Just One 'Goodfellow' in Tombstone

Outside of a few articles buried in the back pages of medical journals, almost nothing has been written about one of the West's most colorful, courageous, and adventurous characters, Dr. George E. Goodfellow. In novels, movies, and television series inspired by the doctor's more famous contemporaries, the Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, the Clantons, Bat Masterson, Curly Bill Brocius and John Slaughter, Doctor Goodfellow is reduced to a one-dimensional, stock figure. He is portrayed as the tough-talking, but tender-hearted, physician who arrives to attend the fallen after the heroes have exited. The real Dr. Goodfellow was perhaps the most brilliant and aggressive surgeon to practice on the American frontier. During the 11 years he spent in Tombstone (1880-91), Goodfellow became the leading authority in the United States on gunshot wounds in the abdomen. While practicing in Tucson (1891-98), Dr. Goodfellow performed the first perineal prostatectomy in medical history, the first appendectomy in Arizona Territory, and pioneered the "outdoor cure" for tuberculosis. He published 13 articles on subjects ranging from malaria to the Gila monster; his major work on prostatectomy was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Dr. Goodfellow's impressive professional and scholarly accomplishments are only one side of his character. Basically, the doctor was a man of action, as robust and adventurous as his times. Goodfellow entered smoke-filled mine shafts and carried out unconscious men. He drove a locomotive faster than any engineer would dare. He was active in the campaign to capture Geronimo. When a major earthquake devastated Bavispe, Sonora, Mexico, Dr. Goodfellow was the first outsider to enter the area. His service as an envoy during the Spanish-American War won him a special citation.

He was a tireless physician, a scholar, a civic leader, a man of great courage and great wit, but he was no saint. Whenever he could the doctor spent his nights drinking in Tombstone's Crystal Palace. He was a frequent escort of the town's most fashionable prostitutes. One night on Allen Street, Tombstone's main street, he stuck a knife in a man named Frank White. He was sued by the United States Army because he refused to vacate or pay rent on a house the army owned in Tombstone. His colleagues considered him a tough, cocky, arrogant man.

George Goodfellow was born on December 23, 1855, in Downieville, California. His father was a mining engineer who had studied chemistry and medicine before leaving Pennsylvania for California in 1849. Although he never received a degree, Milton Goodfellow often acted as a mining company's unofficial surgeon when there were no licensed physicians in the area. He was called "doctor" all his life.

The boy spent his first ten years in Downieville. In 1865, Milton Goodfellow became chief engineer at a mine in Austin, Nevada. After two years in Austin, George was sent back east to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where he lived with an aunt and attended high school.

In 1870 George returned west and entered the California Military Academy in Oakland. A year later he was a member of the freshman class at the University of California. While at Berkeley, he received an appointment to West Point, which he promptly refused when helearned the Academy had recently enrolled its first Black cadets. A short time later he accepted a commission to the United States Naval Academy.

Much to George's dismay, one of his classmates that fall at Annapolis was the first Black midshipman to be appointed to the Naval Academy, a young man from South Carolina named Conyers. Goodfellow ignored Conyers and concentrated on his studies and boxing. In the allAcademy boxing intramurals, George defeated every opponent and was crowned Academy champion.

One afternoon during the winter term, Conyers deliberately bumped into Goodfellow on a stairway. George smashed Conyers in the face, knocking him down the flight of stairs.

missal. Rear Admiral Robley Evans, who was staffed at Annapolis at the time, blamed the Academy's administration for the incident. "In our efforts to protect the colored boy, we ran into the error of paying him too much attention and he gave himself undue importance . . . the boy was really unbearable," Evans wrote later. The pressure mounted and Goodfellow was expelled. A few months after George left Annapolis, Midshipman Conyers got into a fight with his White roommate and was dismissed.

Goodfellow decided to abandon his hopes for a military career and take up medicine. In 1872 he enrolled in medical school at Wooster University in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his medical degree in February, 1876. That April he returned and married Katherine Colt. The young couple left immediately for Oakland, California. Dr. Goodfellow was unable to develop practice during the two years he and his wife spent in Oakland. When his father wrote offering him a position as company surgeon at a mine he was operating in Prescott, Arizona, George jumped at the offer. In Prescott, Dr. Goodfellow took a second job as a contract surgeon at the U.S. Army Whipple Barracks. Two years later he left to accept a similar position with the Army at Fort Lowell, near Tucson. On September 15, 1880, after 11 very dull months at fort fellow resigned to enter private practice in Tombstone.

