(25 April 1861-22 March 1935), physician. (Dr H. J. McDonald; name recorded at baptism: Ewen McDonald) Born in Alexandria, GC. Parents: Allan J. Macdonald (Wheelwright) and his wife Mary McPhee. In Alexandria, he attended the separate school and high school. He graduated in medicine from McGill University in April 1885. An obituary stated that “His first practice [as a physician] was in the lumber camps of Wisconsin,” though perhaps what is meant is only that he had a village practice in the lumber regions (probably at Chelsea), where many of his patients would have been lumber workers. At any rate, many Glengarrians of Dr McDonald’s generation who settled in the United States permanently began by working in the lumber world of Michigan or Wisconsin, and then went on to the rest of the United States, and Dr McDonald would only have been unusual in being a physician who followed this path. It has also been said that he practised medicine in Canada for a few years in the pre-Butte period of his life.

     Then in April 1891 he settled in the bustling frontier mining town of Butte, Montana, which was to be his home for the remainder of his life. With a Dr Freund, he for some years operated the Boston & Montana hospital in Meaderville, which was a working class area (destroyed now, by the extension of mining operations) of Butte. He was also, afterwards, in practice for a time with a Dr Frederick W. McCrimmon (1871-1 Dec. 1921), but it has not been determined whether Dr McCrimmon, a native of London, Ont., had any GC family links. In April 1931, Dr McDonald was honoured at an impressive banquet to mark the 40th anniversary of his arrival in Butte. He died at his home in Butte. Roman Catholic. (children surviving him: 3) Though in poor health for some time, he seems to have continued his practice, or some part of it, to the end. His wife, Carrie LeMere, who was born in 1868, and to whom he was married at Minneapolis, 11 July 1889, long survived him to die in 1963. Dr McDonald’s last visit to GC was about 8 years before his death. A visit of 1912 is aso on record. (Glengarry News 27 Sept. 1912)

     Dr McDonald had the privilege of sharing intimately, during more than four decades, in the rich and turbulent life of one of the great mining cities of the world, the ever-memorable Butte, built at the “Richest Hill on Earth.” Butte was the home also of a good many Glengarrians who had gone there to seek work in the mining industries–like some of the lumber towns of Michigan and Wisconsin, it was one of the particular centres of GC settlement in the United States. The greatest concentration of Glengarrians in Butte was, in strictly approximate terms, from c. 1890 or a little earlier, till c. 1910. And in Butte also lived the artist E. S. Paxson, who drew the illustrations for Glengarry School Days. And see also James Grant (mine foreman).

     On his death, Dr McDonald was described in the Butte press as a “pioneer Butte physician,” the phrase appearing at least three times. It was thought also at this time that he was “Butte’s oldest physician in point of residence and practice,” and that he had been physician at the birth of “more of Butte’s younger generation than any other local physician.” We learn from these press notices also that Dr McDonald took pride in being “one of Butte’s best dressed men.” He was devoted to horses, and at one time he kept a stable of thoroughbreds. Every year he visited Kentucky for the Kentucky Derby. “In his early-day practice he could always be recognized as he drove along with a beautiful team.” In the fall of 1896, the Munro & McIntosh carriage firm of Alexandria shipped one of its cutters to him in Butte. (Glengarry News 20 Nov. 1896)

     Allowing for the expected silences and exaggerations, the impression that emerges from the notices of Dr McDonald on his death is that he was a soft-spoken, unaggressive man, tenacious, hard working, dutiful and kind, and widely known and genuinely liked and respected. It appears, further, from these sources that he had standing (as, admittedly, many well tried physicians had in his day) as a wise man whose opinion on a very wide variety of life’s non-medical problems was sincerely sought and afterwards actually valued. An editorial of tribute records that “gentle and sensitive” though he was as a professional man, he was also “a man’s man.” If he had business and political interests and involvements, they do not appear to have been strong. However, an early source (Progressive Men) mentions him as sympathetic to the Democratic Party, though himself politically inactive.

     Dr McDonald must have been, among the residents of Butte, the best known Glengarrian– though most of the Butte population would have known him, of course, as a physician, not as the native of a particular Canadian county. We may guess Glengarrians in Butte had reason to pride themselves on their respectability! After President Theodore Roosevelt was entertained in this wild mining town in 1903, he confided the estimate to a friend that of the 100 men who were his fellow guests at a Butte civic banquet, at least half had killed enemies or attempted assassinations, and he spoke of their “hard, strong, crafty faces.”

     Dr McDonald’s friends included Archibald Mark Chisholm.

Pors, editorials of tribute, Montana Standard (Butte, Mont.) 23, 24, 27 March 1935, The Butte Daily Post, 23 March 1935 * Glengarry News 29 March 1935 * St. Finnan’s CRNI, II, 391 * his gravestone, St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Butte * Butte city directories * biog. in Progressive Men of the State of Montana (Chicago, 190–?) 290-291 * Dr McCrimmon: death certificate, Silver Bow County; The Butte Miner 2-4 Dec. 1921 * banquet, Montana Standard 26 April 1931, with portrait * Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (2001) [Vol. II of his life of Roosevelt] 233-234: the whole passage is a wonderful depiction of the rough side of Butte in bygone days * attending McGill medical school, Cornwall Reporter 15 Oct. 1881