With Abby at sea on her way back to New Hampshire and Willie at Mare Island in San Francisco Bay, waiting to be sent who knows where, the San Diego Union mentioned that “Captain Winder has been unwell for several days.” He is alone and sick. Again.1
But by March, as was earlier noted, William A. is back on his feet and busy caring for Cave Couts, which he will do until Couts’s death.
With patients to attend to in both Old and New Town, “Dr.” William A. Winder has taken an office in the Hiscock’s Building in a prominent business area around Horton Square. In all, there are nine physicians, a homeopath, a druggist, and two dentists.2
One might assume that the number of people getting medical treatment and the number of practicing physicians worked out to a small patient load for each. One case that went to Winder was the result of an accident. According to a news report, “James P. Jones, who keeps a bee ranch[,] . . . was seriously injured by a premature explosion of a blast while engaged in removing some rocks. A portion of one of his hands was carried away and the forearm was fractured.” Jones was hurried to New Town, where “Dr. Winder assisted Drs. Remondino, Fenn and Gregg” in the amputation of the forearm.3
This is the first known record of William A.’s experience with what was a regular and all-too-common occurrence at his father’s prison at Andersonville: any gangrenous, broken, or infected limb was hastily removed by often indifferent surgeons. In San Diego the doctors attending Jones, hardly indifferent, may have had no other choice.
By 1875, when William A. was already practicing medicine, hard times in his city had hardened to desperation. The citizens of San Diego, steady dreamers who had been intoxicated by the promise of the railroad, felt their ardor dampened as “the depression rolled across the country and slowly settled on California. With many banks in trouble . . . a run started on the Bank of California. . . . Waves of frenzied people pounded on the closed doors . . . and demanded their money” as bank president William Ralston “waded into the ocean, and died.” Half the population of New Town—grown in seven years to “4,000 . . . dwindled to two thousand.” Their departure left developer Alonzo Horton deeply in debt. “He had built a town, but not a city,” and if the railroad ever came, he might not be alive to see it.4
The men and women who remained looked elsewhere for income: to bees and beekeeping, to sheep raising, to mining mirages, anything. There was the Minerva Gold Mining Company, “to operate at San Rafael in lower California.” Minerva stock went for fifty dollars a share, and Winder was a director of the company, whose “place of business would be in the city of San Diego.”5 It was another failure in a failing year, one in which gold values were steeply declining. According to a government report on mineral resources, “none of the mining operations have proven permanently profitable.”6
Also not permanently profitable was Winder’s medical practice. Likely experiencing a dearth of patients in this time of economic drought, he had been one of the few respected doctors practicing in San Diego without an official license. In 1875, however, he seems to have received a diploma from the Keokuk College of Physicians and Surgeons, located in Iowa.7
This diploma is something of a mystery. A close look at the Keokuk Daily Gate newspaper from the time William A. might have been there does not have a record of him in any of the numerous lists of graduates. Was it favor, a connection to someone who must have made possible this important event? But there it was, in his hands, a medical degree and not a moment too soon, for in 1876 “the legislature passed ‘An Act to Regulate the practice of medicine in California,’” as a way to weed out the pretenders, the charlatans, quacks, quick-cure hawkers, and their like. “Holders of diplomas from recognized medical schools were admitted automatically; other applicants were given an examination.” Winder would present his Keokuk diploma to the medical inspectors, so no examination was necessary.8
There is further press coverage of another of William A.’s cases, one that came about when “a serious accident befell Mrs. S. W. Craige” [sic], the wife of the Horton House proprietor, when she ventured out onto the roof, fell through an “open skylight,” and tumbled “a distance of sixteen feet” to the ground, “being rendered insensible from the fall. . . . Dr. Winder who was summoned, raced to her side from the Chollas Valley, a distance of four miles, in the extraordinary time of eight minutes.” The San Diego Union, knowing that the patient was in critical condition during the day, “was glad to learn her condition was better by the evening.”9
Another fall brought out Winder again. The ailing wife of San Diego Union publisher W. Jeff Gatewood had fallen from a fishing boat at “the end of Culverwell’s wharf” and nearly drowned before she was finally pulled from the water. “Notice was sent to Dr. Winder, who, with Dr. Stockton, attended to the case. At last accounts, Mrs. Gatewood was doing well.”10
