BLACKHERBALS.COM
Pandemic
Lori Goodson
Staff Writer
The Manhattan Mercury
Sunday, March 1, 1998
http://www2.okstate.edu/ww1hist/flu.html
Almost exactly 80 years ago today, a vicious strain of influenza--which would
go on to kill millions as it roared around the world--quietly emerged at Fort
Riley's Camp Funston.
"It came in silently...," said 98-year-old Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux of
Manhattan, who told of the epidemic in her recently published autobiography, Any
Given Day: The Life and Times of Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux.
An 18-year-old then, she was working in the quartermaster laundry at Fort Riley
when the flu struck. "We lost lots of them," Foveaux said of the
soldiers and workers at Fort Riley. "They came in so fast and furious. We'd
be working with someone one day, and they'd go home because they didn't feel
good, and by the next day they were gone. Every day we wondered who was going to
be next."
The flu began in March 1918 when a mess cook, Pvt. Albert Gitchell, complained
of a sore throat and achiness as he reported to sick call at Camp Funston, a
large cantonment constructed just months before and housing 60,000 soldiers.
"The next day there were 40 more of them," said Gaylynn S. Childs,
director of the Geary County Historical Society Museum at Junction City. A week
later, 522, cases had been reported at Fort Riley in what would be the mildest
of the flu's three waves. Forty-six died at Fort Riley that spring.
Around the time the flu itself was dying out, the 89th Division--and the
influenza--were deployed to France during World War 1, Childs said. And the
American troops helped spread the disease to the English, Germans, French and
Spanish. The flu gained its name because Spain was one of the hardest hit
countries, with its king almost dying from it, she said.
From there, the flu went on through the Middle East and on around the world,
eventually returning to the United States as the troops also came home for its
second wave through Kansas.
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At Fort Riley, the Kansas Building, pictured
above, was used to house sick and dying soldiers. (Photo courtesy Fort Riley
Museum)
By fall 1918, Kansas and Fort Riley were heading into their deadliest
confrontation with the flu. "The soldiers were going so fast," Foveaux
recalled. "They were piling them up in a warehouse until they could get
coffins for them." The dying continued at such a pace that morticians
couldn't keep up. There were piles of wooden coffins, and the bodies were
eventually wrapped and put outside, where they froze and were stacked "like
cord wood," Childs said.
Foveaux said she and others wore masks and tried everything that was suggested
to keep from getting the flu. "We tried to be careful what we touched or
what we ate," she said. "We were frightened to move, really." In
September 1918, there were 133 cases of the flu in Kansas. Six days later, that
number had climbed to 1,100. By mid-October, it had escalated to 12,000 cases,
and communities across Kansas were reeling from its effects. At Camp Funston
alone, there were 14,000 reported cases and 861 deaths during the first three
weeks of October. The Kansas death toll had climbed to 12,000 by the end of the
year.
Foveaux said the flu was devastating. She recalls one entire Manhattan family
wiped out by the disease. Others, including her sister, had mild cases of it and
soon recovered. The flu targeted young, healthy people. "It would strike
down people in the prime of their lives," Childs said. Schools, churches
and businesses were closed, and the sick were being cared for in makeshift
facilities. A call was put out for women to assist with nursing the sick, who
were being treated at homes and barracks that were turned into temporary
hospitals.
"Fall crops were ready to be harvested, but there were no field hands to
get the crops in," Childs said. "It was an agricultural
disaster." The medical community struggled to keep up with those infected.
"The doctors and nurses in most communities were very thinly
stretched," Childs said. She said two or three of the area's doctors were
serving overseas, so those left in the area were forced to handle the workload.
She tells of an Alta Vista country doctor who traveled for six weeks caring for
the sick, without returning home during that time. A local physician, she said,
would return home every 24 hours for a change of clothes before beginning his
rounds again.
But, as a new year was arriving, the Spanish flu was coming to an end. "By
the end of December 1918, the worst was over," Childs said. A third wave of
the Spanish flu, much less devastating than its predecessors, moved through the
state in early 1919. Foveaux was one of those who contracted the flu at that
time. She remembers working with the laundry when she first felt herself coming
down with the flu. "I began to feel hot and cold--not too good," she
said. After work, she stayed in bed with a high fever, and her doctor had told
her father she probably wouldn't make it through the night. But eventually she
regained her strength. "I was sick a month or so," she said. "I
didn't get back to work until April."
Copyright©
1998, The Manhattan Mercury. Reprinted with permission
