She Was a Doctor Who Became a Mail Order Bride — The Cowboy Who Had No Idea What He Was Getting

There is a black medical bag in a display case at the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne. It is small, worn. The leather along the handle has cracked from years of use in weather that was not kind to it. The brass latch has been replaced once. You can tell from the color of the metal, slightly brighter than the rest of the hardware.

Inside, according to the museum’s 1961 catalog entry, it contains a stethoscope, a set of surgical instruments wrapped carefully in oil cloth, a small stoppered bottle of carbolic solution, and one folded handkerchief embroidered in blue thread with the initials MH. The handkerchief is the only soft thing in the bag.

Everything else is hard and cold and made to do work. That bag belonged to Dr. Margaret Holloway. She packed it in her wedding trunk in Philadelphia in the spring of 1882, tucked between her second dress and a copy of Gray’s Anatomy that she had owned since her second year of medical school and had annotated throughout in a small precise hand.

She was 30 years old. She was boarding a westbound train. She was going to Laram, Wyoming territory to marry a cattle rancher named Cole Briggs who had written to a matrimonial agency in Denver looking for a practical wife and a working partner. Cole Briggs did not know the bag was in the trunk. Cole Briggs did not know Margaret was a doctor.

He did not know this because Margaret had not told him. She had answered every question the agency asked her accurately and fully. She had corresponded with Cole for 4 months and answered his questions with the same care. What she had not done was volunteer the one piece of information that in her 3 years of experience made people look at her differently before they had formed any opinion of her at all.

She had graduated from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1879. She was at that time one of fewer than 200 licensed female physicians in the entire United States. She had spent the three years after graduation attempting to practice medicine in Philadelphia. She had been blocked politely and then with decreasing politeness at every institutional door she tried.

She was not going to Wyoming to leave medicine behind. She was going to Wyoming because she had run out of doors to try in Philadelphia. The West, she had calculated, was a place where what you could actually do might carry more weight than what the medical establishment had decided you were permitted to do.

I have read the archive, all of it, the letters, the journals, the medical records she kept from 1882 until 1918, the oral histories collected from her patients in the 1920s. I want to walk you through the evidence piece by piece because the story of what happened when Cole Briggs discovered what was in that trunk is one of the most quietly remarkable stories in the Wyoming historical record.

It begins with a woman who was not what anyone had been led to expect. And it ends with a medical bag in a museum display case, still packed, still ready to work. The Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania was founded in Philadelphia in 1850. It was the first medical school in the United States established specifically to train women physicians.

At the time Margaret Holloway enrolled in 1876, it was still the only institution in the country where a woman could complete a full medical education without being treated as an anomaly, an experiment, or an inconvenience. Margaret enrolled at 24. She had grown up in a household that took education seriously.

Her father was a lawyer who had argued cases before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Her mother had attended a female academy in New Jersey in the 1840s and had spent Margaret’s entire childhood communicating by word and example that the absence of proper educational opportunities for women was one of the central injustices of the era.

Margaret had absorbed both parents fully and arrived at her own conclusions. She entered medical school with the kind of focused, methodical purpose that the faculty noticed early. She was not the most naturally gifted student in her cohort. She was the most thorough. Dr. James Anenburgg, who taught surgery, and who would later correspond with Margaret from Wyoming for many years, wrote in a letter to a colleague in 1883, “Miss Holay, now Mrs.

Briggs, possessed the quality I value most in a physician and find most rarely. She did not hurry. She looked at what was actually in front of her before she decided what it was. This is harder than it sounds. Most people decide first and look second. She graduated in the spring of 1879. She was 27 years old.

She had a medical degree, strong faculty recommendations, 3 years of clinical training, and a plan for her career. The plan did not work. Pennsylvania Hospital on Pine Street, where she applied first, told her they did not have positions available for her. She applied again 6 months later. They still did not.

She applied to four other Philadelphia hospitals over the following 2 years. The responses were variations of the same answer, stated with varying degrees of grace. She tried a different approach in 1881. She rented a small office on South Street in a neighborhood that could not afford to be particular about who provided its medical care. She hung a sign.

