He even suggested they move from Iowa to Illinois so that she could take advantage of the colleges there that were open to women, and in 1885 Mary (or Mollie as she was generally known) matriculated at the Women’s Hospital Medical College of Chicago, graduating in 1887.

And that is when the troubles began. Though Frank was theoretically in favor of women’s medical education, in the case of Mollie it soon became apparent that he thought of her less as his medical equal, and more as a person whose training would allow her to better serve as his unpaid assistant. The couple moved to Louisiana chasing a potentially lucrative career for Frank, and when that didn’t work they moved again to their hometown of Osage, Iowa, moving in with Frank’s mother, who was set firmly against Mollie’s desire to get paid for her work and to be treated as a co-equal in Frank’s practice. 

It soon became apparent to Mollie that Frank would never accept her as a colleague, and would continue to pocket the fees of the patients that were treated primarily by her, giving her spending money only as she asked for it. Between her tensions with her mother-in-law and Frank’s intransigence, Mollie came to believe that her situation would never truly improve, and one fateful day, she made the decision to leave town, to strike out West for some unknown medical future to be faced alone. She gathered her things, and got on a train for Salt Lake City, where she had a friend who had set up a reasonably thriving practice.

The problem, however, was that Mollie was not a Mormon, nor did she have any desire to become one, and that significantly lessened her potential business and social circle in the Salt Lake City of that era. For a year she struggled it out, living off the dwindling capital of a loan given to her by one of her patients shortly before she left Iowa. Frank arrived in town, but no reconciliation was had. Then, just as it seemed that she would have to return to Iowa with her tail between her legs, an opportunity arose that took all of her pluck and boldness to seize. Her doctor friend informed her that an acquaintance who managed a series of gold mines up in Montana was looking for a new company doctor to tend the miners there who could also manage the difficult pregnancy of his wife. 

Mollie was intrigued by the job, and the daring implausibility of it as the future occupation of a woman divorcee from Out East. She attended a social gathering hosted by the manager, J. Henry Longmaid, and when the conversation turned to the new position which had opened up, she declared that she had just the person in mind for the job, and would send them by Longmaid’s office later for an interview, of course neglecting to mention that that person was herself. She then arrived at the designated time, armed to the teeth with patient testimonials and her medical certifications, assuring him that there was nothing she would have to do at the mines that she had not done before in Frank’s practice. 

Between her own forceful personality and the pressure applied by his wife to have a woman doctor attending her for the birth of her child, Longmaid eventually decided to take the gamble and hire her. She boarded the train again, this time in triumph, as she threaded her way north to Bannack, Montana, the site of a major gold rush in 1862 which was definitely on the downside of its trajectory by the time Mollie arrived in 1891, and which is a historical ghost town today. She soon found herself having to adapt to the realities of mining town life, and particularly to the rampant alcoholism that formed the core of the miners’ recreational lives. Treating wounds that the miners received as a result of their drinking and the brawling that accompanied it, she soon found herself drawn also into the orbit of the women in their lives - of the wives condemned to serial pregnancy in an age when the Comstock Laws, which Mollie vociferously opposed, criminalized the act of informing women about contraception options, and of the prostitutes who were subjected to any and all manners of violence, while law enforcement steadily looked the other way. 

To Mollie, her encounters with the women of Bannack spelled out to her how truly desperate the situation of women in Montana was. She was fortunate to have an education that provided her with a livelihood of her own, and a consequent buffer from the drunkenness and violent lustiness of the male population, but most were not so lucky, and had no ability to pass legislation that might improve their lot. She decided to devote herself to the cause of women’s suffrage in Montana, a cause which would provide mostly frustration in the decades to come as the state’s businessmen regularly combined to defeat the suffrage bills that Mollie and the associations she ran managed to place before the state Congress. People in the liquor business were concerned that women, once allowed to vote, would pass statewide prohibition, while the millionaires of the mining industry worried that women, guided by their emotions and empathy, would side with labor and against them.

Though persistently foiled in her large scale attempts to compel the state to recognize the validity of women’s claim to the vote, Mollie had more success in bringing order to the state’s medical structure, acting as a driving force behind the creation of Montana’s only specialized hospital for patients suffering from tuberculosis, while working for a wider publication and teaching of the insights of germ theory to push for better sanitation and public health resources in order to potentially avoid the waves of disease which regularly ravaged especially the poorer populations of the state. Her most heroic hour as a public health crusader came with the arrival of the great Spanish Influenza pandemic to Montana. Though she was in her sixties at the time, she volunteered to run the influenza hospital at Whitefish, exposing herself and the few brave volunteer nurses she could get to the disease, and miraculously by the end of the first waves, only twenty seven had died as a result of the disease in the town and its environs, and none in the hospital that she ran. 

Prior to her Influenza heroism, Mollie Babcock had re-married, to an accountant by the name of Ben Atwater who supported her in all of her medical endeavors, and agreed with her that they shouldn’t have any children so that she could continue her practice, but as it happened, a daughter was born anyway, which spelled an effective end to Mollie’s medical career, as she wound down her private practice and threw herself more into issues of public health and suffrage. She lived to see the passage of the 19th Amendment, in 1919, some three decades after she had started campaigning for it. Ben died in 1931, and Mollie, having nothing left to hold her to Montana, moved to California to be nearer to her daughter, where she lived for the next ten years, until her death in 1941 at the age of 82. 

Mollie was not the first woman to practice medicine in Montana - Maria Dean and Katherine Holden had both joined the relatively egalitarian Montana Medical Association before she had arrived in the state - but over the years her presence has loomed ever larger, as an individual who shunned convention when it restricted the horizons of her life, and found a place at last where the opportunities were of the same scale as her own character and determination, where talent counted for more than tradition, and personality more than being of an established family. Hospitals rose from the bare Earth, and political associations as well, because Mollie Babcock took a chance and threw herself into her work of ever-increasing breadth at Bannack, then Marysville, then finally at Helena the state capital, and in Whitefish there are likely families there still who owe their existence to her superhuman later life efforts to put herself and her knowledge between their ancestors and the Spanish Influenza. She saved lives, and changed minds, and made of her life the towering thesis that others could point to when arguing for the expansion of women’s role in the public sphere, allowing her state to carve out a better and broader future, and her country with it. 

FURTHER READING: Mari Graña’s Pioneer Doctor: The Story of a Woman’s Work (2005) is the main source for Babcock Atwater’s life and work. Graña is a descendent of Mollie’s who did the long work of tracking down the letters and existent public documents that tell Mollie’s story, and her book is a compelling blend of the through-line of Mollie’s life and the large scale issues of women’s health and political restrictions that formed the boundaries of women’s lives in the West during the closing years of the 19th century.