In 1880 Tombstone was the West's richest and wildest boomtown. It all started in 1878 when a ragged prospector with long, curly black hair named Ed Schieffelin walked into Tucson and filed five mining claims in the San Pedro Valley a vast, empty expanse lying between the Dragoon, Whetstone, and Huachuca Mountains 70 miles southeast of Tucson. Word of Schieffelin's silver strike spread quickly throughout the West, and by late 1879 nearly 600 people were living in tents clustered around Tombstone's only saloon, an establishment that, according to a visiting Chicago newspaperman, was far from glamorous, The atmosphere is dirty and abominable but they dance away nevertheless - the men inanely grinning, the women evidently dancing as a matter of business . . . Two women are white and two are Mexican. One of the white women looks old and worn, dancing with evident effort. All are homely; and with the evidence of worthlessness and probable disease

(Above) Not all of Dr. Goodfellow's patients made it out of town.

Stamped on their faces, they form a ghastly picture of the Low Type of Immorality.

One year later when Dr. Goodfellow rode his horse down Allen Street for the first time, Tombstone had a population of over 10,000 and was the biggest and most important city between El Paso and San Francisco. The original saloon had been replaced by a dozen lavishly decorated establishments where white-jacketed "mixologists" working behind mahogany bars delivered exotic mixed drinks in stemmed glassware. Ladies browsed in millinery shops that featured dresses costing up to $500. The Maison Doree offered a nine-course dinner for a dollar that included oysters, fillet of sole, lamb, buffalo tongue, suckling pig, and a dessert called "Queen Fritters A L'Israelite." Advertisements ran daily in the Tombstone Epitaph for a wide variety of bordellos, the classiest offering French girls who stayed in town for a few months before being replaced by a new group from Paris via San Francisco.

Dr. Goodfellow responded to a practice that was one crisis, one emergency after another by performing operations few other physicians would dare attempt. Medical schools in Goodfellow's day were conservative; students were cautioned against surgical methods which involved the abdominal and peritoneal cavity, and of undertaking anything but common procedures.

Dr. Goodfellow broke with medical tradition over the treatment of gunshot wounds in the abdomen. In those days even the gunmen knew that abdominal wounds were invariably fatal. Goodfellow wrote in The Southern California Practitioner in 1889 that "The maxim is 'shoot for the guts,' knowing that death is certain, yet sufficiently lingering and agonizing to afford a plenary of sense of gratification to the victor in the contest." Faced with watching a man die, or operating, Dr. Goodfellow concluded that "... it is inexcusable and criminal to neglect to operate . . ."

The size of the bullet determined the procedure. If the wound was made by a .32 caliber or less, Goodfellow waited to see if the patient's condition stabilized. He believed that "any ball .32 up ... inflicted enough damage to necessitate immediate operation."

In one of his articles, Goodfellow described an abdominal operation performed under the most primitive conditions. Late one evening he received word that a Mr. R. A. Clark had been shot in a fight in Bisbee, a mining town about 30 miles from Tombstone. Goodfellow arrived about midnight and found the victim lying on a table in a restaurant, bleeding to death from a gunshot wound in the abdomen. The doctor decided to operate. He wrote, I was alone entirely, having no skilled assistance of any sort, therefore was compelled to depend for aid upon the willing friends who were present - these consisting mostly of hard-handed miners just from their work on account of the fight... the anaesthetic was administered by a barber; lamps held, hot water brought, and other assistance rendered by others.

Clark died 19 hours later, but the doctor considered the operation justified because it eased the victim's suffering and prolonged his life long enough for him to compose a will and take leave of his

Goodfellow saved the lives of many others by operating when another doctor would have shook his head, administered a sedative, and left the room.

friends. Goodfellow saved the lives of many others by operating when another doctor would have shook his head, administered a sedative, and left the room. Modern physicans who are familiar with Goodfellow's career find it "amazing that so many of the patients he treated recovered . . ."

On June 22, 1881, a barrel of bad whiskey in the back of the Arcade Saloon was ignited by a bartender's cigar. The fire spread along Allen Street, eventually destroying 65 businesses. The only man injured in the blaze was George W. Parsons, a restless young ex-bank-clerk who had come to Tombstone to make his fortune. Parsons was on the balcony of the San Jose House attempting to cut it loose when the beams collapsed. In the diary he kept to record his trials and small triumphs, Parsons wrote that his "face caught it all."