She kept proper hours. Patients came. Working families, laborers, women who had no other access to a physician they could trust or afford. Margaret treated them well. They came back. They sent their neighbors. Within three months, she had more patients than the office could comfortably manage. But the income from a practice on South Street was not enough to cover the office rent and her living expenses and the cost of supplies.

And by the winter of 1881, she sat with her account books and read them with the same undivided attention she gave everything. The numbers said what numbers say when they are telling the truth. She wrote to Dr. to Annenburgg in December 1881. I have spent 3 years attempting to practice medicine in a city that does not want me to practice medicine.

The evidence is clear and I have looked at it long enough. I am going somewhere that has not yet decided what it does not want. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, wrote in her memoir, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, published in 1895. The idea of winning a doctor’s degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.

Margaret Holloway understood this perfectly. She had fought that fight for 3 years. She had not lost it. She had simply run into walls that her skills and her degree and her patient outcomes could not move. And she had decided to find different walls. She found Cole Briggs’s entry in a matrimonial agency listing in February 1882.

She wrote to him 3 days later. Cole Briggs was 40 years old in 1882. He had come west from Mororrow County, Ohio in the spring of 1871, arriving in Wyoming territory with $60, a horse, and a specific plan that he had been refining for 2 years before he acted on it. Cole was not impulsive. He was deliberate in the way that people who cannot afford to make large mistakes are deliberate.

He had worked for other ranchers for 2 years, learning the country, understanding the land and the cattle, and the economics of running both. By 1873, he had leased his first parcel, 80 acres east of Laram. By 1877, he had bought it outright and added another 120. His operation ran 200 acres by 1882 with a herd of 60 cattle, a solid house he had built himself over three summers, a root seller, a good well, and a barn that was better than the house and was meant to be because the cattle were the income.

He had been eating meals alone since 1876 when his only hired hand left for better wages in Colorado. His neighbor Frank Doors had used a Denver matrimonial agency the previous year and the arrangement had worked out well. Cole listened to Frank’s account with the attention he gave useful information and filed it.

In January 1882, he wrote to the agency himself. His letter was direct in the way of a man who has been thinking about what he wants to say and has no interest in saying more than that. He was 40 years old. He owned his land. He ran cattle and the operation was stable. His house was small. Wyoming winters were hard. He was not looking for a romantic arrangement.

He was looking for a real partner, someone willing to work, someone of good character, someone who meant to stay. He wrote, “I would rather know the hard things at the start than be surprised by them later.” He sent that letter and did not worry about it because worrying about things you cannot currently act on was in his view a waste of a resource.

The agency sent him Margaret’s file in February. The description said, “Educated woman, Philadelphia, good family, age 30.” Cole wrote to her in the second week of February. She wrote back within 5 days. Their correspondence ran for 4 months. Margaret’s letters to Cole are preserved in the University of Wyoming archive, donated by their granddaughter in 1944.

Reading them, you see immediately the quality of attention Margaret brought to a correspondence she had decided to take seriously. She asked about the land, what kind, and what it produced. She asked about the cattle operation in specific terms. She asked about the nearest town, the nearest school, the nearest physician.

That last question she phrased carefully. She wrote that she believed the availability of medical care was an important factor in any frontier living situation. This was true. It was also a question whose answer she needed for reasons she had not yet explained. Cole answered each question. He told her the truth about the house which was small and which he said plainly.

He told her the truth about the winters. He described Laram with a balanced accuracy. rough in certain ways, improving in others, a real town with a real future. He mentioned in his third letter that the nearest physician was a Dr. Ira Pence in Laram, 12 mi west, but that Pence was unreliable because of a drinking problem that was common knowledge.

Margaret read that sentence twice. Then she read it a third time. She did not tell Cole about her medical degree during the correspondence. She made a decision consciously and without selfdeception to tell him in person. She packed the medical bag in the trunk. She packed Gray’s Anatomy between her dresses. She also packed three back issues of the Lancet, the British Medical Journal to which she had maintained a subscription because there was no good reason to cancel a subscription simply because she was relocating to Wyoming. Cole received

no advanced warning about the Lancet. Margaret arrived in Laram on the afternoon train on June 9th, 1882. She had been traveling for 4 days from Philadelphia. She was tired in the way of someone who has been moving across a continent in railroad cars and stage connections, but she was not worn down by it because she had spent the journey reading and thinking and preparing herself for what came next.