Also doing well was a fast sloop named the W. A. Winder, which was reported to be taking part in a multiday celebration of the Fourth of July in San Francisco. According to the Daily Alta California, at “the annual Regatta of the master Mariners Benevolent Association” the race began on “a fine day,” with “a good breeze and good sport.” At one o’clock the piers and shipping were alive with spectators to witness the event. The decks of the steamers were crowded with excursionists, all eager to herald the anniversary of “our glorious republic . . . dedicated to humanity forever . . . and a lasting peace” after “the fiery serpent crept down the trail of the ages . . . swift and awful war was the result.” Racing along to cheers with “forty-one other entries” was the W. A. Winder, skippered by Nels Anderson. At half past one the gun was fired from the Pacific Street wharf, and they were away. It was a twenty-eight-mile course, with the W. A. Winder making it in a little more than three hours.11
Racing sloops aside, in September William A. departed for Los Angeles to receive a “contract from the War Department to attend the Military personnel [in San Diego] . . . who may require treatment.”12
This contract, ultimately unrecorded, was not given to William A. Worse still was news that the Southern Pacific Railroad, now permanently linking San Francisco to Los Angeles but not San Diego, had dampened hopes for a flow of new arrivals to William A.’s adopted hometown. “Her only rival [Los Angeles’s] is, or was San Diego,” the San Bernardino Guardian sneered, “and the fates seemed ‘down on’ that ambitious little burgh.”13
But there in that once-ambitious little burgh is Dr. Winder, now licensed yet facing financial instability. Putting pride aside once again, he writes to Alexander McConnell Kenaday, secretary of the Association of the Veterans of the Mexican War, in Washington. In doing so, he was reaching back into his own history, to the war that had made him an army officer, a war whose spoils included California, the land of his self-imposed exile. Couched in his request for a badge awarded to those who’d served in that war was a plea.
“Dear Sir, I served in the Mexican War, first as a paymaster’s clerk, and was appointed a 2nd Lieutenant in the 3rd Artillery before the war closed,” he wrote. This was not entirely true, as William A.’s appointment came shortly after the war, but it made for a good argument. “Now I wish to obtain one of the badges given for that war, and any other advantages growing out of it.” What advantages would be gained and how could they help him out of his financial straits? Here then is the true request:
Will you do me favor to tell me how to proceed, and whether I am entitled to any of the privileges to be conferred upon those who served? I resigned as a Captain of Artillery at the close of the late war, is there any [illegible] by which I could get back in the army, and then go on the retired list. My military history can be had at the War Dept, and I am suffering from bad health induced by exposure while in the service, of course I will pay all necessary expenses.
Respectfully, yr obdt sevt,
Wm A. Winder14
William A. hoped his request would appeal to Kenaday, a Mexican War veteran. Like William A., Kenaday had performed on impulse and with heroism. At the Battle of Churubusco he particularly distinguished himself by unloading gunpowder from a burning weapon.
Kenaday forwarded William A.’s letter to the War Department. By May 13 the request had been received. On May 27 Adj. Gen. Edward D. Townsend, who was well acquainted with William A.’s history, responded to Kenaday.
“Sir: In reply to your note . . . calling attention to an inquiry of Captain Wm. Winder late of the 3rd US. Artillery as to whether there is any way by which he can be restored to the army . . . , I have to inform you that he could only get back by a special act of Congress, or by appointment as 2nd. Lieutenant by the President and that even then his retirement would depend on the result of an examination in accordance with the law by an Army Retiring Board,” Townsend wrote. As an afterthought and to further stymie this request, Townsend scrawls in dark ink across the page, “I may add that . . . it is not customary to restore officers or to appoint persons physically disqualified.” The bad health Winder has disclosed closes the door. But a crack remains (a presidential okay or an act of Congress), one he will attempt to open again and again.15
*
With the election of a Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, to the presidency—a then-noteworthy contest, as Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular but not the electoral vote, the occupation of the former Confederacy by Union troops ended and Grant’s sway over the country and over army matters also ended. In the year to come Old Town will host the Democratic county convention with “seventy-four delegates present.”16
William A. will be nominated for the office of county coroner as a Democrat and ultimately lose to the Republican opponent, Dr. Charles Fenn. This defeat meant the loss of a salaried position. Nothing in the record indicates that William A. was ever anything but a Republican, a Lincoln Republican at that, though voter rolls for the years he dutifully registered gave no party affiliation. This brief Democratic turn was a run at opportunity.