… the worst wound was caused by a stick going through my under lip cutting a round hole and going thence through everything up through the left side of my face. Piercing the nasal cavity by bridge of the nose. My upper lip was torn loose from its holdings so that one could run a finger up into the nasal cavity.

One month later, Dr. Goodfellow performed plastic surgery, an operation a modern physician would refer to a specialist.

The doctor inserted the knife just to left of bottom or end of the bridge [and] cut across and down nearly to end of the nose After cutting sufficiently the cartilage was seized and raised to its proper place when a needle with silver wire was forced through the nose from one side to the other and this wire held the cartilage in place after being fastened to the splint on my nose.

Several further operations were performed before Parsons reported that he felt "quite elated as nose is hardening into good shape..."

Several further operations were performed before Parsons reported that he felt "quite elated as nose is hardening into good shape..."Goodfellow was one of Tombstone's civic leaders in the 1880s. The doctor refused to accept any money from Parsons because he was injured defending the town. After the 1881 fire, Goodfellow led the campaign to pipe water to Tombstone from the Huachuca Mountains. The swimming pool he insisted the city council build is still in use today. When the Earpcowboy feud broke into "war," Dr. Goodfellow became an outspoken Earp supporter.

After the OK Corral gunfight of October 26, 1881, Billy Clanton was taken to a room across Fremont Street and Goodfellow was summoned. He could do nothing for the 19-year-old youth except pull off his boots; Clanton had promised his mother he would not die with them on.

After the OK Corral gunfight of October 26, 1881, Billy Clanton was taken to a room across Fremont Street and Goodfellow was summoned. He could do nothing for the 19-year-old youth except pull off his boots; Clanton had promised his mother he would not die with them on. Tombstone was tense for months after the battle. One evening in December, 1881, Parsons and Goodfellow were about to leave the doctor's office when Goodfellow drew his revolver and "snuffed" a kerosene lamp with a bullet. "... about 500 people were on hand in a minute. Great excitement. [Doc did it] for devilment," Parsons told in his diary.

There was nothing humorous about the gunshots Parsons heard two weeks later. Dr. Goodfellow had just left Parsons' house when "four shots from heavily charged guns" were fired on Allen Street. "I immediately thought Doc had been shot... knowing how pronounced he was on the Earp-cowboy question."

Parsons ran into the street and found Dr. Goodfellow holding Virgil Earp, whose arm had been shattered by a shot-gun blast. They took Earp to a room at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where Goodfellow was able to save the arm by removing four inches of bone. When Virgil's wife Allie rushed into the room, the wounded man said, "Never mind. I've still got one arm left to hug you with."

In March, 1882, Morgan Earp was assassinated while playing billiards in the back of the Campbell and Hatch Saloon. One of the bullets passed through Earp's body, and lodged in the thigh of a man named George Berry, who had been watching the game. Berry slumped to the

floor and never regained consciousness. Dr. Goodfellow, by then the county coroner, reported that "Berry's injury was inconsequential and hardly more than an abrasion. Technically, he died from shock. The simple fact was, the man was scared to death."

Several of the reports Goodfellow authored while coroner reveal the doctor's black sense of humor. A man named McIntire was shot to death in a saloon brawl. Goodfellow wrote that he had "performed assessment work" on the corpse and "found the body rich in lead but too badly punctured to hold whiskey." When a mob of citizens from Bisbee and Tombstone dragged an outlaw named John Heath from his cell in the Cochise County Jail and hanged him from a telegraph pole, the coroner's jury under Goodfellow's direction faced a dilemma. The usual verdict of "death at the hands of parties unknown" was impossible; the hanging took place in the morning, most of the male population of Tombstone (including Goodfellow) was there, and pictures were taken.

Dr. Goodfellow suggested a way out. He explained to the jury that there was no need to mention the hanging because, technically, Heath had died from emphysema. The final report read: We, the jury of inquest impanelled and sworn by the coroner of Cochise County after viewing the body and hearing the testimony, find that the name of the deceased was John Heath, 32 years old, a native of Texas, and that he came to his death from emphysema of the lungs which might have been, and probably was, caused by strangulation, self-inflicted or otherwise, as in accordance with the medical evidence.

