SPANISH FLU
1918 pandemic devastated the province
Their lives have been turned upside down. First, there’s the devastation, destruction and loss of the war, and then after four bloody years, this is capped with the terrible flu.
The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 marched across the Prairies, killing thousands in Saskatchewan. Its victims outnumbered the soldiers from the province who died during the First World War. Spanish flu, caused by a variant of the H1N1 influenza A virus, killed more than 20 million people globally and an estimated 50,000 in Canada. The StarPhoenix’s Thia James takes a look back at how the deadly pandemic affected people in Saskatchewan a century ago. FIRST NATIONS DEVASTATED
Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Vice-Chief David Pratt says the pandemic tore his father’s family in half.
Pratt’s father, Bill (born in 1909) saw the flu enter the family’s home on the George Gordon First Nation in 1918 and kill his mother and three of his siblings. Bill, his father and two sisters survived and moved to Muscowpetung First Nation. Bill’s father re-married in 1921.
The elder Pratt, who died in 2000, told his son about losing his mother and moving to a new community.
“It was a traumatic experience for them as a child, obviously for them in residential school and to lose your mother, and to be sent to deal with all of the traumatic effects of residential schools, was I think a very heartbreaking experience for everybody that was involved,” the younger Pratt said.
The close quarters in which many Saskatchewan people lived aided the spread of the virus, brought home by soldiers returning from the Western Front.
Pratt noted that many members of the George Gordon First Nation fought in the war. While Indigenous people were not conscripted, men and women from First Nations volunteered for service. How much a community was affected depended on the number of soldiers who returned, he said.
The people who died of Spanish flu on First Nations were not included in the Government of Saskatchewan’s official death statistics.
The vast archive of the parliamentary sessional papers for the Dominion of Canada for 1920 noted “There was a very heavy mortality among the Indians of Saskatchewan as a result of the epidemic of influenza, which was prevalent on practically all the reserves in the province. Very few of the Indians escaped this malady and many of them have been left in a very delicate state of health as a result thereof.”
Saskatchewan historian and former University of Saskatchewan history professor Bill Waiser notes that the Royal North West Mounted Police put stricken reserves under quarantine, but the measure did little to help people who lived on the affected First Nations. Their health was already compromised by poor and crowded living conditions and inadequate medical care, he said.
In the Battleford Agency, the death rate was four times higher than the provincial rate during the epidemic, Waiser said.
Archival documents contain sporadic references to what happened on First Nations when the flu struck. In “The Role of the RCMP during the Indian Residential School System,” RCMP officers took the bodies of dead children from a residential school in Onion Lake through a potato field to a trench to await burial.
During a Parliamentary debate in 1920, Last Mountain MP John Frederick Johnston related a story about deaths of children at the school on George Gordon. He said there were “some 50 cases in the school and they did not have a spare room for isolation of cases of this kind. There were three deaths from this disease.”
THE SICK AND THE DEAD
The effects of Spanish flu were often swift and fatal. A person could fall ill and die within 24 hours.
Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan records show that between September 1918 and December 1919, 4,916 deaths from influenza were recorded off reserve. In 1918 alone, 3,906 off-reserve deaths were recorded.
Waiser doesn’t think the pandemic can be viewed in isolation.
“The Spanish flu is punch two of a one-two punch, or a double whammy,” he said.
The first punch was the deaths of 4,400 people from Saskatchewan who served during the Great War. The second was the 5,000 off-reserve deaths from the virus.
“I think for people living at the time, they were wondering what is happening in the world. Their lives have been turned upside down. First, there’s the devastation, destruction and loss of the war, and then after four bloody years, this is capped with the terrible flu,” Waiser said.
Saskatoon’s medical health officer, Arthur Wilson, noted in a letter to the assistant city commissioner that the first reported cases came by railroad, spreading to railway men and café or restaurant workers.
By Oct. 21, two people had died and 239 cases had been confirmed, Wilson noted. Reporting that one of the men who died came to the city from Meacham, he recommended that cases that weren’t severe should be treated at home. He said St. Paul’s Hospital and City Hospital each had capacity to care for several cases. As the number of deaths rose and prevention efforts increased, even burial rites were not sacred. An order in council in Regina prohibited transporting the deceased by rail within Saskatchewan or outside the province, and mandated burying the dead at the place of death or the nearest cemetery. Bodies would be exhumed when the order in council was cancelled. It also called on embalmers, undertakers or anyone in charge of the dead to ensure burials took place at the earliest possible time.
The sick also had to wear masks made of four-ply cheese cloth over their mouths while in transit to or from their homes or hospitals, as did everyone who cared for them. The masks were to be burned immediately after use.
“I don’t think anybody could have acted soon enough because of the speed with which the flu spread and how quickly it infected a person, and how quickly a person died,” Waiser said. “They did react, and when they realized the severity of this epidemic, they did take steps.”
ISOLATED HOMESTEADS SAFER THAN CITIES, BUT NOWHERE WAS IMMUNE.
While rural residents were disproportionately killed by the flu, isolated homesteads were often safer than cities because crowding facilitated the spread of the disease, Waiser said.
