The Lady Doc

Caroline Lockhart’s second novel drops a fraudulent physician into a raw Wyoming town and watches the damage spread. Dr. Emma Harpe reaches Crowheart after being run out of a Nebraska town over a dead patient and a malpractice suit, holding a diploma from one of the cheap commercial colleges Lockhart describes as turning out illiterate graduates by the hundred. She finds her match in Andy P. Symes, a promoter hunting investors for an ill-conceived irrigation scheme, and climbs toward respectability while Essie Tisdale, the hotel waitress who knows too much about her, becomes the obstacle she works to discredit. Published by Lippincott in September 1912, it was read in Cody as a portrait of a real local doctor, and it split the town. Few Westerns of the period gave a woman the villain’s part.