A Frontier Doctor Page: 1

A FRONTIER DOCTOR
CHAPTER I
A PIONEER BOYHOOD
DURING State Fair Week in September, 1927, I visited a
flying-field at the southeast corner of Snelling and Lar-
penteur Avenues, St. Paul, Minnesota. Planes were
humming through the air in every direction, when sud-
denly a young woman dropped from one as it passed over,
a parachute unfolded, and she made a graceful landing
but a few paces from the spot where I first appeared on
the screen of life.
In 1854, this flying-field was a typical Minnesota farm,
owned by my father, Lorenzo Hoyt, who had arrived in
Minnesota as a pioneer in 1848. Our farm then was
practically a self-sufficing unit. Not only did we raise all
our own food, including a coffee substitute composed of
several varieties of parched cereals, but we even provided
our own clothing by raising and shearing our own sheep,
carding the wool and spinning it, and on our own loom
making our own cloth.
There were no railroads in St. Paul in those early days.
All our transportation was by stage or steamboat. Two of
my uncles were rivermen and one of my pleasures was
driving down to the levee at the foot of Jackson Street
to meet the boats coming up-river from New Orleans.
Sometimes as my father and I sat in the buggy watching
the unloading of the boat, very often a fine-looking,
strongly featured young man would come over and chat