(George Jarvis wrote the following personal notes about his father)

Your grandfather after the Civil War had his first experience in business for himself by buying horses in Illinois and shipping them by rail to Philadelphia for sale. Later he went to Illinois joined by his brother Millard. They bought a covered wagon and traveled from Illinois and crossed the state of Iowa. Iowa was then mostly prairie. They did odd jobs in small towns and on farms, mostly where they used their horses, hauling, grading roads, etc. When they got to the Missouri River, Millard left on his own and your grandfather took the contract of furnishing gravel to a railroad company that was building a bridge across the Missouri River.

Your Grandfather Jarvis had a good set of dental instruments. Three forceps of different sizes. One, when handles were attached, was 2 feet long. Instruments for cutting off sharp corners of teeth and rasps for smoothing sharp edges. Also an instrument to hold the mouth of a horse open. One operation necessitated the horse to be thrown. These were cases where a large molar tooth was broken off and abscessed roots were left imbedded in the jaw hole. This operation was performed by drilling a hole in the jaw bone to the base of tooth and then knocking it out with blunt instrument. Grandfather had a harness for throwing horses. After the horse was thrown it was always necessary for someone to put their knee on horses neck and then hold the horses head straight up at right angles to the ground.

(Note from William Jarvis: This task of holding the horse during the operation often fell to my father, George Jarvis!)

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