The year before, J.D. Higinbotham, a southern Alberta Pioneer pharmacist, joined him in a two-year Fort Macleod partnership. Both suffered from being 2,000 miles from their source of pharmaceutical supplies. Even old alcohol bottles had to be procured from local repositories and reused. More adventurous was the medicine-by-mail, which the two practiced in 1885 after Higinbotham moved to Lethbridge and patients there awaited the arrival of Dr. Mewburn.

In When The West Was Young JD talks often of the legendary and most beloved Dr Mewburn including a chapter describing a trip he took with Mewburn down the MacKenzie River to the Arctic in 1928.

In the 1920s my father, a medical student, worked summers aboard Hudson Bay Company freighters on the Mackenzie. In 1977 he received the following letter from JD's son, Norman.

Norman L. Higinbotham,M.D.
1435 Lexington Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10028

November 9,1977,

Dear Arthur:-

My sister Phyllis in Preston was rummaging through some old papers of our father's and ran across some old negatives of pictures that he took when he went "down" the McKenzie river in 1928. That is about fifty years ago and, as you mentioned that you had spent some time on the McKenzie and recognized some of the places that father had mentioned in his book "When The West Was Young" , I thought that you might recognize some of these shots and might be interested. Father took all the pictures so does not appear in any of them but Frank Mewburn is easily recognizable in some of them. (by the handle bar mustache)...


Yours sincerely,

Norman.

You can compare it with a slideshow of the Haig brothers' 1922-23 Mackenzie River Adventures.

Do you recognize any of the same people or landmarks?

.

Alberta's First Pharmacist Index