This is a really good question.
And I suppose there are all kinds of answers.
From my own point of view I watched people believe in the church I was raised for example, that going to doctors was somehow bad.
As a direct result of this many people I knew growing up died.
As a young natural scientist by ages 8 or 10 years old I thought to myself: "Why didn't these people go to doctors so they wouldn't die?"
But, even my father and grandfather were like this where they just mostly didn't go to doctors unless they needed stitches or broke their arms or something.
The main difference between my Grandfather and father was that Dad believed in God but I'm not sure my Grandfather did and he made fun of my Dad for going to a church whenever he saw him.
But, the one thing that they shared in common was: "Doctors are ONLY going to kill you!" So, don't go to hospitals ever.
So, my grandfather when he got old had a mining claim in Elk City, Idaho and one day he had a D-9 Bulldozer there and decided to pull a stump with it. My Grandfather was a very stubborn and determined man. So, he had a drag line on the Bulldozer so he hooked to to the biggest boulder he could find. The other end of the line was connected to the other end of the huge bulldozer and he hooked that line around a tree stump he wanted to pull out of the ground.
This is what a newer D-9 bulldozer looks like now.
Okay, well he kept tightening the drag line from the front and the back of the bulldozer until it got taught. Then it got even tighter and it lifted the whole bulldozer up off the ground and it spun around on the drag line and trapped my Grandfather under the bulldozer upside down. He was there for at least a day until someone found him with diesel and hot radiator water running over him.
Then they took him to the hospital and he had a collapsed lung and broken ribs.
Well. He had someone smuggle Camel cigarettes into his hospital room and his pistol. So, when they told him he couldn't smoke in the hospital he told them he was re-inflating his lungs by smoking a cigarette. Once he had re-inflated his lungs he pulled on his boots while holding the pistol on people and walked out of the hospital. Since he was born in the 1870s people sort of expected this kind of behavior from Kansas cowboys like he was. He walked out of the hospital and no one stopped him and he didn't go back once he got his boots on.
That was always important to him "To die with his boots on" like a lot of Cowboys.
He was a very impressive person any way you look at it whether you thought he was right or wrong. This took place around 1960 or so and he lived until 1970 when I was 22 years old. I saw him before he went over a cliff in his panel truck in Idaho in the fall of 1970 in Seattle Washington. Though he survived this when his panel truck went into a river there near Elk City, he died within a few days because he wouldn't let them take him to a hospital. So, I guess he died with his boots on in his Cabin on his mining claim somewhere in his 90s.
He was a very impressive character. You don't really meet people like this who survived the wild west anymore.
MY father and my grandfather (his father) were likely the most impressive people I met as a young man.
They just don't make them like this anymore.
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