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Dr. Josiah L. and Hattie Phillips BY WAYNE FANEBUST
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r. Josiah L. Phillips was born in Maine, in 1835. His father was a doctor and Josiah wanted to join him in that profession. So he went to Illinois and graduated from the Rush Medical College in Chicago at the age of 21. He moved to Dubuque, Iowa, where he joined a group of businessmen that formed a town site entity known as the Western Town Company, for the purpose of creating a town at the Falls of the Big Sioux River. The company was formed in October of 1856, and soon thereafter two men were dispatched to find the Falls and layout a town site. Dr. Phillips and a party of men, including Wilmot W. Brookings, arrived at the Falls in August of 1857, and began the long, hard work of building a city from scratch, believing that settlers
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HISTORY
and merchants would come and join the enterprise. Just then the fabled Falls were part of Minnesota Territory, and as it turned out a group of speculators from St. Paul formed a company called the Dakota Land Company. These men had similar designs on the Falls, but when their party of men arrived at the roaring rapids, they discovered that their Dubuque rivals had claimed the big prize. Undaunted, the two groups decided to work together rather then fight over the matter. Since there were so few people at the town site, Dr. Phillips was unable to maintain much of a medical practice. But in February of 1858, he responded to a terrible emergency and performed an amputation of the lower legs of his friend, Wilmot W. Brookings, whose lower
extremities were frozen after a fall from his horse while crossing the Split Rock River, east of the town site. The crude surgery was done while the patient was lying on a buffalo robe in his dirt floor cabin. The surgery was successful and somehow Brookings survived and with wooden feet and a cane, continued with the work of town building. After the Civil War broke out, Dr. Phillips offered his services to the Union Army. He was appointed to the position of surgeon of 16th Iowa Infantry, to do the work of patching up wounded soldiers, and of course amputations. The 16th Iowa served under General William T. Sherman and was a part of that general’s famous Georgia march from Atlanta to Savannah. Unfortunately, Dr.
