A disturbing echo from 1918

I've recently been reading The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary-Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast.

Butcher was a missionary to the community of Kitamaat on the central BC coast from 1916-1919. She ran a school for the children of the local Haisla people, though it was far from academic: the girls were trained for domestic service and the boys for menial labour.

Whatever we may think of her efforts today, she appears to have been a sincere and hard-working woman who thought she was helping the natives. And when Spanish flu arrived in the fall of 1918, hard on the heels of a whooping-cough epidemic, she described it in vivid terms:

Rumours of the terrors of Spanish Influenza had reached us from time to time: Seattle, Vancouver, Ocean Falls, Prince Rupert—ever creeping nearer—would the Indians who were away, keep away & so save us the scourge?

No, an Indian must die in his own place & on Wed Oct 23rd two launches came in, one bearing two corpses, the other several sick people from Rupert. We did not know whether they were really suffering from Spanish Flu...

So we really were careful but without avail for Mon morn at 7 a.m. one girl said she was sick & nine went to bed that day, many more on Tues and by Wed, Miss Hortop & I with the help of one girl started nursing the 30 who were in bed. ... Those children were very sick and what with vomiting, dysentery, nose-bleeding & senior girls' troubles, we had a horrible time.

I never saw such nose-bleeding. We could not stop it & when it transpired that the only girl whose nose did not bleed, suffered hallucinations & was out of bed and trailing bedding or clothes crying she had killed herself or the house or her darling, or else asking me to cut her in pieces ... I put up with the bleeding as a beneficent evil rather than have several crazy ones.

After bleeding came congestion in varying degrees & horrible expectoration until it seemed impossible that children who a few days previously had been in good health could throw up such quantities of vile mucous.

...Meanwhile the people in the Village had begun to die two or three at a time so there were funerals to conduct. I cannot yet dwell on the pathetic scenes we took part in. ... Three or four lying sick in one room—the Father or Mother carried out by other who were more or less sick—the trail to the graveyard—two white women to conduct the services. We always went in twos—Mrs. Allan & one of us or just two of us as was possible.

Sometimes—several times—we gathered three coffins, once there were four, and read service over them. We shed no tears then but I shall now if I attempt to describe it.

...Those of you who have suffered from Spanish Influenza can best understand our plight. The toll death has taken in Kitamaat is 29. Some half-doz more are not expected to live.

Butcher's letters form part of a lost history of the British Columbia central and northern coast, a region largely forgotten and ignored. But in its time, as we are beginning to realize, it was the home of a complex society numbering in the hundreds of thousands. (See my review of Clam Gardens.)

Smallpox, measles, whooping cough, and finally the Spanish flu effectively depopulated the coast. We should be grateful to Margaret Butcher for remembering her schoolchildren and their parents, and for passing a warning to us almost ninety years later.

Comments

[slovenia]

Vivid indeed. Even The Great Influenza was tempered in comparison. Every now and then I need a jolt to boot me out of the "influenza-a-very-bad-cough" mindset into which I allow myself to slip. I may print this post and paste it to the wall.

[caia]

You've probably seen this, and possibly posted it as well, but this 2001 video clip about bioterrorism has a vivid section about the 1918 pandemic, and admits what many would deny: we may be worse off than our 1918 counterparts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpzxNoLZx0w&mode=related&search=

[Victoria]

Crof, and Caia,

Very thought provoking. Is it going to be any different when they call the next Pandemic?