Goodfellow's scholarly writing is much more precise than his coroner's reports. An interesting article entitled "Notes on the impenetrability of silk to bullets" records Goodfellow's surprising discovery that bullets do not pierce silk. A notorious cattle-rustler was shot in the neck with a Colt .45 at point-blank range. Dr. Good-fellow examined the wound and found that the silk neckerchief the man was wearing had been driven far into the neck. When Goodfellow extracted the necker-chief, the slug came with it. The rustler was back on his feet in two weeks. "He is now, I presume, pursuing his trade on the border, if not in peace, at least in prosperity," Goodfellow reported in The Southern California Practitioner.

The doctor spent a great deal of time in the saddle. When news reached Tomb-stone that Buckskin Frank Leslie had shot his wife and James Neal at the Leslie Ranch, Goodfellow left immediately. The next day the Tombstone Epitaph reported that "Dr. Goodfellow returned this morn-ing from Leslie's ranch after being in the saddle almost continuously for 18 hours traveling over 90 miles."

On one of his journeys the saddle-strap broke and Goodfellow fell off his horse, breaking his arm. He set it himself, alone in the desert. Another trip took him across the Mexican border to deliver a baby. The new father, a wealthy rancher, gave the doctor a sack of gold coins for his efforts. When Goodfellow got back to Tombstone, he headed straight for the Crystal Palace and bought the drinks. The party ended when the last coin crossed the bar.

Although he spent many an evening in Tombstone's saloons, Goodfellow swore that liquor never affected his work. He was fond of saying that a surgeon needed "the eye of an eagle, the heart of a lion, and the touch of a woman." He claimed he would quit drinking when "on the morning after the night before," he was unable to bring the heads of two needles together at arm's length with his thumbs and fingers covered with surgical tape.

On May 17, 1885, Geronimo and 140 followers broke out of the San Carlos Indian Reservation. Goodfellow joined the campaign to recapture the wily chief. The Apache, who rank among the world's greatest guerilla warriors, were fond of slipping up on an army camp, executing a sentry, and fading back into the darkness. Goodfellow could never understand why another sentry standing only ten feet away could not hear the twang of the bowstring.

He asked Geronimo about it after the chief surrendered. Geronimo bet the doctor he could stand next to him, shoot an arrow, and the doctor would not hear the twang. Goodfellow put up $20 to the chief's five. A tree was selected as a target, Goodfellow took a position on Geronimo's right, and closed his eyes. When he opened them there were three arrows in the tree. Geronimo was $20 richer.

When news of the earthquake that had devastated Bavispe, Sonora, Mexico reached Tombstone in May, 1887, Goodfellow loaded a wagon full of medical supplies and headed for the border. He arrived in Bavispe two weeks after the quake had hit, and found people nursing broken arms and crawling about with broken legs. The doctor immediately set up a makeshift hospital; the line that formed outside the tent was endless. For weeks he worked from sunrise to sunset. Word of the man the natives were calling "el santo doctor" reached President Diaz in Mexico City. Diaz sent a detachment of army officers to Bavispe to present Goodfellow with a Kentucky-bred horse. President Diaz later awarded the doctor the silver double-headed eagle of Austria, which was supposed to have been found among the treasures Maximilian ordered buried before he attempted to flee Mexico.

The greatest tribute Dr. Goodfellow received came from the people of Bavispe. Every year on the anniversary of the earthquake a group from Bavispe made a pilgrimage to Goodfellow's home to commemorate the doctor's arrival in Sonora. These journeys continued even after the doctor had left the Southwest and settled in San Francisco.

The famed Crystal Palace is a Tombstone landmark. Dr. Goodfellow's name on his office window on the second floor has been preserved.

(Far right) Late afternoon shadows create patterns on the boardwalk along Tombstone's Allen Street.

Goodfellow's practice in Tombstone ended in 1891 as a result of a shooting that occurred in Tucson. Southern Pacific Railroad surgeon Dr. John C. Handy, the first chancellor of the University of Arizona, had been having marital difficulties for several years. Mrs. Handy finally decided she had had enough and filed for a divorce. Shortly after being served with the papers, Dr. Handy met his wife's lawyer, Francis J. Heney, and started an argument that ended when Heney shot him in the stomach. The wounded man asked for Dr. Goodfellow.

