LA CROSSE COUNTY HISTORICAL SKETCHES

months of teaching school in Council Bay, and then another two years
in a drug store in Blair, from which place it was an easy step to enter
the Rush Medical College in Chicago, from which I graduated in 1885.
    Then on the throw of a postal card, I set my course to Grand
Forks, four or five hundred miles nearer the North Pole than I had
ever been before, where for nearly 50 years I devoted my whole soul
to the practice of my profession.
    I have devised three or four new operations during these years. A
rather large number of contributions have been made to medical lit-
erature from my pen, for which I was honored a short time ago by
being elected a member of the American Medical Editors' and Authors'
Association. I built the first hospital in North Dakota, which proved
to be the first Norse-American hospital in this country. At the present
time this hospital is neither bankrupt nor out of date, but has received
the highest rating from the American College of Surgeons.
     In 1887 I was married to Mathilda C. Johnson of Blair, "the girl
I left behind me". A historian once stated that a nation without a his-
tory is a happy one. We have no history with which to regale the world,
and therefore we have been very happy. We have traveled extensively
in Europe and Asia, and at one time circumnavigated the globe.


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