J. D. moves on to Lethbridge - 1885
Lethbridge Hotel
Higinbotham's Drug Store
Circa 1885
Quotes from J.D. Higinbotham's When the West Was Young
Sketches from Trek students at Hamilton Junior High in the 1970s.
On a glorious autumn day, October 2, 1885, my brother Ed and I loaded a buckboard with a trunk and a small supply of drugs and headed for Lethbridge... we headed for the Lethbridge Hotel, which was kept by two Scotsmen, Hogg and Henderson. While larger, and a considerable improvement upon "Old Kamoose's" hostelry at Macleod, it was, nevertheless, a pretty crude affair.
The rooms, according to the custom of those days, were divided by cotton partitions; these were but seven feet high, upstairs, so that one, standing on a chair, could see from one end of the building to the other.
"Tenderfeet" who left their shoes outside their room doors to be shined had them thrown back through the transoms, as likely as not, and the shoes hit their owners on the head, if the latter were not good dodgers.
The bed-posts ... stood — for a thousand excellent reasons — in former tomato tins half-filled with kerosene.

Even these precautions did not entirely discourage "the pestilence that walketh in darkness," as they found no difficulty in scaling the cotton walls and ceilings and from the latter turning handsprings upon the unsuspecting victims below.

Alberta's First Pharmacist Index