Although the coroner’s post was lost to him, there are still patients who need him. William A. rushes to an emergency in which a young child suffered a serious injury from either a rock thrown or a shot from a pellet gun aimed at her. “Dr. Winder was called to attend the little sufferer, and found a deep jagged wound two inches long extending across the knee,” the Weekly Union noted, damning the dangerous so-called “nigger shooter,” a contemporaneous term for the pellet gun that had presumably caused the injury. The child, though scarred and in shock, had her bleeding stanched and her knee wound closed with silk thread, and she recovered. So must William A., reeling from disappointments, but at the ready with his doctor bag and his devotion. As the summer slumps into autumn and then winter, his rheumatism worsens but not his will. Never his will.17
*
Barely has the year 1878 begun when a small but determined band of California notables acts in support of a highly regarded and unimpeachably loyal former army officer’s desire to be reinstated in the army. From Sacramento comes California state senator John W. Satterwhite asking on William A.’s behalf for former California governor Frederick Ferdinand Low’s help.
“I understand that Capt. W. A. Winder is desirous of being reinstated in the army,” Satterwhite writes, “and that you [Low] are making an effort in his behalf to that end. It affords me great pleasure to endorse any application you may make on behalf of Capt. Winder.” Low knows “somewhat intimately Capt. W. when an officer of the army”—Low was the collector of the port at San Francisco during the Civil War—“and I hazard little in saying that the army never had a more accomplished, competent and brave officer.”18
Upon the heels of this correspondence came a signed petition sent from Sacramento to Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes: “The Undersigned, members of the Legislature and citizens of California, respectfully request the reinstatement of Wm A. Winder, late a captain in the 3rd Regiment Artillery. Captain Winder served some eighteen years in the army, having received his original appointment for services during the Mexican War, and during the late war . . . he held the command of the most important post (Alcatraz) on the Pacific coast, giving entire satisfaction to his superior officers as well as the citizens of the State.” Surely the petitioners well knew of the accusations of disloyalty Winder had suffered, but it seemed to Sen. John W. Satterwhite and several others that the war and its agonies were past.19
The letter expressed pride for what had been an exhausting test of endurance for William A. during his command at Alcatraz. Now he was filled with regret at his hasty, emotional resignation from the army. William A. is clearly in financial distress, as evidenced by a letter sent to him by Ephraim Morse. William A. was once deeply in debt to Morse and has apparently appealed to him again for a loan. Time has passed, and Winder has had to swallow his pride and beg for funds. How Morse responded to this request is at once startling and moving.
“Dr. Winder,” Morse writes, “I would accommodate you with pleasure if I could do so, but I have not the money.” This should have been enough, but Morse goes on. “Four or five years ago, I b[r]ought a large amount of money from the East—left me by my father—and today it hardly yields me income enough to pay my expenses. . . . I hope better times are in store for us.” He regrets not being able to lend William A. any money. They are two men who have weathered distrust, disappointments, fire, the demise of their beloved Old Town, and a depression.20
The parade of petitioners continues.
