Couriers’ duties included fetching patients from cabins, weighing babies, delivering medicine, cleaning saddles and bridles, and escorting any guests who rode the routes between FNS outposts. In the early years, “there was no way for nurses to send word back and forth from the cabins to the headquarters, so … taking messages was one of the main things that couriers did,” said volunteer Katherine Trowbridge Arpee in a 1978 oral history.
Volunteers also cared for the horses. Before coming to work, they might have known how to groom, saddle and bridle their mounts, but they likely didn’t know barn management or veterinary care. “And these horses were valuable assets, trained and skilled [at] navigating that terrain,” Cockerham says. “[For] these young women, that was a lot of responsibility, and there were stories of having to diagnose [the animals], flipping through veterinary books and trying to keep the horses alive.”
Henning recalled one night when she was sent to check on a nurse-midwife who had been gone for longer than 12 hours. “I can still feel the blackness of that night,” she wrote for the Courier-Journal in 1938, “without a star in the sky or a glimmer from the moon. We could not even see our horses’ heads in front of us. … The mountain horses are wonderfully sure-footed in the dark as well as the daylight.” In 1934, Cincinnatian Mary Elizabeth Rogan told her parents about riding “the most terrific descent I’ve ever experienced,” on a cold day when she’d already been lost for hours. “I think I must be getting pretty tough,” she wrote in a letter home.
Couriers could wear tape advertising their affiliation with the FNS on their sleeves, but this wasn’t usually necessary, as locals quickly started to recognize the horses and volunteers. “Taking patients from the clinic to their cabins was often a two days’ journey,” courier Mary MacCaughey told the Chicago Herald and Examiner in 1932. “Quite different from riding in the park on a bright morning!”
“They got to wear pants, they got to act independently,” says Goan. “And for sheltered young women, that’s a great experience—a defining experience, I would say, in their lives.”
By the early 1930s, FNS had a long waiting list for courier postings. When one former courier gave birth to a baby girl, she signed her daughter up to serve in 1957.