Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (41 page)

Since Loring Miner documented this potent new strain before anyone else and treated its first victims, I contacted the Haskell Township Library in Sublette to find out where he had lived and worked.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where Miner’s old home is or who owns it now?” I asked librarian Helen Hall.

“I do,” Helen replied.

“Oh, great,” I said, grabbing a pen to write down the name. “Do you think they’d be okay with me stopping by to see it and take some photographs?”

“No,” Helen clarified, “
I
live in it.”

A few seconds passed in silence before Helen asked, “Are you still there?”

“Sorry,” I said, “I’m just thrown by the coincidence.”

“It’s a small town.”

(Indeed. Less than one square mile in size, I later found out.)

Helen said she’d be happy to show me around, and in the meantime she’d collect some additional materials about Miner.

That was weeks ago, and as I’m driving out of the Liberal airport now, I stop at a gas station to use the restroom and get my bearings.

“How far up is Sublette?” I ask the attendant.

“About thirty miles.”

“Any landmarks I should look for? I don’t want to whiz past it by mistake.”

“You won’t.”

“I’m pretty good at getting lost.”

“Trust me,” he says. “Out there you can see a can of tuna from six miles away, and if you walked up and stood on it, you could see for another ten.” (Best line of the trip, so far.) Then he adds: “If you’re really that worried, keep an eye out for the giant grain elevators.”

Half an hour later, and sure enough, there they are, a row of one-hundred-foot-tall silos across from the Sublette water tower. I turn off the highway and drive around for a few minutes before finding the library.

Inside, I meet with Helen Hall and Jamie Wright, the library’s director who also went out of her way to locate biographical material on Miner for me. There isn’t much about him, but what’s known is that Miner had migrated to Kansas from Ohio in 1887 and didn’t move to
Sublette until 1913. Although he’d bought an automobile in 1910, he often made his rounds on horseback because cars were notoriously unreliable and most roads were unpaved and often muddy. A single house call could take up to two days, and a solid meal was sometimes Miner’s only payment. Apparently the good doctor wasn’t averse to having a drink—or several—on or off the job, but the consensus seems to be that residents liked him immensely and would rather have had a slightly inebriated Dr. Miner treating them than a sober anyone else.

“Did you ever find anything of his in your home?” I ask Helen, who’s offered to drive me over to the house.

“Nothing that I’m aware of,” she says. “But other people had lived there before me.”

From the library we go east on Chouteau Avenue about six short blocks and turn right onto South Inman, just past the elementary school. We park a few doors down in front of a cozy-looking “foursquare, prairie home,” as Helen describes it, with a wraparound porch and cedar-and-rock siding. A cheerful garden gnome and two stone angels stand on the lawn.

I don’t want to impose on Helen by asking to go inside, so I stay on the front walkway and take some pictures.

“Didn’t Ernest Elliott live around here?” I ask, referring to the man who visited his brother at Camp Funston after his child—and, most likely, he, too—had been infected in February 1918.

“Right there,” Helen says, pointing to a house across from hers.

Of the three dozen largest Army posts in America, twenty-four of them were overrun with influenza cases by May 1918. The close quarters proved a perfect breeding ground for the virus, and from these bases it spread swiftly to neighboring towns.

President Woodrow Wilson’s administration, like its European counterparts, refused to acknowledge the mounting health crisis lest it dampen the country’s wartime morale. Early proposals to quarantine troops were rejected, and massive patriotic gatherings went on as planned, despite evidence that the disease was highly transmissible.
On September 28, 1918, some 200,000 people came together for a Liberty Loan rally in Philadelphia. Within three days, every hospital bed in the city was full.

Surgeon General Rupert Blue (the same man who enlisted Joseph Goldberger to defeat pellagra years earlier) dithered as fatalities surged. In September, after tens of thousands of Americans had died, Blue finally acknowledged that there might be an epidemic at hand, but his response was underwhelming; instead of galvanizing doctors and scientists across the country in a single, coordinated effort, Blue offered the public a short list of schoolmarmish dos and don’ts to prevent further infections, including “Avoid tight clothes, tight shoes, tight gloves”; “Your nose not your mouth was meant to breathe thru”; and “Food will win the war … Help by choosing and chewing your food well.”