Goodfellow made the trip to Tucson in record time. He drove a livery team full speed nine miles to Fairbank, where a wheezing old locomotive waited on a northbound track. Goodfellow had traveled to and from so many medical emergencies by train he had learned to operate a locomotive and was a fully-licensed engineer. He took the controls and opened the engine full throttle; the old locomotive hurdled over trestles and around sharp bends to Benson. There an engine and a car were standing ready on the main tracks. Goodfellow was supposed to ride in the car, but he ordered the engineer away from the controls and drove full throttle to Tucson.

He stopped the locomotive in the middle of a street in downtown Tucson, about a block from Dr. Handy's house. Goodfellow operated immediately; just as he was putting in the last stitches, Dr. Handy died of shock.

When Dr. Goodfellow moved to Tucson to take Dr. Handy's position, he purchased the Orndorff Hotel and converted It into a hospital. During the first week his hospital was open, Goodfellow performed more operations than Dr. Handy had in his entire career. In a single day it was not uncommon for him to perform abdominal surgery, plastic surgery, do a cataract removal, and deliver a baby.

His dedication was amazing. Dr. M. V. Whitmore, his assistant in Tucson, recalled that after performing a uterine operation, Goodfellow went to the patient's home four times a day at 6 a.m., noon, 6 p.m., and midnight to irrigate the abdomen. The procedure continued for weeks, until the patient recovered "in self-defense."

On September 29, 1891, Goodfellow performed his greatest medical feat. “I made a pure perineal prostatectomy, the first as far as known to me deliberately devised and carried out.” Although physicians at citadels of medicine like Johns Hopkins had difficulty believing that medical history could be made by a general practitioner in a dusty cow town, Dr. Goodfellow was right: his operation was the first of its type ever performed.

The man Goodfellow operated on was E. B. Gage, a wealthy mining entrepreneur. Mr. Gage went back to Chicago ecstatic about his surgery, and soon his rich and powerful friends were traveling to Tucson to be operated on by Dr. Goodfellow.

The doctor performed the first appendectomy in Arizona on the son of Tucson's chief of police in July, 1892. That same year he became interested in tuberculosis. He was an early advocate of the outdoor cure after discovering that his patients improved when they rested in the sunshine.

When the Spanish-American War broke out, Goodfellow left Tucson to join the staff of his friend, General William R. Shafter. Dr. Goodfellow spoke better Spanish than any of the General's official interpreters and was soon acting as an envoy. After the battles of San Juan and El Caney on July 3, 1898, the Americans were facing heavy gunfire from the Spanish forces in Santiago de Cuba. The heat was intense, a violent tropical storm was brewing, and malaria, yellow fever, and typhoid were depleting the American lines. Time and again, blindfolded and under a flag of truce, Goodfellow was ledinto the Spanish camp to negotiate. When the Spanish General Torrel finally surrendered, Goodfellow was credited with talking him into it. The doctor remarked later that never before had liquor been used for a better or more therapeutic purpose.

On February 20, 1900, Goodfellow was cited for his performance in Cuba: In July 1898 Dr. G. E. Goodfellow, civilian and volunteer aid to General William R. Shafter, for especially meritorious services, professional and military during the campaign in Cuba.

The beauty of the citation is its simplicity. They were rare in those days; it was years before anyone else on Shafter's staff received one.

After the war Goodfellow settled in San Francisco and devoted himself to prostatectomy. He made a “triumphant” tour of the country, demonstrating his operation at medical schools. Dr. Goodfellow was working on a series of articles on prostatectomy, and had nearly completed his account of the Spanish-American War, when his papers were destroyed in the fire that followed the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Dr. Goodfellow lost everything but his collection of Oriental rugs. He had loaned them to Enrico Caruso, whom he met at the St. Francis Hotel, to use in a production of the Metropolitan Opera Company.

At the time of the earthquake, Goodfellow and three of his friends owned a building on the corner of Market and Gough Streets. When they learned the building had been destroyed, Goodfellow's friends left town, leaving him legally responsible for the damages. The settlement wiped out his savings and left him a weary man. “We soon become tired of everything in life,” he wrote. “Riches fatigue the possessor, ambition when satisfied leaves only remorse behind; the joys of love are but transient joys.” He was a bitter man when he left San Francisco in 1907 to accept a position as chief surgeon for the Southern Pacific Railroad in Guaymas, Sonora. The following year he developed a case of multiple neuritis that caused him great pain. His condition steadily deteriorated. No longer able to practice, he resigned and moved to Los Angeles.

He died there in 1910. ☐ ☐