putterings 541b < 542 > 543 index
At last, the interesting cases came forward;
We could see her puttering over his ears, but could not make out exactly what she did; but, before the child went away from the chariot, he could hear a watch tick.
...At last, the interesting cases came forward. A child about three years old was lifted into the chariot; she had never walked, owing to a terrible malformation in her back, which was shown to the crowd. The doctor rubbed it with some ointment, and put the child aside, and in the mean time treated a little boy for deafness. We could see her puttering over his ears, but could not make out exactly what she did; but, before the child went away from the chariot, he [49] could hear a watch tick. It really seemed as though it were a revelation to him, he was so surprised at it. Another anointing then took place over the child with the crooked back; and, after several applications and rubbings, that child got down from the chariot alone and walked away. Our little boy came back to us, and said it made him feel “kind of queer and sick,” and he thought he wouldn’t have his tooth pulled today; a policeman, he said, assisted him to get out of the crowd. two hours’ work was over for the afternoon, and I was much disappointed not to have seen the paralytic cured.
Surprise Land : A Girl’s Letters from the West. by “E. G. H.” (Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co., 1887) : 48
Harvard copy/scan (via google books) : link
same (via hathitrust) : link
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Ellen G. Hodges. no information at present.
travels through Massachusetts; Niagara; Chicago; Albuquerque (visit to an “Indian school,” being interested in the “Indian question”); Arizona; Needles and Mojave Desert; Los Angeles (where the above passage is set, describing “a French doctress who is in this hotel where we are staying, who claims that she can cure all diseases”); Yosemite Valley; Monterey; a longer stay in San Francisco (including visit to an opium den in Chinatown), Salt Lake City (floats in the Great Lake, comments on Mormons); Colorado Springs and Denver; Chicago (again)...
The author seems to be among a party that are guests of a Mr. Augustus in some “private varnish,” at least part of the way. The book is treated in recent studies (on “Chinatown,” on Mormons, etc.)
- Barbara Berglund, “Chinatown's 19th Century Tourist Terrain” at FoundSF : link
Originally published in chapter 3 “Making Race in the City: Chinatown's Tourist Terrain” in Making San Francisco American : Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906 by Barbara Berglund (2007)
- Sun, L., & Wei, Y. (2025). The ‘Mystery’ of American Chinatown: An Interdisciplinary Study Between Literary Representation and Social Reality. Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (2025) : 1–11 : link (abstract and bibliography only)
- note 139, in Ronald W. Walker, “The Salt Lake Tabernacle in the Nineteenth Century: A Glimpse of Early Mormonism,” Journal of Mormon History (Fall 2005)
4 August 2025