Newspapers followed the White House’s lead, or lack thereof, and took a similar head-in-the-sand approach. “Do not even discuss influenza,” the
Philadelphia Inquirer
instructed. “Worry is useless. Talk of cheerful things.” Other papers downplayed the so-called plague as part of a “Hun plot” to stir up national hysteria. They nonetheless ran advertisements that capitalized on their readers’ growing sense of unease. “Spanish Influenza! Can you afford sudden death?” one ad asked ominously. “If not, protect your Family and Business by Life Insurance.” Car dealerships warned the public to stay off crowded street trolleys and buy an automobile instead.

When the government and media could no longer suppress that a full-fledged epidemic was raging, they took a new tack and claimed that the whole thing had been
caused
by the Germans. One high-ranking U.S. military officer suggested that enemy agents had released “Spanish influenza germs in a theatre or some other place where large numbers of persons are assembled,” and a Public Health Service representative announced that there were “authenticated cases” of this biological warfare. No proof was ever given.

With the medical community stumped on how to stem the disease, an increasingly scared and confused public ingested every conceivable
home remedy, from red-pepper sandwiches and raw garlic to shots of kerosene and sugar cubes sprinkled with turpentine. Only one real cure existed: bed rest and luck.

October 1918 was the epidemic’s deadliest month. October 1918, in fact, remains the deadliest month in American history. Influenza killed two hundred thousand men, women, and children in thirty days, and the population in 1918 was a mere third of what it is today. Never before had the United States confronted so many dead and dying in such a short period. Family members too weak or terrified to remove their deceased loved ones left them locked in bedrooms or covered in blankets on front porches. Bodies stacked up outside of funeral homes and morgues unable to process and bury the corpses. In Pennsylvania, steam shovels were brought in by the Bureau of Highways to dig mass graves. Hospitals couldn’t keep up with the parade of victims staggering into their emergency rooms. “There was a man lying on the bed,” one nurse recalled, “[and] he had stopped breathing. I don’t know whether he was dead or not, but we wrapped him in a winding sheet and left nothing but the big toe on the left foot out with a shipping tag on it to tell the man’s rank, his nearest of kin, and hometown.” Orphanages, overrun with boys and girls who’d lost both their parents, had to turn children away.

Cities hit early on by the plague tried to brace other communities for what was to come. “Hunt up your wood-workers and set them to making coffins,” one distraught sanitation worker on the East Coast implored colleagues in California. “Then take your street laborers and set them to digging graves. If you do this you will not have your dead accumulating faster than you can dispose of them.”

But until they experienced it firsthand, many city officials initially doubted the doomsayers. “If ordinary precautions are observed,” the chief health officer of Los Angeles stated in late September 1918, “there is no cause for alarm.” Forty-eight hours later, with infection rates surging, the L.A. government started shutting down schools, movie houses, churches, and synagogues.

Around the same time, San Francisco began quarantining flu
victims—but also carrying on with patriotic events. On October 11 more than fifty thousand citizens gathered in front of the Chronicle Building to hear the celebrated French tenor Lucien Muratore sing “La Marseillaise” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a show of French and American solidarity. By October 18 flu cases in San Francisco had quadrupled.

Basic services collapsed in city after city as police officers, firemen, and garbage collectors failed to show up for work. Factories emptied out and schools closed their doors. Local governments banned citizens from attending dance halls, theaters, and roller rinks, efforts that most citizens understood. Riots nearly erupted, however, when saloons and brothels were boarded up.

Some small towns warned would-be visitors to keep their distance. In Meadow, Utah, the lone public health officer drove out to the borderline and erected a makeshift sign that declared
THIS TOWN IS QUARANTINED—DO NOT STOP
. But ultimately his efforts were futile; the postman had already been infected and unknowingly spread the virus throughout Meadow.

With the threat of death ever present, people went insane with grief. A Chicago man who could no longer bear the sight of his wife and four children suffering from influenza was overheard raving, “I’ll cure them my own way!” before slitting their necks.

