Veterinarian Stories

Just a couple random stories about what our favorite veterinarian, Mike O'Hearn, was up to in the late summer of 1918.

1. The Horse Fell Dead

One August morning, Mike drove south of Deep River to the Ted Johnson farm. Ted had asked him to look at a horse of his that was "acting queerly" and losing weight. Eyeballing the horse, Mike could see nothing obvious wrong with it, so he began a closer examination. He pried the creature's mouth open and looked inside, while Ted stood nearby watching. Suddenly Ted yelled, "Look out, Mike!" and all at once the horse fell over dead.

Having narrowly escaped being crushed, Mike apparently was determined to solve the mystery, so he autopsied the horse. When he opened the chest, he found "layer upon layer of fat around the heart."

2. Karma Is a Cow

A frantic call summoned Mike to the Liverpool area on the afternoon of September 14 — cows shot! He hurried out and found seven gunshot victims, all of them cows belonging to local residents. Mike did what he could for his patients, but one died that evening, and two more the next morning.

The shooter turned out to be one William H. Hayes. Although he worked as a barber in Gary, his home was a tent on the banks of the Deep River near Liverpool. He lived with a female companion. They had planted a garden nearby: there lay the source of the trouble. The neighbors' cows kept getting into William's garden. When they got in yet again that September afternoon, William flew into a rage, grabbed his rifle and went on a rampage.

That proved to be his downfall. He was immediately arrested, of course, for damaging the neighbors' property (the cows). But once the authorities directed their attention to him, they began to discover more unsavory facts about him. First of all, his female companion was not his wife. His wife was in Chicago and was divorcing him on grounds of desertion; he had abandoned her six years earlier. William and his girlfriend had apparently come out from Chicago to live together without benefit of marriage — an illegal and immoral purpose for which William had brought a woman across a state line in violation of the Mann Act.

Furthermore, a little checking with the draft board revealed that William had applied for exemption from military service, stating that he had a wife who needed his support. That was false — his wife in Chicago had lived without his support for six years, and though his girlfriend may have needed his support, she wasn't his wife.

In short, William found himself in big trouble. If only he had shared his garden with the cows, or found a less brutal way of driving them out, he might have stayed on for years in his little country love-nest. Now he was facing prison. The cows had the last laugh.


Sources:
♦ "Barber Shoots Several Cows Near Liverpool, Gets In Trouble." Hobart News 19 Sept. 1918.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 5 Sept. 1918.
♦ "Shoots Seven Cows." Hobart Gazette 20 Sept. 1918.