Offbeat Oregon: Pioneer woman doctor was Oregon’s ‘Modern Prometheus’

Image: Wikimedia Commons##Bethenia Owens as she appeared in her late 20s, when she was a successful hat-shop entrepreneur in Roseburg in the late 1860s.

In Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s classic novel “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,” Shelley tells the story of a brilliant and gifted scientist-physician who reaches too far in his quest for knowledge, and dares to lay his hands on the power that rightly belongs only to the gods: that of the creation of life.

Oregon history has its own Modern Prometheus. She didn’t create and animate a monster out of corpse-parts, and the product of her overreach didn’t hunt her down with vengeance on its mind. But it has cast a terrible shadow over her legacy.

Her name was Bethenia Owens-Adair; and when she died at age 86, she was one of the brightest stars of Oregon’s intellectual firmament. She was a wonder, worthy to be compared to a Titan like Prometheus; parts of her life story read almost like a frontier “tall tale” like the ones about Paul Bunyan and Casey Jones.

She had been the first female M.D. physician on the West Coast. She had worked closely with Abigail Scott Duniway to win for women the right to vote.

But she also had done more than any other person to give the state the power to forcibly sterilize anyone it thought might be genetically unfit.

Writer Catherine Aird once said, “If you can’t be a shining example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”

If nothing else, the story of Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair proves you don’t have to settle for one or the other. You can be both.

Part I: The spunky pioneer girl

Oregon’s Prometheus was born in Missouri in 1840, and at age 2 she crossed the Oregon Trail in the Jesse Applegate wagon train — the same one Marcus Whitman joined on his return from the East Coast in 1843.

Her parents worked hard, and did very well. By 1853, when they moved to Roseburg, they were quite well off. And that was the year a young bachelor named LeGrand Hill came to visit.

Hill, who was in his early 20s, fell hard for Bethenia, still just 14 years old and nowhere near finished growing.

Creepy as it sounds to the modern ear, this age spread raised no eyebrows in 1854, and when Hill asked Bethenia’s father for permission to pop The Question, there were no objections.

The young couple moved onto a 320-acre spread that LeGrand bought on credit just before the wedding. Bethenia’s father supplied a dowry that included her beloved horse Queen, along with several cows and some furniture. There was a rude log cabin on the land, mostly unchinked, with no floor and no chimney. But it was spring; they had all summer to build a proper house.

Except, LeGrand turned out to be ... well, lazy.

“Mr. Hill neither drank or used tobacco,” Bethenia recalled in her memoir, “but, as his aunt said, he simply idled away his time, doing a day’s work here and there, but never continuing at anything. Then, too, he had a passion for trading and speculating, always himself coming out a loser.”

He did some work on the house; but he didn’t get much done, and by the time of the rainy season only half the floor was finished. Then he mashed his left thumb with his hammer and, on that basis, convinced his naïve young wife that he couldn’t do any more work that season, and that they should move back in with her parents till spring.

The next year, Hill sold his interest in the land back to the original seller and packed Bethenia up for the gold fields in California. To get up a stake, he sold Bethenia’s cows. But, he seems to have had no luck as a prospector.

Back in Roseburg, Hill, at the start of another summer-long shot at building a cabin on a lot furnished by Bethenia’s father, got sweet-talked into going into a brickmaking venture with a friend. The business went nowhere, and when fall came, it found Bethenia living in a tent. By now the couple had a baby, and mother and baby were soon sick with typhoid fever.

Bethenia’s parents came to the rescue again, offering another plot of land to build a house on — but deeding it to Bethenia, so that LeGrand could not sell it as he had everything else for ready money. LeGrand took this personally and dug in his heels. The rainy season came along and found Bethenia still living in that tent, four years and three partly-built houses into her marriage.

About this time Bethenia came to her parents and told them she didn’t think she could stand it much longer. LeGrand was getting increasingly abusive and seemed to think spanking the baby was the best way to get him to stop crying, and she had been sleeping rough for four years by this time and it was having a bad effect on her health.