Senator Satterwhite has written to Peter Dinwiddie Wigginton, a member of Congress from California: “Dear Sir, Dr. W. A. Winder wishes to be reinstated in the army and at his request I have procured the written recommendations. Winder is a resident of San Diego and wishes me to forward the papers to you and request that you present them personally to the President.”21
Immediately, Wigginton wrote to President Hayes: “I enclose applications of Dr. Winder for reinstatement or appointment to [a] position in the Army together with recommendations of Ex Gov. Low of California and Senator Satterwhite of that state. Asking your attention to the matter and such reply as you may deem proper in the business. Very respectfully yours. P. D. Wigginton.”22
Perhaps these communications are crossing in the mail, as William A. doubles down in his efforts to gain reinstatement in the army so that he could retire with a military pension. He writes to Wigginton, reminding him that he has “forwarded some papers requesting the President to reinstate me in the army. . . . I request that you give me your personal assistance in this matter.” William A. details his service yet again, saying, “Before leaving Washington I called on the President [Lincoln] and stated my case that being of Southern birth my loyalty might be suspected.” Lincoln, he said, “fully appreciated my position and considered my allegiance to the government” and the Union. When William A. assured the president that he would “perform my whole duty to the best of my ability . . . he [Lincoln] expressed himself perfectly satisfied and I did do my whole duty although I did find that I was an object of suspicion to the radical so called loyal citizens of San Francisco, who applied to General Wright to remove me from the command of Alcatraz, for no other reason than that of my Southern birth.” Wright asked these unnamed citizens “for charges, but as they had none to make,” William A. wrote, “he declined to make the charges.” Winder wrote all this to explain why he had resigned. “My pride compelled me to resign, since which time I have been unfortunate in business . . . and would like now to be reinstated, or get some other appointment of equal grade. . . . I trust that you will pardon the liberty I have taken.”23
As he waits for answers over the hot, dry summer, the Los Angeles Herald reports, “The friends of Dr. W. A. Winder in this city will regret to learn that he is lying very ill at his home in San Diego.”24
*
The year 1879 finds William A. at his easel, engrossed in his oils and brushes, pots of watercolors and graphite. It is an avocation that began when he was a young man, and now, as an older man with stiffening hands, he is making art again, and doing so with singular determination. He is painting a group portrait and gratefully acknowledges his friend Alfred Henry Wilcox’s gift of a canvas, something he could not otherwise afford. William A. is painting a “camp scene” and needs a “small photograph” of Wilcox to complete the painting. They are two men of the same age. One is a struggling doctor, a man who paints for personal peace, while the other is a former sea captain, Colorado River explorer and pioneer, the owner of a steamship line, and a wealthy man whose image William A. will fix forever on this gift of a canvas. “How am I ever to repay your acts of thoughtful kindness I cannot now see,” he writes, but he also assures Wilcox that he will somehow “manifest his gratitude.”25
In a postscript to the letter that suggests perhaps Wilcox has suffered with a common and painful condition, William A. writes that he is seeking a device with “Galvanic Faradic batteries. . . . I wanted one with which I can remove piles.” For those patients willing to endure electrical current sent through a two-celled battery through a wire to an inner or outer hemorrhoid with the hope that the offending mass might be excised, this practice promised relief.26
William A.’s lingering ailment was not medical but financial and sent him back to what has become a tireless pursuit: yet another request for an army reinstatement. This time he sent his request directly to Pres. Rutherford Hayes.
“Sir,” he writes, “sometime since I made an application to be reinstated in the army, that application failed, I now enclose a slip cut from a paper by which you will see how officers born in the South whose idea of loyalty induced them to sacrifice all personal feelings and remain in the service of the government, were looked upon by people generally, and how the lamented Lincoln looked upon them.” He notes that he served eighteen years and “until the close of the war, I experienced the same treatment but had no General Steedman to speak for me.” William A. then refers to an officer, a Major Wyse, “formerly of my regiment [who] has been restored as Lieutenant Colonel and placed upon the retired list. The Major resigned about the commencement of the war, am I then not entitled to be restored with the rank of Major, and am I asking too much when I ask your kind consideration.” William A. “trusts, sir[,] that you will pardon this direct application, but I have no political friends, and therefore determined to apply directly to you.” He reminds President Hayes that “my case has, I believe[,] been laid before you, therefore any long statement is unnecessary.” William A. asks that the president might “consider this application as confidential, in case that you cannot comply with the request.”27
William A.’s mention of Gen. James B. Steedman is likely a reference to “How Lincoln Relieved Rosecrans,” an article that relates the story of how President Lincoln summoned Gen. James Blair Steedman to the White House. The president, disappointed and troubled by General Rosecrans’s performance in the field, asked Steedman, “Who beside yourself . . . is there in that army who would make a better commander?” Steedman had just defended Rosecrans, and though momentarily stunned by the president’s question, he “promptly” answered “Gen. George H. Thomas.” The president agreed that Thomas would indeed make a better commander but added, “Mr. Stanton is against him, and it was only yesterday that a powerful New York delegation was here to protest his appointment because he is from a rebel state, and cannot be trusted.” Steedman replied, “A man who will leave his own state [Thomas was a Virginian], his friends, all his associations, to follow the flag of his country can be trusted in any position to which he may be called . . . that night the order went forth from Washington relieving General Rosecrans of the command of the Army of the Cumberland and appointing Thomas in his place.”28
With William A.’s pointed reference to this startling article in his rather presumptuous letter to Hayes, the recurring theme of Stanton’s distrust of southern-born officers and his ongoing refusals to reinstate William A. in the army fixes direct blame on the war secretary and not on the military rule according to which once one resigned, one was always replaced by an officer next in line.
