George Frazier drew his last breath in Green River, in a Union Pacific Hotel room one September night in 1897.
The cause of his death was no particular mystery. He died of tuberculosis, according to the doctor who signed his death certificate.
It’s the doctor’s name that presents more of a mystery. It belonged to one Dr. Charlotte Hawk, wife of Dr. Jacob Hawk, a railway surgeon for the Union Pacific Railroad.
“That was the first death certificate she signed in Green River,” historian Faith Mullen told Cowboy State Daily. “So that’s the first trace of her being in Green River that I have found."
Mullen is on a personal mission to recover Dr. Charlotte Hawk’s place in history and answer an important question.
Was she the state’s second female doctor of record?
Historians have so far given that distinction to a woman named Florence DeWitt, who set up a practice in Laramie in 1902.
But Mullen believes Hawk was likely Wyoming’s second female doctor — though she also points out there could be other women physicians who have simply vanished from history, too.
Charlotte’s signature on the September 1897 death certificate isn’t the only evidence of her early medical work in Wyoming, Mullen added. She also appears on the Wyoming State Medical Society’s membership roster in 1898.
Charlotte’s husband arrived in Green River in late 1896, and Mullen believes Charlotte probably came with him at that time. By then, Charlotte already had eight years of experience as a practicing physician.
“She was a pretty accomplished doctor by the time she set foot in Green River,” Mullen said.
Charlotte graduated from the trailblazing Women’s Medical College of Chicago in 1888.
She showed up in Denver not long after that, running a practice for women with another female doctor.
By the time she reached Green River, she had delivered academic papers on medical care for women. Later, she would also serve as one of the vice presidents in Wyoming's State Medical Society.
A Chance Discovery
For Mullen, uncovering the hidden fragments of Dr. Charlotte Hawk’s legacy is an obsession that started accidentally.
There was a passing reference to Charlotte in an essay about early Green River residents that mentioned the woman had practiced medicine there for 25 years. Yet Mullen, who grew up in Green River and is an avid historian, had never heard of her before.
Female doctors in that timeframe were highly unusual, especially in the American West. She couldn’t believe she had not heard of this woman until now.
“It’s not that I wasn’t fairly steeped in Western history and Green River history,” she said. “I had heard of other doctors who practiced in Green River, but I had just never heard of her.”
Since then, she’s combed through hundreds of newspaper references, as well as birth and death records, piecing together as many fragments of Charlotte’s life as possible. So far, she’s compiled 73 pages of material for an eventual biography.
Charlotte’s name appears on more than 200 birth certificates, Mullen said. She and her husband were also the only two doctors in Green River during the deadly 1918 flu epidemic that sickened hundreds of people in a town of 3,000.
The disappearance of female pioneers’ accomplishments isn’t uncommon, Mullen acknowledged.
“So many of the contributions of women have sort of been obscured for one reason or another,” she said. “But I think she really deserves to be known and appreciated for being a pioneer physician.”
A Doctor In Her Own Right
Charlotte may have come to Green River because of her husband’s appointment, but she brought an established medical career of her own.
She was a firm advocate of handwashing at a time when whiskey was considered a plausible anesthetic and there were no antibiotics.
“She just really tried to be educated and be knowledgeable,” Mullen said. “She cultivated professional relationships with other doctors.”
And with pharmacists too. The Hawks ran a drugstore in Green River for a number of years, Mullen said. Later, when they designed the Tomahawk, a druggist had space right next door to Charlotte’s medical practice.
As Mullen explained it, someone coming into a drugstore for a heartburn remedy might have something more serious that needed a doctor’s attention.
“So, this pairing of drugstore and medical care was a very useful pairing,” she said.
House Calls And Home Births
For the Hermansen family, Charlotte was more than a name on a certificate.
Alton Hermansen, born in Green River in 1915, identified her as his doctor in his recollections of Green River’s early days. The oral history is archived with the University of Wyoming Libraries.
