Frontier Doctor: Observations on the Changing West

Urling Coe came to the new town of Bend, Oregon, in 1905, a young medical school graduate seeking adventure and opportunity in the West. Frontier Doctor, Coe’s autobiographical account of his thirteen-year residency, details the extraordinary experiences of a young physician in frontier Oregon and offers a vivid social history of town and ranch life on the Oregon high desert. His memoir also documents the development of a western town: with the arrival of the railroad in 1911, the wide-open settlement known as Farewell Bend was transformed into an important metropolitan center. In a new introduction historian Robert Bunting shows how Frontier Doctor adds to our understanding of the region’s past and present. Coe’s informed opinions and observations illustrate many of the newer topics in western history, such as conservationism, environmental change, the urban West, women and family issues, the West’s multicultural character, and westerners’ ambivalent relationship with the federal government.