Libby in the time of influenza

It began with a one paragraph news item from the other side of the country, part of a regular feature of The Western News aimed at keeping residents connected to the wider world in autumn 1918.

“Brockton: An epidemic of Spanish influenza in Massachusetts towns is greatly hampering the shoe industry, hundreds of cases being reported among employees of the factories,” read the brief published in the Sept. 26 edition.

Nineteen days earlier, a soldier stationed at Camp Devens, which held about 45,000 soldiers preparing to leave New England for the European battlefields, was carried into the facility’s hospital. Doctors diagnosed the delirious soldier with meningitis.

A day later, a dozen more men from his company were stricken with meningitis, according to historian John M. Barry’s 2017 Smithsonian magazine article “How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America.”

Doctors soon changed their prognosis. Barry cites a U.S. Army report describing the situation at Camp Devens as an example: “the influenza … occurred as an explosion.”

But in Libby, little was made of the coming crisis. As the cases of what was deemed “la grippe” or the Spanish Flu grew in and around Boston, articles here announced the approach of chicken, pheasant and grouse hunting season, for example.

War news still dominated the headlines. There were calls for residents to buy government bonds to support the military effort.

A prominently placed article on Sept. 12 reported on the growing concern about Cpl. Jose Fierro, one of the first Libby men to ship out after the declaration of war in 1917. Fierro, a veteran of the Pancho Villa Expedition, was wounded in France.

Around that time, a ship from Boston docked in Philadelphia, carrying the virulent strain of influenza with it. Within days, two sailors died. The next day, 14 more sailors and one civilian died, according to Barry.

Against the urging of doctors, Wilmer Krusen, Philadelphia’s public health director, allowed a Liberty Loan parade to take place in the city on Sept. 28. Military men mixed with civilians, packing the streets. Two days later, according to Barry, Krusen confirmed the virus had spread from the Navy yard to the general population.

“The parade became an opportunity for mass infection,” wrote John Kopp and Bob McGovern in a Philly Voice article commemorating the event’s centennial. At its height, the epidemic killed 759 people a day in Philadelphia.

On Oct. 3, The Western News printed a small news item with a Washington, D.C., dateline reporting that the flu was present in 25 Army camps. A front page article, meanwhile, directed readers to boil water and swat flies in an effort to combat an outbreak of typhoid fever.

By that time, cases of the influenza had reached Seattle, where 700 cases and a single death were reported at the University of Washington Naval Training Station, according to a timeline compiled by the American College of Emergency Physicians. Soon residents of that community would be required to wear face masks.

Back in Boston, 202 were dead. Parades and sporting events were cancelled.

By Oct. 10, warning signs had begun to appear in northwest Montana. The Libby newspaper reported six cases in Helena and in Dodson, “an epidemic of influenza has struck this place.”

The items ran on the interior pages. A front page article derided Simon Schneider of Swan Creek for refusing to buy war bonds. Schnieder allegedly wrote local officials that he would only buy bonds if the U.S. forced England to return occupied German territory as the war wound down. Otherwise, he would donate only to the Red Cross.

His stance on geopolitics earned him the newspapermen’s derision.

“Simon Schneider, the little Kaiser of Swan Creek who wants to run this nation in accordance with his pro-German sympathies, has once more disobeyed President Wilson’s wise counsel to our enemies at home: “Keep your mouth shut!” The Western News reported.

But news of the influenza hit home on Oct. 17 with the death of Private Neil Joughin. Stationed at Fort Missoula, Joughin succumbed to pneumonia after a bout with the flu. He left Libby two months prior, nearly to the day.

A friend who escorted the body home recounted the speed and horror of the sickenss. Although in “fine health,” Bob Brennan “says the epidemic that swept over Fort Missoula, where he and Neil were stationed, was unprecedented in its fierceness.”

Brennan told The Western News that 40 men were hospitalized on the first day. Out of the 206 men at Fort Missoula, 115 were ill and three others had died before he left.

The same edition carried news that the depot in Dodson had closed. The workers were all sick with the flu.

Another article let readers know that federal authorities were issuing pamphlets on how to prevent the spread of the flu and treat cases of the illness. The effort was undertaken in part because of the shortage of doctors — many of the nation’s physicians were now serving in the armed forces.

It noted that the Red Cross and Montana Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis would coordinate to respond to the growing epidemic. The newspaper also reported on rumors of a “serum” to combat the illness, but quoted then-U.S. Surgeon General Rupert Blue as writing, “influenza vaccine still in [the] experimental stage. Not recommended as yet or furnished by the service for general use.”

By the Oct. 24 edition of The Western News, the cases were piling up. A headline announced: “Spanish flu invades Montana and takes toll of lives; authorities fight it.”

“Scarcely one county in the state has escaped its inroads, though some are affected more seriously than others,” read the piece. The closures of theaters, schools and dance halls were announced. More than 1,200 cases were confirmed in Helena.

In Libby, 30 cases had sprung up. In the local news item section, the paper reported that two daughters of Charles Leonard, “an early Libby man,” died in Butte. The Bessey family had three cases. Morris Brooks was recovering from influenza, but his brother, Charles, had now fallen ill. Mrs. A. R. Ford, wife of the Lincoln County High School superintendent, had died of the flu.