Throughout it all President Wilson remained silent. On October 12 he personally led a war-bond parade in Manhattan, attracting a cheering throng of twenty-five thousand. Within a week, an additional two thousand New Yorkers were dead.

After cresting in October, infections began to dip nationwide in November and then rise again one month later. Another, less punishing wave swept the country in March 1919, and then, as suddenly as the disease had appeared almost a year earlier, it was gone.

Determining with absolute certitude where, down to the square foot, influenza attacked its first victim isn’t possible. Nor is it likely that the real patient zero will ever be identified, though in all probability it was
a local farmer infected by a sick bird. But what strikes me while standing in the middle of South Inman Street and looking at this small oasis of homes surrounded by corn, milo, and wheat fields is that, within two months of Miner’s report to the Public Health Service, the virus had left Haskell County in rural Kansas and was decimating countries half a world away. Spanish flu went on to kill 675,000 Americans and at least 50 million people overseas. Other estimates put the global tally at twice that, but the final number won’t ever be known because the doctors, nurses, and coroners who normally recorded fatalities were either overworked to the point of exhaustion or dead themselves.

There’s no mention in anything I’ve read to indicate if Dr. Loring Miner ever got sick from the Spanish flu, but he definitely didn’t die from it; Miner was killed on September 30, 1935, when his car swerved off the road and struck a power-line pole outside of Sublette.

Back at the library I ask Helen and Jamie where Miner is buried, and Jamie says, “The Valley View Cemetery in Garden City, thirty miles up the road.” I hadn’t planned on going there, but I figure that while I’m in the area, it’s worth a visit.

“You can easily make it to Garden City before it gets dark,” Jamie tells me.

I thank her and Helen for all their help and head back onto U.S. 83, stopping only once to see where Miner had his car accident.

Inside Valley View’s main office a very nice woman named Tabitha gives me a cemetery directory and marks where Miner is buried. Valley View has thirteen thousand graves spread out over forty-seven acres, and within seconds of exiting the door, I’m already turned around but too embarrassed to go back in and ask which way I was supposed to walk. A truck pulls into the parking lot and, hallelujah, out steps one of the groundskeepers.

“Hey, can I ask you a quick question?”

“Sure,” he answers.

“I’m trying to find Dr. Loring Miner, and he’s supposed to be here,” I say, pointing to the highlighted section. “But I’m not sure which direction that is.”

As he looks at the map, I casually mention Miner’s small but historic role in being first to report on the influenza pandemic of 1918. “I’m traveling the country to find people and places neglected by history.”

“If you want, I can drive you over. It’s not far, and there’s something else that might interest you.”

“That’d be great, if you have the time.”

“Won’t take long. Jump in.”

When I introduce myself, he says, “Nice to meet you,” but doesn’t volunteer his name.

He asks me where I’m from.

“Washington, D.C.,” I say.

“Most people from out of state come here to see the Clutters, the family killed up in Holcomb that Truman Capote wrote about in his book,” he tells me, referring to
In Cold Blood
. From what I recall, the two murderers slashed Herb Clutter’s throat after shooting his two teenage children and his wife.

“They’re over in the northwest section of the cemetery. People have traveled from as far away as Japan and Australia just to see their graves.”

We slow down after a series of short turns, and he points to a red marble gravestone and says, “Miner’s right over there. I’ll drop you back here in a minute.” We then drive past a large memorial that, from the map, I’m guessing is Monument Grounds.

“That’s essentially our tomb of the unknown soldiers,” my guide says. “And see those bushes at the base? Under those are the amputated limbs of veterans. But that’s not what I wanted to show you.”

I’m still processing that piece of trivia when we come to the southeast corner of the B section and pull over. We get out and walk past a row of graves, and I take note of the names and dates:
OSCAR CLIFTON CLAMPITT DEC. 16. 1916-JULY 25. 1918, HILDA DAU OF GUST & FANNIE PETERSON AUG. 17. 1917-AUG 11. 1918,
and
IN MEMORY OF LOUIDA V. REDWINE 1895–1918.
One headstone is for two members of the same family who died within a day of each other: Alpha A. Jones on November 10, 1918, and Jephthah L. Jones on November 11.