Both Charlotte and her husband were physicians, he recalled, working in a time when women commonly gave birth at home.
When his mother delivered his younger sister and brother, the other children went to a neighbor’s house for two or three days.
The children considered that a treat, Hermansen said. And so did their mother.
Charlotte’s connection to the family extended beyond medical care. Before her death, she gave the Hermansens a tablespoon bearing an “H.”
“It was a time when doctors made house calls and the plumbers did not have to,” he said.
When The Flu Came
House calls also brought doctors to doors on less joyful occasions.
Hermansen remembered quarantine notices tacked outside homes when diseases like smallpox or scarlet fever struck. Families stayed inside until a doctor deemed it safe for them to leave.
In the fall of 1918, the Hawks faced an outbreak that tested them and the entire community.
A deadly flu epidemic swept through Sweetwater County in early October, striking down young, otherwise healthy people. Death certificates from the time show many died within days of becoming ill, Mullen said.
The Hawks were Green River’s only two doctors, caring for a town of about 3,000. At peak, 600-some people were sick.
The epidemic didn’t stop other emergencies, though. There were still railroad injuries. Appendices still ruptured. The Hawks had to care for those patients, too.
Help came from people like Pearl Wade, a young woman whose memories of nursing during the epidemic survive in an oral history at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum, Mullen said.
In it, Wade recalled caring for a family with children who all recovered. Her treatment was simple. She asked the grocer to keep bringing plenty of milk and tomatoes, which she turned into tomato soup.
In Wade’s account, Charlotte told her, “I don’t know what you did for them, but just keep doing it because it really worked.”
The people the Hawks treated weren’t strangers passing through town. Some were families whose lives the Hawks had already helped shape.
Mullen found records of Charlotte attending a baby’s birth, then the mother dying of flu. Meanwhile, men Jacob had examined for draft registration in September were dead by the end of October.
“It must have really been devastating,” Mullen said.
More Than Medicine
Medicine wasn’t the only way Charlotte invested in Green River’s future.
“She was very interested in civic improvement,” Mullen said. “I mean that was part of the impetus behind building the Hotel Tomahawk, was to give Green River a place where it could anchor the downtown businesses. That would turn Green River into the kind of place where people wanted to be.”
The Hawks knew about the coming of the Lincoln Highway and situated the hotel on one of its corners.
The hotel’s tenants included a bank, a grocery store, and a music store, as well as Charlotte’s own medical practice, situated right next to a drugstore.
Charlotte’s investment in community was also woven into the town’s social fabric. She was president of the women’s club and during World War I she taught first aid and knitted socks for troops.
The Hawks’ daughter, Janet, meanwhile, went to Washington, D.C., to learn to drive an ambulance purchased with money Green River residents had raised.
She was to drive the ambulance in France, but the war ended before she could go.
While her parents were caring for flu patients in Green River, Janet was helping care for people caught in the epidemic in D.C.
The Doctors Hawk
Charlotte moved to California in 1922, but Green River remained part of her life.
She returned often, Mullen said. For her 82nd birthday, friends gathered in Green River to celebrate with her.
A photograph of the occasion survives, showing about 20 women who came to mark the birthday of a woman who had once been one of the community’s pioneer builders.
Charlotte died in California in 1946 at the age of 86. Her husband had died 21 years earlier in 1925, while serving as mayor of Green River.
The physical and human architecture she helped build remain, from babies she delivered who grew up in the town to the brick facade of the Hotel Tomahawk still standing on the old Lincoln Highway.
Mullen doesn’t believe the disappearance of Charlotte’s accomplishments from local history was deliberate.
She suspects later historians saw references to the “Doctors Hawk” and assumed the plural was a typo — that there had been just one doctor, Charlotte’s husband.
But Charlotte’s signature is still written all over Green River, even if it took a century for history to rediscover it. Her name also survives on the records of many lives that began and ended in Green River.
George Frazier's death certificate was just one of them.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
