DOCTOR’S ORDERS
Dr. Isaac Coates and Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer first met at Fort Riley, Kansas, at the outset of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock’s 1867 campaign against the Cheyennes—Custer’s introduction to the Indian wars. “The first thing I noted about [him]…was his laugh, which, soon after I entered the room, burst forth volcanolike until the very windows shook,” Coates wrote of Custer in April 1867. “There was an intellectual vigor, a whole-souled manliness and an indomitable energy expressed in that laugh.” Assigned to the campaign, the doctor would shortly see more of and come to befriend the colonel.
Isaac Taylor Coates was born in Coatesville. Pa., on March 17, 1834, to a Pennsylvania family with deep roots and a good repute if little money. He taught school to pay his way through medical school and earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1858. After making several trans-Atlantic crossings as surgeon aboard the packet ship Great Western for the Black Ball Line of passenger vessels, he served as a physician on various Union Navy ships during the Civil War. On March 22, 1865, Coates married Mary Penn-Gaskel, a descendant of Pennsylvania founder and namesake William Penn. That fall he received a commission from Pennsylvania Governor Andrew G. Curtin, and he served through year’s end as assistant surgeon to the 77th Pennsylvania Infantry, then on Reconstruction duty in Texas. Isaac and Mary had three children (two of whom died in infancy), but he spent most of his life away from home. Descendants surmise he loved his wife but disliked her snobbish family. For much of 1866 he remained on Reconstruction duty in the South as an acting surgeon with the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands.
In February 1867, during one of his rare visits home to Chester, Pa., a restless Coates wrote to U.S. Army Surgeon General Joseph Barnes, offering his services as a surgeon for one or two years in “the territories.” Quickly accepted, he was directed to report for duty at Fort Riley,.