James Moses Israel Putnam Coulter

   Another name for James was Mose.

  General Notes:

1870s Frontier Doctoring & a Scorned Nurse's Revenge
The full name of the second son of my great-grandparents Samuel Coulter & Maria Bash was James Moses Israel Putnam Coulter (James for his paternal grandfather; Moses from the Bible; Israel Putnam for the Revolutionary War general). Moses signed his name "J.M. Coulter." He painted houses and barns and was also a wallpaper hanger. His hand was so steady he could eat shelled peas with a table knife---which fascinated young children at the dinner table. Mose never married. He is buried in the Coulter plot just east of his parents at Conrad.

When Uncle Mose was in his teens and past puberty, he contracted mumps, which "went down on him"---the common expression for painfully-enlarged testicles, a possible side effect of mumps. We're talking 1860s or '70s in frontier Iowa, north of Marshalltown. To end the pain, the frontier doctor castrated Mose, who was held down on the kitchen table in the Coulter cabin by his father and brothers. Talk about "the good old days!" If you were a young boy, you hoped you got mumps BEFORE puberty set in.

Saturday night dances were held at one of the larger farmhouses, and all the neighbors were welcome. Mose was standing on the sidelines, watching the dancers, when Laura McDonald, a girl who was sweet on him, came up and pretended to faint in front of him, expecting him to catch her in his arms. He didn't; he just stood there and let Laura fall to the floor.

Years later, Laura got her revenge. Mose was in the Marshalltown hospital. The nurses wanted him to get out of bed so they could change his bed sheets. He refused. The nurses called for the head nurse, who was none other than Miss Laura McDonald. "Mose Coulter," she said, "you get out of bed this instant, or I'll climb under the sheets with you!" You never saw Mose move so fast to comply!

And what became of those neighborhood dances north of Marshalltown? Several men started bringing hip flasks full of liquor to liven up the friendly events. The flasks emptied, tempers flared, fights erupted, and the Saturday night dances ended for good.

After Mose's parents died, he stayed on in the two-story Coulter home on Washington Street on the west edge of Conrad. His local younger sisters didn't approve of his disregard for housekeeping, and they would descend upon the house every spring and give it their idea of a thorough housecleaning. Finally they refused to do it anymore; they said Mose had to move out, so the house could be sold (& they could split the proceeds). His brother Aaron took him into his home at 4 East Webster Street in Marshalltown, Iowa. But when Mose was sitting at the kitchen table while his sister-in-law Etta prepared a meal, he made some comments that alarmed her, and she demanded Aaron remove Mose from the house. Her young granddaughter Doris lived in the house, plus young female schoolteachers boarded there. So Aaron---probably with a doctor's order---took his older brother to the state mental ward at Independence, Iowa. Mose later died there, and his body was returned to Conrad for burial.