Cole met her at the station. He was wearing a clean shirt, which he had put on that morning because clean shirts were for occasions, and he had the quality she had been trying to predict from four months of letters, completely as described, tall, weather darkened, still in the specific stillness of someone who has spent years making decisions by himself, and has become, through that practice, economical.

He looked at her and said, “You made good time.” Margaret said the train was punctual. These are their first spoken words to each other. Margaret wrote them in her diary that evening, which she kept from girlhood until 2 weeks before her death in 1931. And the entry notes that Cole’s face was the face of a man who has made many decisions and regretted very few of them. That is a precise description.

It is also, as the evidence shows, accurate. Cole helped load her three trunks into the wagon. Three trunks was more than he had anticipated. He wrote in his journal that evening that he had noted the three trunks and had not said anything about them. The drive to the ranch took almost 2 hours. The road was good by Wyoming territory standards, which meant it was navigable in good weather and unreliable in bad.

Margaret watched the landscape shift as Laram fell behind. The grassland opened flat and wide in all directions. The sky in Wyoming in June is a color that Philadelphia does not have. A clear, deep blue with a quality of altitude in it that you feel in your breathing before you notice you are noticing it. Cole spoke when she asked questions.

He answered her questions about the land and the herd and the property lines. He pointed out where the creek ran, which was low from a dry spring. He mentioned the well, which had never failed in 11 years, and said that as though it were the most important fact about the place, which it was. The ranch house was small.

He had told her it was small, and he had not softened it, and he had been accurate. Two rooms downstairs, a sleeping loft above, clean, organized with the specific organization of a man who has been the only person in his space for years, everything in its place, nothing out of place, and no decorative objects anywhere because there had been no one to put them there for.

Margaret’s three trunks went upstairs. Cole helped carry them without comment. Supper that evening was beef stew and bread, simple and well-made. They sat across the table and talked about the ranch and about Philadelphia and about Wyoming, and neither of them mentioned the three trunks upstairs, one of which contained a complete medical bag and a subscription to a British journal.

The discovery happened on day 12 of Margaret’s time at the Briggs Ranch. It was a Friday morning in late June. Cole was mending fence on the south pasture. Margaret was in the kitchen making preserves from the first of the summer berries she had found growing wild along the creek. A neighboring rancher named Amos Fletcher rode in at midm morning.

Amos Fletcher was 54 years old and had been ranching east of Laram since 1866. He was not a man who asked for help easily. He was asking for it now. His right hand was wrapped in a cloth that had gone dark red from the wrist down. He had been mending fencing wire on his south property line when the wire slipped and caught the base of his palm.

The cut ran from the base of his index finger across the width of his palm, deep enough that Fletcher had gone pale from the blood loss and somewhat paler from the look of it. Cole came out of the south pasture when he saw Fletcher’s horse at the fence. He looked at the hand and said in the steady voice of a man assessing a problem without adding fear to it, “We need to get you to Pence.

” Fletcher said, “Pence is in Cheyenne. His wife’s mother is sick. Been gone since Monday.” Cole looked at the hand again. He was calculating. Carbon County had a physician, but Carbon County was 60 mi south of Laram, which was itself 12 mi west of the Briggs Ranch. Fletcher could not ride 60 mi. Margaret came out of the house when she heard the voices in the yard.

She had been listening from the kitchen window for about 30 seconds. She looked at Fletcher’s hand for two seconds. The way you look at something when you already know what it is, she said, “Bring him inside.” Cole said, “Margaret,” she said, “now please. He is losing more than he should be standing here in the sun.” She went upstairs.

Cole heard the larger trunk being opened. He heard things being moved. Then Margaret came back downstairs with the black bag. What happened next took 22 minutes. Cole stood in the kitchen doorway and watched Margaret Holloway clean Amos Fletcher’s hand with carbolic solution and examined the cut and close it with three sutures in the specific places where the closing was needed.