*
If there was ever a thought or hope that William A. would ever see his brazen, zealous uncle William H. Winder, any possibility ended with his death on October 18, 1879, at the age of seventy-one. The lifelong bachelor, embittered by his years of struggle to clear his brother John H. Winder’s name, died “at his residence in New York of an affliction of the heart, a sickness of two weeks,” and was buried in Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery, the final resting place of famous and infamous Marylanders, among them John Wilkes Booth. Noting William H. Winder’s arrest, though not mentioning his secessionist adherence and anti-Lincoln stance, of particular irony was that the article announcing his death noted that the Winder Building, his singular building achievement in Washington DC (purchased by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in 1854 for $200,000), was later occupied by the Union government “for the War Department’s use” during the Civil War.29
Known at the time as “Winder’s Building,” the seventy-five-foot tall structure had 130 rooms. “At the time,” one source notes, “it was the largest and tallest office building in the nation’s capital. Among the government offices it housed were the Navy Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography and the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.” It also housed the Quartermaster General’s Department, which, “under the capable direction of General Montgomery Meigs, led the massive effort to supply the Union Army from the offices in the Winder Building.” Toward the end of the war the Bureau of Military Justice, helmed by Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, the fervent and vengeful prosecutor of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, headquartered there.30
*
If William A.’s uncle knew that his nephew was a doctor, a highly regarded one at that, might he have had a jot of pride, a jot of forgiveness for the young man who studied medicine and pined to practice?
William A.’s last recorded treatment of a patient, at the end of 1879, was noted as follows. He wrote a letter to a Los Angeles physician, Dr. Henry Worthington, who was visiting San Diego and told him he has been “unexpectedly called to go into the country.” He begs Worthington to see “my friend and patient Capt. [Alfred] Wilcox, who has Ballenitis and threatened Paraphymisis.” William A. is referring to a swelling of the foreskin—likely caused by an infection—that can lead to gangrene if not treated. Imagine this painful condition as Winder tells Dr. Worthington what he has done so far: “I have touched the parts with a solution of nitrate of silver today & a lotion, also ordered Bismuth sprinkled over glans penis and [prepuce] if no improvement takes place by tomorrow.”31 As for the remedy, in this case the solution of nitrate was both “antiseptic and cauterizing.” Bismuth was a powder mixed with carbolic acid that could “prevent putrefaction . . . [and is] also used as a surgical dressing.”32
William A.’s dedication to his patients—old or young, rich or poor, even after suffering badly from rheumatism and chronic bronchitis—is illuminated in a letter written many years later by Horace Bradt to the San Diego historian Winifred Davidson. “Dr. William A. Winder, who for many years practiced his profession throughout this county, has so impressed me, that I feel having known him quite intimately for many years. . . . I have many times taken him to call on the sick, when none but a thorough humanitarian would dare to face the elements,” Bradt wrote. “One time in particular during a heavy rain and wind storm, over rough and muddy roads, even covering himself with a heavy canvas, when sickness really should forbade [sic] him to leave his bed, yet with his regard to an unfortunate calling for his services, he would brave serious inconvenience for himself.” Bradt stressed that “no one ever called for his professional services, be he rich or poor, that did not receive his most distinguished services.” William A. indeed often saw patients for free. “All glory to his name, which should never, never die,” Bradt proclaimed.33