On the day of publication, schools in Yellowstone County were closed, according to a retrospective published in the Billings Gazette in 2018. Days earlier, doctors there had counted 527 cases of the flu. Temporary hospitals were set up in local churches.

“Whole families were moved to the hospital when there was no one in the household well enough to care for the sick,” wrote Lorna Thackery in the 100-year retrospective for the Gazette.

Back in Libby, authorities had similarly decided to minimize public gatherings.

“…the city had been ordered closed,” The Western News reported.

Dr. J. H. Morrison, Libby’s leading medical authority at the time, believed the flu was spreading within families “and had not yet become general.”

At least 116 local cases were known by the newspaper’s Oct. 31 edition, when the news ran front and center, with 33 popping up in the past week. New rules banned public gatherings around town, including barring saloon patrons from staying in a drinking establishment for more than five minutes. The rules were tacked up in prominent spots across the city.

Morrison worried that residents recovering from the flu were resuming their normal routine too quickly, thus spreading the illness.

“Possibly because the physicians are too busy to instruct their patients, I notice that too many have gone out on the streets still coughing and spitting,” he said. “These people have had the flu and are not yet over the danger of giving it to others. I am afraid they do not realize that they are not only doing their neighbors in Libby a wrong, but that their action is positively unpatriotic.”

He believed the epidemic reached its zenith. Still, he instructed residents to report any and all cases to local authorities.

Another article urged residents to avoid bothering doctors after 10 p.m., citing the need to let them rest. Medical professionals already are under a great strain and must conserve their strength, read the news item.

Barry wrote that by the height of the illness “society itself began to disintegrate” across the country. City streets were empty. Workers stopped showing up for shifts. Neighbors shunned one another, according to his account.

As evidence, Barry cited an American Red Cross memo that described the atmosphere: “A fear and panic of the influenza, akin to the terror of the Middle Ages regarding the Black Plague, [has] been prevalent in many parts of the country.”

The symptoms were terrifying. According to NPR, the Spanish Flu began like most others, with fever, nausea, diarrhea and aches. More serious cases, though, would end with a pneumonia attack. Patients turned blue as they suffocated from a frothy, bloody substance collecting in their lungs. They coughed up the blood-tinged substance as they edged closer to death. Others died bleeding from the ears, nose and eyes, Barry wrote.

As Dr. Victor Vaughn recounted after getting ordered to Camp Devens in September, “I saw hundreds of young stalwart men in uniform coming into the wards of the hospital. Every bed was full, yet others crowded in. The faces wore a bluish cast; a cough brought up the blood-stained sputum. In the morning, the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like cordwood.”

In Libby, it was reported that Sheriff Wave Brown had taken ill with the flu. The sister of Mrs. A. Schaubel died of it in Sheridan, Wyo., but J. E. Leary and his daughter, Grace Leary, were on the mend. Charles Brooks, too, was recovering.

The police chief nursed a “floater” back to health in the city jail “for want of a better place to take him.” He had found the man in bad shape at a local saloon. The local San Francisco Tea and Coffee salesman stopped taking orders because the epidemic had so disrupted the supply chain.

The first of what modern readers would know as a news obituary since the article on Joughin ran in the Nov. 14 edition. The paper reported that William Earl Lucier succumbed to “an attack of the Spanish Influenza” after an illness of only a few days. A vaccine was in the works, but in the meantime, authorities urged residents to focus on securing “good medical attention, good nursing, fresh air, nutritious food, plenty of water and cheerful surroundings.”

On Nov. 21, the newspaper reported Dave Hudon had succumbed to the influenza after returning to Libby from Bozeman. That same week, Peter Lucier died of the flu. His brother, Earl, died six days earlier. Their mother, though, looked to be on the mend.

But by then, weeks after Morrison hoped the illness had hit its high water mark, officials thought they could soon reopen the public schools. Mr. Buckingham was back at work at his jewelry store after a week’s illness, The Western News reported, and Mrs. William Cody was “rapidly getting back to her regular good health.”

“Then, as suddenly as it came, influenza seemed to disappear,” Barry wrote in his account for Smithsonian Magazine. “It had burned through the available fuel in a given community.”

On Nov. 28, The Western News reported that the ban on public gatherings had lifted in Libby and the “community emerges from epidemic cloud with record of comparative success in fighting the plague.”

Across the country, the flu had left hundreds of thousands dead. The American College of Emergency Physicians estimated the toll at 600,000. Barry put the figure at 670,000. Worldwide, deaths numbered between 50 and 100 million.

The 15-month pandemic represented the “deadliest disease outbreak in human history,” Barry wrote.

In Libby, residents celebrated the lifting of public restrictions that had lasted six weeks. The Western News extended thanks to local business owners for cooperating during the illness.

Schools reopened for classes. The passing of the illness meant city council could gather for their scheduled November meeting. The newspaper excitedly reported “Libby stores [are] laying in fine stocks of useful and pleasurable Christmas gifts.”

Life went back to normal.

“All things considered, Libby emerged from the epidemic that has swept this whole nation with every reason for feeling that fortune has favored the community,” The Western News reported.