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Dr. Thomas Steel The Difficulties of Achieving the Reunited Family I cannot help wishing sometimes that you and Lilly were out here with your means of living all properly secured. —Thomas Steel to James Steel, March 18, 1854 In 1853, Thomas Steel, a forty-four-year-old Scottish medical doctor and farmer, had been living in rural Waukesha County, Wisconsin , for a decade.1 The first year on the prairie had been hard, filled with privation, loneliness, and disappointment. He had left England as a member of a community of two hundred Utopian socialists who had banded together out of a number of smaller associations, and had decided to call the cooperative commune they wished to establish “Equality .” They quickly fell to arguing among themselves, and began to disband within months of their arrival.2 Steel left the commune in December 1843, just as winter arrived. He spent the cold months in the cramped cabin of a family of settlers. He tried to make a living practicing medicine, but soon realized that in an economy without cash, he was destined to be paid for his services—and his interrupted meals, sleepless nights, and wanderings around the thinly settled countryside in the middle of the night to the cabins of sick and injured farmers—in eggs, bread, chickens, and unfilled promises.3 But with substantial assistance from his affluent father, James, a senior civil servant in London, he had bought a partially improved farm, soon got some land under cultivation, and enjoyed a bountiful first harvest in 1845. He had improved the house he bought with his land into a comfortable residence.4 Early that same year, he had taken a wife, Catherine Freeman, the daughter of British emigrants, and by 1853 they 10 309 had four bright and healthy children. His father-in-law and brotherin -law helped him plant and harvest his crops, and the elder Freeman loaned him money to add to his acreage.5 He had connected with others among the substantial British (and particularly the Scottish) communities in his neighborhood to socialize, begin a curling club, and celebrate Robert Burns’s birthday and other British holidays.6 Though not without criticisms of his American neighbors, whose self-interested materialism and religious zealotry he disliked, he conceded that they had their virtues. His medical practice had taken him into their log cabins, and he encountered them as neighbors, and had come to value the frankness and neighborliness they sometimes manifested . Though he remained rather distrustful of most of them, it hardly effected his pleasure in his new home. Though reluctant to forsake his allegiance to the British monarchy, he obtained American citizenship papers in order to secure his property .7 But there was more to this decision than expedience, for the longer Steel experienced American political institutions, the more value he saw in a politics that ultimately depended on free discussion and that encouraged organization at the local level. He served as a Justice of the Peace and a clerk of the township School Board, and took part both in the organization of the first school in his neighborhood and in the affairs of the county medical society.8 He eventually also made his peace with the frustrations of his medical practice, which, even when he added pulling teeth to his repertory of skills, he knew would never increase his wealth and would make frequent and inconvenient demands on his time, but did bring the rewards of respectability and service.9 By 1853 he was now out of debt for the first time in years, and possessed a small surplus of cash. His farm yielded enough to feed his family, and his father’s subsidies allowed them to buy necessities beyond what they themselves produced.10 By the time he experienced several years of bad crops in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Steel had a sufficient enough surplus to prevail. In addition to these parental subsidies, his unmarried sister Lilias (Lilly) and father, who lived together in London, frequently sent boxes of books and clothing and the medical equipment and medicines Steel needed to sustain his doctoring. Prescribing the quinine his father bought for him in London enabled Steel to gain a reputation for effectiveness in treating the malarial fevers that plagued settlers in marshy prairie regions.11 In the winter of 1853, life for the immigrant country doctor appeared 310 | Dr. Thomas Steel [3.146.255.127] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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