She worked without wasted motion. Her hands did not hesitate. She explained to Fletcher what she was doing at each step, not because she needed to explain it, but because Fletcher was watching the needle with the expression of a man doing everything possible not to think about the needle, and the explanation gave him something else to track.

She bandaged the hand with precise, firm wrapping and told Fletcher the specific instructions. Keep it clean. Change the bandage every 2 days, come back in 10 days, and she would check the sutures. Fletcher said, “Where did you learn to do that?” Margaret said, “Medical school. Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, class of 1879.

” Fletcher looked at Cole. Cole looked at Margaret. Margaret wrote in her diary that evening that Cole’s expression was the look of a man who has opened a crate. He believed he knew the contents of and found something entirely different inside and is spending a moment deciding whether different constitutes a problem. She waited.

She had thought about this moment since Pennsylvania. Cole said you were going to tell me it was not a question, but Margaret answered it. Yes, I was waiting for the right moment, which I admit kept not being the moment before this one. Cole was quiet for another moment. He looked at Fletcher’s bandaged hand.

He looked at the bag on the table. He said, “Is there anything else in those trunks I should know about?” Margaret said, “Three issues of the Lancet, which is a British medical journal, and a complete copy of Gray’s Anatomy.” Cole said, “The medical reference.” Margaret said, “Yes.” Cole turned back to Fletcher.

He said, “You should stay for lunch. Your color is still not right.” That was the full extent of the first conversation about the medical bag. It was not the last, but the quality of that first response told Margaret something she had not been certain of before. Cole was someone who looked at what was actually in front of him before he decided what it was.

Word moved in the ranching communities east of Laram with the efficiency that all useful information moves in places where people are spread thin and news matters. By the end of June 1882, three weeks after the Fletcher incident, two more people had made a specific trip to the Briggs Ranch for the purpose of seeing the doctor who now lived there.

The first was a ranch hand named Pete Callahan, who worked for a neighboring operation and had a splinter infection in the sole of his foot that had been getting worse for 10 days, and that Pete had been treating with methods that were not improving it. Margaret cleaned and drained it and gave him instructions.

The second was the wife of a homesteader south of Laram named Mrs. Eugenia Park who had a persistent chest complaint that no one had been able to address because the nearest reliable doctor was 30 mi away and the trip cost more than the Park family had available. Margaret listened to her chest, diagnosed a bronchial inflammation, and gave her instructions that included keeping warm and resting, which was advice that the frontier generally did not make easy to follow, but which Margaret delivered anyway because it was correct. Cole watched

this. He did not say anything for 2 weeks. In the third week, on a Wednesday evening after supper, he went out to the small storage room off the kitchen, which he had been using to keep tools and extra rope and a collection of things that had no other place, and he spent an hour moving things around. Then he came back in and said to Margaret without preamble, “You need somewhere proper to see people.

That room off the kitchen is the right size. I will clear it out this week.” Margaret looked at him. He said the kitchen table is not the right place. People come to see a doctor. They should come to see a doctor in a doctor’s room. Margaret said that is very practical. Cole said most things are if you think them through properly.

He cleared the storage room that week. He built Margaret a desk from spare lumber measured carefully and jointed well. The kind of desk that would not wobble and did not require apology. He found a proper examination table at the estate sale of a retiring physician in Laram and paid $11 for it, which he considered money well spent.

He hauled it back in the wagon with the same matter-of-act efficiency he brought to everything that was simply a problem requiring a solution. He did not present any of this as a gesture. He presented it as logistics, which it was, and also as a statement of position, which it also was. Margaret heard him tell his neighbor Frank Doors in August of 1882.

I sent to the agency for a wife and they sent me a doctor. I have considered this from several angles and I believe it came out in my favor. Doors found this very funny. Cole did not appear to see what was funny. He was stating a conclusion reached through methodical assessment which he considered a normal thing to state. Dr.

