California Biographies

Transcribed by Peggy Hooper

This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives 
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm

Source:
History of the state of California and biographical record of the San Joaquin 
Valley, California. An historical story of the state's marvelous growth from 
its earliest settlement to the present time.
Prof. James Miller Guinn , A. M.
The Chapman Publishing Co., Chicago 1905
Notes: Missing Page: 865-866,983-984,1175-1176


RICHARD HENRY ENDICOTT, M. D. During the twenty-nine years Dr. Richard Henry 
Endicott has pursued the practice of medicine in California, he has been known not only for 
his skill and assiduity as a physician, but also for the genial urbanity of his manners, his liter- 
ary taste and talent, and for his popularity as a member of its social circles. He has gained pro- 
fessional eminence by none of the arts of the charlatan, neither has he sought it in special lines 
of practice. He has been content to follow the beaten track in which physicians educated in the 
highest sense of the regular school, and loyal to its ethical code, seek rather to merit recognition 
by their knowledge and skill, than to gain notoriety by the more questionable methods by which 
less meritorious practitioners find a short cut to fame and fortune. Few, engrossed in the absorb- 
ing occupations of life, appreciate the patience, the self-denying application, the weight of care 
and anxiety, and the enormous responsibility which attends the life of the meritorious phy- 
sician. It is the pride of the many families which have come to regard Dr. Endicott as an integral 
part of their households, that he belongs to and adorns this class of professional men. 

It is pleasing to note that Dr. Endicott belongs to the only American aristocracy, that of brains 
and birth. An ennobling ancestry set up in his childish heart an ideal which the years have not 
diminished or changed, and which has served as a spur in overcoming obstacles and discouraging 
drawbacks. Born in Ridgely, Platte county, Mo., October 9, 1845, he is a lineal descendant of 
Governor John Endicott of Massachusetts, that zealous Puritan, Indian fighter and executive, 
who was born in Dorchester, England, in 1589, and who died in Boston, Mass., March 15, 1665. 
Later members of the family made their way to Virginia, where Joseph Endicott, the paternal 
great-grandfather of the doctor was born, and from which state he emigrated to Bourbon coun- 
ty, Ky., in the early days of its plantation supremacy. His son William, the next in line of succes- 
sion, was born in Bourbon county, as was also his son, Richard Bohannan Endicott, the father 
of Richard Henry. William Endicott moved from Bourbon to Henry county, Ky., later mak- 
ing his home in Platte county. Mo., where he conducted farming until his death. Dr. Endi- 
cott 's mother, formerly Dieza L. Cartwright, was a niece of that famous Methodist Episcopal cir- 
cuit preacher, Peter Cartwright, who flourished in the latter part of the eighteenth and fore 
part of the nineteenth centuries. She was a daughter of Isaac Cartwright, a planter of North 
Carolina, where she was born, and from there she went overland with horse teams to Missouri. 
Richard Endicott made a fair success of farming in Platte county, reared his family of four sons 
and two daughters, three of whom are living, and spent his declining years on a farm in Clay- 
county, where his life ended just as the Civil war burst in fury over the land in 1861. Two 
of his sons entered the medical profession, J. M., the oldest, practicing for many years in Oakdale, 
this state, where his death occurred. 

Dr. Endicott is one of the many successful men of to-day who had their characters set and 
their thoughts turned into serious and responsible channels by the Civil war. When the call 
for volunteers broke into the occupations of men, he was a hard-working farmer lad with little 
thought of the future, and at the time of his discharge in St. Louis, July 6, 1865, he was still 
a youth, whose nineteen years would scarcely seem to warrant the serious and earnest outlook 
upon life. Enlisting in Company K, Eighteenth Missouri Volunteer Infantry, in 1862, he was 
mustered in at Macon, Mo., and after serving six months was taken ill and discharged for dis- 
ability. Enlisting in 1863 in Company A, Fourth Missouri Cavalry, he participated in the second 
battle of Springfield, January 8, 1863; the battle of Jefferson City, Mo.; of Marshalltown; Big 
Blue ; Little Blue ; besides numerous skirmishes and cavalry dashes, and spent the winter of 1864 
in quarters at Sedalia, Mo. When peace settled over the country he returned to his home in 
Missouri and attended Ridgely Academy, completing the course in 1868. A closely following 
experience was a journey to Colorado as a contractor on the Union Pacific Railway in Wy- 
oming, and after the completion of the road he returned to Missouri and began to study medi- 
cine under his brother, J. M. Endicott. At the same time he engaged in the drug business, and 
in 1871 removed his store to Peru, Kans., where he continued in the store until entering the Col- 
lege of Physicians and Surgeons at Keokuk, Iowa, from which he was graduated in the class 
of 1875. 

At the outset of his professional career Dr. Endicott wisely chose California as his most 
likely field of effort, practicing in Hollister from the fall of 1875 until 1876. and then locating in 
Darwin, Inyo county, where he remained a few months. He next located in Sacramento, and 
from there he removed to Bakersfield in 1877, assuming the position of superintendent and phy- 
sician of the county hospital. For five years he practiced medicine in Riovista, Solano county, 
and in 1883 took a much needed rest in the east, visiting different cities and hospitals, and taking 
a course at a hospital in St. Louis. Returning to California in 1884, he practiced in Gilroy 
until 1886, and for the following seven years worked up a large practice in Oakdale. In 1893 
he located in Stockton, from which headquarters he followed mining in Tuolumne and Eldorado 
counties, becoming interested as organizer and promoter in several large properties. He was a 
member of the company which opened the Red Cloud mine, near Plymouth, organized the Red 
Cloud Company and opened the North Star and Black Warrior mines in Tuolumne county. He 
also became interested in the Noonday mine in Tuolumne county, which they mined for several 
seasons, and a quarter of which he still owns. In 1901 the doctor settled in Riovista, duplicated 
his former success until 1904, in which year he became a resident of Oakdale, to which he 
brought a splendid reputation for erudition and ability. Dr. Endicott has a son by his former 
marriage, Edwin E., who shares his professional tendency, and is now a practicing surgeon of 
Jackson, Cal. He was educated in the public schools and graduated from the Kentucky School 
of Medicine in Louisville in 1894. In Stockton Dr. Endicott married for his second wife, Lulu 
Bechtol, a native of Clark county, Mo., and the mother of two children : Jessie, a graduate of 
the Stockton high school, and Albert. Dr. Endicott is a Mason and Knight of Pythias, and in 
politics is a Republican. His intellectual character is marked by strong qualities and positive 
convictions, which are tempered by kindly feeling and sympathy for the weak, while his profes- 
sional endowments are of the kind which have tended to inspire confidence in his ability and a 
retention of his services as long as they were available in a given locality. He is a sincere and 
high-minded gentleman, proud of his good name, his many and loyal friends and the success 
which has been so fairly and strenuously won.