Wearing only light coats and shivering in the frigid air, the woman and child gazed in wonder at the small, rugged town on the prairie, snow piled high in the streets. Three weeks after boarding the emigrant ship and saying farewell to their native Scotland, mother and daughter completed their journey, arriving in Dakota Territory on a bitterly cold winter day in December of 1887. A summons for help had decided the future for that small family, bringing them to the American Midwest to a train stop named Mitchell.
While waiting to be met, the woman worried about her sister Isabella Diehl, a recent widow with a farm to work and three wee bairns to raise. Surely, reasoned the woman, this newly settled territory will welcome her skills as a trained nurse and midwife, allowing her to practice her profession and to help ease her sister’s burdens. Soon after their reunion at the train station, Jean Todd followed Isabella through “narrow shoveled paths, down wooden sidewalks, past scattered wooden houses,” with Todd reflecting that she “had come to a world of new things and strange experiences.”
The expression “pioneer nurse” describes Jean Todd, not because she moved to an area of pioneers, but because she entered the nursing profession as a working class woman in an era when training in medicine was rare for all women, regardless of class, and because she established herself as one of the first professional nurses in Dakota Territory. With courage, confidence, and persistence, Todd developed her practice, served her community for thirty years, and built a contented life on the Dakota prairie.
Working as a nurse and midwife in the Plankinton area, Todd retired in 1918, at the age of seventy-two. She lived out her life in Aurora County, passing away fourteen years later. Her story, written by Ruth Page Jones, has been recently published in the South Dakota History journal, issued Fall of 2017. Jones is donating two copies of the journal to the Plankinton Library and another copy to the Aurora County Historical Society so that local citizens can learn about a remarkable woman that once lived in Aurora County.
Jean Todd lived a full life in Scotland before emigrating at the age of forty-one years. Born to Thomas Todd and Jean Arklie Todd in Edinburgh on January 31, 1846, Todd’s world changed when her father died in her seventeenth year and she became responsible for supporting her mother and three younger siblings. First employed as a linen weaver and then, at the age of twenty-two years, as a warder of the Women’s Division of the Fife County Prison, Todd belonged to the working class. Three years later, Todd trained to become a nurse at the Dundee Royal Infirmary, in Dundee, Scotland, from 1881 to 1884.
When Todd arrived in the United States in December of 1887, she would have been one of only a few trained and experienced nurses practicing in the United States. Although the first Nightingale school of nursing, named after Florence Nightingale, opened in 1860, the profession of nursing in the United States did not begin until twelve years later, when five schools of nursing opened in New England in 1872 and 1873. The same year Todd began her nurse’s training, in 1881, the first school for nurses in the Midwest opened with eight pupils. When Todd received her certificate three years later, the early nursing schools throughout the United States had only graduated about six hundred nurses total, increasing the graduate count to ten thousand by 1900. By the mid-1890s, only a few trained nurses, some educated overseas, were practicing their profession in South Dakota.
At the close of their first winter in the country, Todd and her daughter moved with Isabella’s family to the Diehl farm near the town of Plankinton. Finding few people with the need or funds to hire a nurse, Todd moved to Chicago to look for better nursing opportunities. After working for eleven months in that city, Todd returned to Dakota Territory for a visit. This time, finding enough work in Plankinton to earn a living, she chose to stay and build a life in that rural community. In 1890, she married George Saville, a widower with six children, who had been one of the very early homesteaders in Aurora County.
When Todd started practicing her profession in Plankinton, physicians were primarily general practitioners who hitched horse to buggy at all hours of the day and night to attend to their patients in their homes. Nine doctors registered to practice in the county before 1892, but some had already moved away, leaving only a few to cover the entire county. Most doctors had never worked with a trained nurse and, at first, the doctors in Plankinton were reluctant to work with Todd. Before and after marrying, Todd provided nursing care in a wide area around Plankinton, attending many births and caring for the sick. Her daughter noted that “one graduation class at Plankinton were all ‘her’ babies but one.” She also offered her services laying out the dead. In her memoir, she wrote, “I made no charge for this friendly service, but I met many nice people and made many friends through it.”
The journal story provides more detail about early nurses training, medical care during the first decades of settlement in Aurora County, and how Todd ministered to the health needs in Aurora County. Her story, set in time and place, enriches the history of the early years of nursing and of professional women in the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century.
It Happened Right Here: Pioneer Nurse, by Ruth Page Jones, Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, November 21, 2017.
Note: The Fall issue of the South Dakota History, vol. 47, no. 3, can also be purchased for $10.00 at South Dakota Historical Society Press.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 