Annenburgg wrote to Margaret in September 1882, having received her first letter from Wyoming. He wrote, “I am relieved. I feared you would spend your career fighting the same walls in Philadelphia. I am glad to hear you found a different kind of wall and walked through it rather than into it.” Margaret wrote back, “I did not walk through it exactly.

I married it, but the practical result is similar and the company is considerably better.” By the winter of 1882, word had reached Laram itself. The town doctor, Dr. Pence, had returned from Cheyenne, but his reputation had not improved. Margaret began seeing patients not just from the surrounding ranches, but from Laram proper.

families who had heard through the ordinary chain of human communication that there was a physician at the Briggs ranch who was reliable and whose charges were fair and who did not smell of whiskey at 10:00 in the morning. Cole drove her into Laram when she needed supplies and waited outside the general store with the same patient quiet he brought to all waiting.

He did not comment on the growing frequency of these trips. He began keeping a running list of medical supplies on the same piece of paper where he tracked feed and fence wire and the other material requirements of the ranch because it was simply a category of supply as straightforward as any other. Margaret noticed this. She wrote about it to Dr.

Annenberg in November 1882. Cole keeps the medical supplies on his ranch accounts list between harness oil and oats. He does not appear to find this remarkable. I find it entirely remarkable. The examination room that Cole had cleared and furnished that fall was by December 1882 in use three days a week.

Patients came by wagon and horseback, some from as far as 20 m. Margaret kept meticulous records, date, patient name, complaint, treatment, outcome. These records are in the University of Wyoming archive today. 47 notebooks covering 36 years written in the same small precise hand that had annotated her copy of Gray’s Anatomy in medical school.

They are the record of a physician who worked and the work was good. Cole Briggs kept a journal from 1875 until 2 years before his death in 1924. Short entries, mostly weather, cattle prices, fence work, carving, the ordinary accounting of a working ranch. The journal was found in a cedar chest in the attic of the Briggs ranch house in 1931 by his granddaughter Clara Briggs Halt, who donated it to the University of Wyoming, along with Margaret’s letters and correspondence and the medical bag.

The entry for June 21st, 1882, 9 days after the Fletcher incident, is longer than most of Cole’s entries. It fills most of the page. He writes, “Have been thinking about Margaret and the medical business for 9 days now. I wrote to the Denver agency for a wife. What came off that train was a doctor with a medical bag in her trunk and a subscription to a British journal that I have looked at and cannot make sense of. I want to be fair about this.

” She did not lie to me. She answered everything I asked. She did not volunteer a thing I did not ask about, which is a different thing from lying. I have done the same,” he continues. “When Fletcher rode in with his hand the way it was, I did not know what to do with him. She knew exactly what to do. She did it without drama and without waste, and she was right.

I have thought about what would have happened to Fletcher’s hand without her being here. I have thought about it more than once.” Then he writes, “She told me she did not say anything because she had found that saying it made people look at her differently before they had formed any opinion of her at all. I understood this.

I have kept things back for the same reason. I think she is the right kind of person. I think we will get along. I think we will get along.” That sentence in the handwriting of a man who had learned to say only what he meant. That sentence is the complete verdict. Margaret Holloway Briggs established a formal medical practice in Laram in 1885.

Cole had built a proper addition onto the ranch house for it by then. Two rooms with a waiting area and a proper examination room with good south-facing windows for the light. By 1890, Margaret was the only licensed physician within 40 mi in any direction. She delivered babies and set broken bones and treated pneumonia and saddle sores.

and the full range of ailments that the frontier produced in its people. And she did this for 36 years from 1882 until 1918 when her eyes began to make the fine work difficult. Cole died in 1924 at 82 years old. He had lived in Wyoming for 53 years and had been a fair judge of a situation for all of them. Margaret lived until 1931.

I stood in front of that display case in Cheyenne for a long time, looking at the black medical bag with the cracked leather handle and the blue embroidered handkerchief. The bag crossed a continent in a wedding trunk. It treated patients for 36 years on the Wyoming frontier. It is in a museum now because the woman who carried it was exactly what the frontier needed.

And the man who received her had the good sense to look at what was actually in front of him before he decided what it was. He thought they would get along. He was right.