Woman surmounted many obstacles
to become a doctor:
Bethenia Owens-Adair dared
do what few women ever had
by David Loftus
[first published in the Roseburg, Oregon
News-Review, February 21, 1988]
Bethenia Owens pioneered the role of women in medicine
photo courtesy of the Douglas County Museum
There could be no doubt about it. The invitation to the autopsy was meant as a challenge, not as a compliment. But Bethenia Owens had worked long and hard to get here.
She was a divorced, single mother who had run a millinery and dressmaking shop in Roseburg for five years, and now she was determined to become a doctor. There was nothing to do but go through with this charade.
Born in Van Buren County, Missouri in 1840, the second daughter of Thomas and Sarah Owens, Bethenia Angelina Owens crossed the plains with her family in the first wagon train to travel west of Fort Hall, the Hudson's Bay Co. trading post near present-day Pocatello, Idaho. That was in 1843.
The Owens family settled on the Clatsop plain, not far from the tiny trading settlement of Astoria. Four more children were born to the family in the next seven years. Bethenia received no education beyond three months with a traveling teacher who came to the neighborhood when she was 11.
In 1853, Thomas Owens decided to move to the Umpqua Valley to raise his growing herd (then more than 100 head of cattle), and he settled on the west side of the river, running a lucrative ferry service in the winter. He and his wife also bore two more children there.
Soon after the family's arrival in Roseburg, it was decided that Bethenia should marry. A man named Legrand H. Hill was chosen, and the two were wed on May 4, 1854 by the Rev. Thomas Stephens. They settled in a 12-by-14-foot log cabin on a 320-acre plot four miles from her father's home that Hill had purchased on credit. Bethenia was just 14 years old.
The couple did not prosper, and within a year they sold their interest in the property back to the previous owner and Hill decided to follow gold prospectors to Yreka, California. There, an aunt of her husband who did not think highly of her nephew took Bethenia under her wing and taught her some of the skills of a seamstress. Aunt Kelly even offered to take care of Bethenia's son George, who was born April 17, 1856, but the 16-year-old mother refused.
"Mr Hill neither drank nor used tobacco, but, as his aunt said, he simply idled away his time, doing a day's work here and there, but never continuing anything," Bethenia was to write in her autobiography. "Then, too, he had a passion for trading and speculating, always himself coming out a loser...."
Perhaps hearing that things were not going well, her parents came down in July 1857 and talked the young couple into returning to Roseburg. Even before they got home, Hill had put all their money in a brickmaking venture that collapsed, and Bethenia came down with typhoid.
Thomas Owens allowed his daughter to pick a plot for a new house, but when he offered Hill a team and manpower to help move lumber in, Hill demanded a deed to the land. Owens and his wife agreed they had given the couple one good start, and after 3-1/2 years Hill had only a horse to show. Owens said he would put the deed in the name of his daughter and grandson.
This enraged Hill, who bargained for a lot in town and began to build there. Bethenia, convalescing with an ill and fretful infant, told her parents she could not stand her marriage any longer.
Her mother, she reported much later, said, "Any man that could not make a living with the good starts and help he has had, will never make one," and felt Bethenia should leave him.
But her father wept, and said, "Oh, Bethenia, there has never been a divorce in my family, and I hope there never will be. I want you to go back and try again and do your best. After that, if you cannot possibly get along, come home."
Bethenia returned to her husband, secure in the knowledge she would be protected if she chose to leave. She watched Hill spank his son unmercifully and try to discipline his appetite. One morning in March after he threw George on the bed, she picked up and went home.
This is how she described the incident in her 1905 memoir. The circuit court divorce papers, however, still in the archives at the Douglas County Courthouse, say that on Feb. 23, 1858, "your complainant was beaten and driven from her home by said defendant and told by said defendant not to return again."
The complaint further alleges that in the 18 months preceding, "Beatheany A. Hill" was subjected to "the most humiliating and cruel treatment wholly inconsistent with and in violation of every duty" that Hill owed to her as wife and mother.
Bethenia's suit asked that her marriage be dissolved, that her husband be compelled to pay a reasonable amount for the support of her son and herself, and that her name be changed back to "Beatheany A. Owens."
The defendant's reply denied all the allegations and charged Bethenia with neglecting her child and acting "imprudently" with a man named Douglas and a man named Thomas A. Avery.
When a neighbor was told that Bethenia did not accuse her husband of adultery, she told Bethenia, "go back, and beg him on your knees to receive you -- for the scriptures forbid the separation of man and wife for any other cause than adultery."
Bethenia replied, "I think there are other things quite as bad as that.... I was never born to be struck by mortal man."