We have been learning about the regional impact of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, guided in exploring its origins and extent by John M. Barry’s pandemic history, “The Great Influenza.”

The outbreak originated in southwest Kansas in early 1918; spread to the Army training center at Camp Funston in eastern Kansas; and Camp Funston troops brought it to camps around the US. The influenza eventually reached the training center at Camp Dodge, Iowa where young men drafted from our area received their initial training.

The outbreak of spring 1918 touched our region on April 3, 1918, when Marshall’s Walter Bedore died of pneumonia while in training at Camp Dodge.

The outbreak burned through Camp Dodge during April and May, overwhelming its hospital facilities with thousands of patients and taking the lives of 100 young men. Families across the upper-Midwest, like the Bedore’s of Marshall, having sent their young men with great fanfare to serve the nation in wartime, received them back for a funeral at government expense, victims of epidemic disease before they had completed their military training.

But most of the soldiers at Camp Dodge and other camps who contracted influenza that spring recovered after a few days. Even most of those whose more severe symptoms required hospitalization also recovered. This virus was not unusually severe, unlike the earlier cases from southwest Kansas, where the fatality rate was higher.

The influenza outbreak of spring 1918 appeared not to sicken people living in our region. But it reached around the world, sickening millions and interfering with military operations on both sides of the war in Europe, but killing relatively few of those infected.

Back in our region war news and war effort support dominated news coverage in the News-Messenger, along with letters home from soldiers at camps in the US and overseas in France.

Our region continued sending off young men for military training. Seventy-seven men boarded a train in Marshall for Camp Lewis, Washington in late May. They came from across our region and included Ernest Rebers of Cottonwood, Edward Becker of Ghent, Edgar Marcotte of Marshall, Andrew Berg of Minneota, Otto Dillberg of Russell, Bernard Rignell of Tracy, and John Johnson of Tyler. A month later another sixty-five departed for Camp Grant, Illinois that included Clarence Wright of Balaton, Victor Svendson of Florence, Rees Jones of Garvin, George Grandpre of Green Valley, John Work of Russell, and Carl Prestby of Tyler. Another fourteen departed for Camp Grant at the end of August and only days later, on September 3, a group of forty-five left for Camp Grant. This group included Andy Brown of Amiret, Rolland Habban of Balaton, John Aamodt of Cottonwood, George Hirmer of Marshall, Leonard Moline of Tracy, and Oscar Suprenant of Tyler.

Meanwhile, the influenza pandemic received its name when it reached Spain that summer. Spain was neutral in the war, so its press was not constrained by wartime political conditions in covering the epidemic. Other countries’ publications picked up epidemic stories out of Spain and it became known as the “Spanish Flu.”

But the pandemic was undergoing change as it spread around the world, a change triggered by the nature of the disease organism.

Influenza is caused by a virus that typically infects us through airborne aerosols from coughs or sneezes. Once inside, the virus invades our cells and reproduces itself, but that process routinely results in genetic mutations. Most of these mutations are unsuccessful and die, but some can be more efficient at infecting humans. The most dangerous ones make the resulting flu virus more deadly. This began happening around the world in the late summer of 1918.

John Barry’s book describes how this new and deadly form of the influenza arrived in the U.S. in Massachusetts where influenza cases arose in a Boston Navy facility in late August and at the Army’s nearby Camp Devens. Once again, the close proximity of troops living in crowded barracks proved fertile ground for the virus. At each location a few cases became dozens, then hundreds of cases a day, and men began dying of pneumonia, lots of men.

The military continued moving personnel from these installations. Sailors from Boston arrived at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center outside Chicago on Sept. 7. Many young men from our region had reported there for Navy training. Influenza began ripping through the barracks there within weeks and sailors began dying.

Our region had sent 124 young men to Camp Grant, Illinois for their initial Army training over the summer. Dozens of officers from Camp Devens arrived at Camp Grant on September 21. The first influenza cases from among those officers reported to sick call the same day; three days later the hospital admitted 392 influenza cases; and the first pneumonia death occurred the following day. Its hospital overwhelmed by the numbers of seriously ill troops, Camp Grant reported 74 deaths on October 4 alone.

Army physicians reported those who developed serious cases of this influenza suffered terrible symptoms; reporting severe joint pain, extreme fever and chills, headaches and ear aches, and heavy coughing. Those who died often experienced bleeding from the nose and mouth; air pockets under their skin from air escaping from leaking lungs; and cyanosis, their bodies turning blue because damaged lungs were unable to oxygenate their blood.

The fall 1918 influenza pandemic was different than the spring outbreak in two significant ways. It was more dangerous and, likely following the routes of passenger rail service from infected training installations and larger urban areas, it reached our region.

I welcome your participation in and ideas about our exploration of prairie lives. You may reach me at prairieview pressllc@gmail.com.