Finally, Bethenia took George and moved out.

She was 18 years old, physically sick, with a 2-year-old baby, and would soon be carrying the stigma of divorce. Plus, she was barely even literate. What could she do with the rest of her life?

If you’d asked her that, she probably would have shot back, “What can’t I do?” And if she knew you well enough, she probably would have told you her plan. Bethenia always had a plan, and she never stopped working it.

After her health returned as a result of a balanced diet and decent living conditions, she set about remedying the deficits that her four-year matrimonial adventure had left her. She started leaving George in the care of brothers or sisters while she went to school for remedial studies.

Her studies went well enough that a few years later, she was actually teaching a class of 16 students — two of whom were more advanced than she (“I took their books home with me, and with the help of my brother-in-law, I managed to prepare the lessons beforehand, and they never suspected my incompetence,” she wrote later).

To keep from becoming a burden on her family, she took on piecework jobs as well — sewing, laundry work, nursing, anything that would earn her a paycheck.

But her goal wasn’t a teacher’s desk. Teaching, like the piecework, was a means to an end for Bethenia. By working hard and being very thrifty, she saved up enough money to launch a millinery business (that is, a hat shop) in Roseburg.

This business became very successful, and generated enough money for her to send George to the University of California at Berkeley when he was just 14.

Once he was off to college, so was she. One of the skills she’d picked up in her life was medical — nursing was, in that age, grueling and unappreciated work, easy to get and hard to do, precisely the kind of work a driven person like Bethenia would take to fill an unexpected gap in her schedule of piecework jobs. Along the way, she discovered she liked it a lot.

But she well knew there was no future for her in nursing; to make a career of medicine, she would need her own medical practice.

So in 1870, the same year she sent George off to college, she started looking at options for obtaining a medical degree.

Her friend Dr. Hamilton, when he heard the way her thoughts were trending, was enthusiastic and supportive. He sent her home with copies of his medical textbooks to study and wished her the best.

But her initial inquiries were not encouraging. She was unable to find a mainstream medical college that would admit a woman. She would have to choose the least sketchy among the many non-mainstream medical colleges that were around in the 1800s — the ones that taught homeopathy, hydropathy, Thompsonian medicine, Hygienic medicine, Eclectic medicine, etc.

She settled on a medical school in Philadelphia which taught in the “eclectic” tradition — emphasizing botanical remedies and physical therapy. She spent a little time grooming her sister to take over the millinery business — she had to be discreet about this, because she had no support at home. Her whole family thought the idea of a woman being a doctor was close to sacrilegious.

Finally, in 1871, she traveled back east and enrolled in the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania. She returned roughly two years later (medical school, in the 1870s, was somewhat less lengthy than it is today — although not necessarily less arduous, as we’ll see later!) and opened a medical practice in Roseburg while working to finalize the handoff of the millinery business.

It was a real inflection point in Bethenia Owens’ life. She had left Roseburg as Mrs. Owens, a spunky young businesswoman who’d demonstrated a willingness to work harder than any three ordinary mortals. She returned as Dr. Owens, a credentialed professional and a bit of a social lightning rod.

What hadn’t changed — what never would — was her self-confidence and the firm conviction that she was in the right, and was smart and decisive enough to carry through what she’d decided was the right thing to do.

That decisiveness was her superpower. It would lead her to the highest peaks of her profession — and then, at her very moment of triumph, stain her legacy for the next half century.

See Part II in next Friday’s edition of the News-Register.

(Sources: Dr. Owens-Adair: Some of Her Life Experiences, a book by Bethenia Owens-Adair published in 1906 by Mann & Beach Printers; “Bethenia Owens-Adair,” an un-by-lined article published in July 2014 on WomenHistoryBlog.com; “The Myth of the Harmonious City,” an article by Robert D. Johnson published in the Fall 1998 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly)

Finn J.D. John’s most recent book, “Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon,” was published by Ouragan House last year. To contact him or suggest a topic: finn@offbeatoregon.com or 541-357-2222.