Voices

Popular doctor may have hidden life of despair

The author is unknown. The editor of the Alaska Citizen, who published the letter in Fairbanks May 12, 1919, identified him only as a "Close Associate" of the 63-year-old dead man.

Close Associate began by describing the circumstances leading to the discovery of Dr. Clarence Danforth's body in Wiseman, a tiny mining camp 270 miles north of Fairbanks. Suspicion was aroused, Close Associate noted in the passive voice, when the doctor was seen by nobody for an entire day. No smoke came from the stove pipe poking from his cabin. No footprints disturbed the fresh snow covering his yard. A passerby, Rod Morrison, received no response when he knocked on the doctor's door.

After hearing from Morrison, Close Associate and a friend identified as Wright visited the cabin with a pass key.

They discovered "one of the most gruesome sights that I ever witnessed," CA wrote. "The walls were spattered with blood and the doctor (lay) dead in bed with a bullet wound through his heart and his body covered with blood ... a Colt's automatic .32 caliber was lying on the floor beside the bed which told the story. ... He had laid out clothing presumably for burial purposes and also made out his will the day before committing the act. ..."

Dr. Danforth took his life April 5 or 6, 1919, more than a month before Close Associate's letter.

Clarence E. Danforth was born in Hudson, Ohio, March 18, 1856, the sixth of six children. His father, Harrison, was a doctor; his mother, Sarah, who died in 1869, kept house. Harrison learned his profession in the office of a local physician -- a common 19th-century practice. Clarence, however, enjoyed formal education, attending the Columbus Medical College, now Ohio State University.

After graduation in 1880, Clarence, 24, and his wife, Belle Longnecker Danforth, 21, moved to Grandville, Mich., near Grand Rapids, where he practiced nine years before going west to Marysville, Calif.

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Marysville, the self-styled gateway to the California gold country, was settled by '49ers. Perhaps Clarence Danforth caught gold fever from aging former miners while making his rounds. In any case, he succumbed to the call of the Klondike in the summer of '98 and shipped out for Dawson via St. Michael -- the Yukon River route rather than over the Chilkoot Pass -- leaving behind Belle and two sons, Roy, 15, and Harold, 5.

If you look at the 1900 Alaska census -- 1910 too -- you will be surprised by the number of married men with wives and families in the "states." Some men even had wives in Japan or Europe.

Why would a doctor leave a wife and two children for an almost unknown corner of the globe? Nineteenth-century doctors often struggled to earn a living: Maybe he was struggling too, and believed he would become rich in the Klondike. Many men did, especially those who had lost their savings or their homes in the "panic" -- depression -- of 1893.

Dr. Danforth never completed his voyage up the Yukon River to Dawson. On Sept. 21, 1898, he landed at Rampart, north of the confluence of the Yukon and the Tanana River. In the fall of '98, promoters intoxicated by the mining potential of nearby Minook Creek christened the cabins and crude frame buildings of Rampart "the new Dawson." As many as 1,500 people lived in Rampart at the turn of the century.

Tall, trim, blue-eyed Clarence Danforth was a popular figure throughout Interior Alaska for more than 20 years. First in Rampart (1898-1903), then in Chena (1903-1904) and Cleary-Chatanika-Fairbanks (1904-1914). Finally in Wiseman. He's mentioned in the newspapers frequently. When called to treat men injured in mining accidents. Participate in inquests. Testify in court cases. Deliver babies. Preside at the meetings of civic organizations.

He also seems to have been a participant in mining "propositions," to use a term of the times, probably as a modest investor.

Danforth was restless, on the move, and it is easy to see why. Interior mining camps played out rapidly once miners dug all the "sunburned gold" near the surface of productive ground. Fairbanks was in decline when he departed for Wiseman in late 1914.

It's difficult to believe Clarence Danforth made much of a living as a doctor in Wiseman. Robert Marshall, in his classic account of early 20th- century Koyukuk life "Arctic Village," pegs the permanent non-Native population of 1914 at 270 people. When the doctor died, the number was 130 -- in an area the size of Belgium.

We are left to guess why Danforth took his life. He did not write a note to accompany his will, which named his wife as his heir. Belle Danforth received $1,383 -- all the money Dr. Danforth accumulated during 21 years in Alaska except the few dollars needed to bury him.

A Wiseman neighbor believed the doctor had suddenly despaired after receiving a letter in the mail. Nobody else mentioned the letter.

An unsigned story in the Fairbanks Daily News, apparently written by a second Close Associate, concluded "Dr. Danforth was a most convivial personage, and the solitude and remoteness of his cabin undoubtedly preyed upon his mind until he sought the quickest and surest way to untroubled dreams where a populous community must exist but from which no traveler has yet returned with the story."

"Convivial" is a euphemism of the day for "liked to drink." And Wiseman, small as it may have been, was a great place for grog. Robert Marshall says that in 1915 freighters brought in 400 pounds of liquor for every non-Native man, woman and child in the Koyukuk. Liquor had priority over all other freight.

The doctor lies buried on a Wiseman hillside overlooking the trans-Alaska pipeline. A tall wooden marker bearing his name and Masonic symbols towers over his grave.

Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.

By MICHAEL CAREY

Michael Carey

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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