People fleeing towns and cities went to villages, Maureen Lux noted in her 1997 article “The Bitter Flats” in the Saskatchewan Archives Board publication. They did so to be closer to medical care, she wrote.
In 1918, 2,217 people died of Spanish flu; 1,689 were urban dwellers.
“If you look at cities like Saskatoon, when the war ends, people naturally gather together to celebrate,” Waiser said. “Half the 5,000 that die from the Spanish flu epidemic die in November 1918.”
As the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan noted in its recently unveiled online exhibit, the Spanish flu outbreak made it into many local history books. Local writers included short anecdotes, which illustrated how the illness could so swiftly claim the lives of multiple members of one family.
The PAS included an excerpt from the Rouleau and District local history book which told the story of Sister Mary Cecil (Prudence Roddy), who lost her sister Beth and both of their parents several days after her father first fell ill.
“There were no funerals, only burials,” she wrote in her account in 1994. Her mother was the last member of her family to die, 11 days after the family gathered around their new Victrola (an early record player) to celebrated her 34th birthday.
In the Pelly constituency, Liberal MLA Magnus Ramsland died of the flu in November 1918, his death reported by the Regina Leader. Ramsland’s widow, Sarah, ran in the byelection for his seat in 1919 and won, becoming the first female MLA elected in the province.
As Waiser noted in a 2016 History Matters column about the Spanish flu, Sarah Ramsland’s victory came three years after women got the right to vote. She served as the MLA for Pelly for about six years.
SOCIAL LIFE GRINDS TO HALT
After the Great War ended with an armistice on Nov. 11, 1918, Saskatchewan people wanted to celebrate, but cities had already been feeling the flu’s arrival since October, before the end of the war.
By mid-month, an order in council granted cities, towns and villages the power to close public gathering places, such as bowling alleys, theatres, dance halls and pool halls, as they deemed necessary. Public meetings were banned in cities. Schools were closed.
Oct. 20, 1918 is known as the province’s first “Churchless Sunday,” since churches were closed for the first time on record.
“One person living in Saskatoon at the time remarked about the closure of the schools, the churches, limited public meetings or limited contact; he compared the streets of Saskatoon to a city of the dead. People stayed home,” Waiser said.
The city closed all “places of amusement or entertainment” starting at midnight on Oct.
17. Council passed an order to reopen such places on Nov. 25, but only between 5:15 p.m. and 7 p.m. Schools were permitted to open on Dec. 2.
The ministerial association recognized that people were congregating elsewhere, such as stores, hotel lobbies and auctions. At a Nov. 22 meeting of the city’s influenza relief committee, the association asked the committee to “intimate” to city council’s health committee that churches were among the “best ventilated buildings of the city” and should not keep their doors closed.
The First Baptist Church of Regina condemned city authorities for not taking steps to deter people from crowding in street cars or special sales, and for discontinuing the work of “educating the people in regard to personal care, and keeping them keyed up to it.”
The church argued that it had been established that the disease was communicated from person to person and stated its desire to “protest against this inertia and to urge for an active, scientific and comprehensive course by the City Council and its committees in order to conserve the health and lives of the people.”
UNIVERSITY VOLUNTEERS
As the Spanish flu arrived in Saskatoon, Walter Murray, then the University of Saskatchewan’s president, gave people a chance to leave the campus if they wished, then ordered a quarantine.
“It was a bold move on Murray’s part and I think it limited the number of deaths associated with the University of Saskatchewan,” Waiser said.
The campus for the most part was isolated from the rest of the city, save for Emmanuel College, which was used by as a temporary hospital during the outbreak. In granting the use of the building on Oct. 19, 1018, the college only asked that the city fumigate the building and bedding when they were no longer needed.
Emmanuel College functioned as an emergency treatment centre; the volunteers were mainly women.
One of the student volunteers who assisted at Emmanuel College became ill after two days and died several days later, Murray reported to the man’s mother in a letter. The student, William G. Hamilton, received full funeral honours, including a procession at the university.
Hamilton, a widower, left behind three young children. Murray wrote to his mother that if he had known the young man had children depending upon him, they would have tried to dissuade him from offering his services.
“Your son gave his life for others, and his sacrifice was as great as that of any soldier who died on the field of battle,” Murray wrote. “It will ever be an inspiration for the young men and women who come to the university.”
The names of the volunteers who stepped in to help and lost their lives are etched in a stairwell in the Peter MacKinnon building on campus.
CURE-ALLS AND REMEDIES
The flu’s spread also led to a temporary loosening of the Temperance Act, which made alcohol sale and consumption illegal in Saskatchewan. An order-in-council allowed druggists to prescribe a maximum of eight ounces of alcohol per day for medicinal purposes “during the prevalence of Spanish influenza.”
The appearance of Spanish flu in Saskatchewan also gave rise to demand for eucalyptus oil, lemons and devices that promised prevention or relief. From the City of Saskatoon archives From the City of Regina archives From the University of Saskatchewan archives tjames@postmedia.com