Hard-hit New Mexico not prepared
ALBUQUERQUE» “Keep away from the sick,” the newspaper advised. “Avoid crowds, wash your hands frequently, cover your mouth and nose when you cough or sneeze.”
Sound measures for combating the coronavirus pandemic confronting us now. But those instructions appeared in the Oct. 24, 1918, edition of the Raton Range as part of that newspaper’s “Ten Commandments for the Control of Influenza.”
By that date, the dreaded Spanish flu was stampeding through New Mexico and officials, slow to react to the threat, were desperately trying to turn it back.
“They closed down schools, churches, banks, everything. Just like now,” said recently retired Richard Melzer, who was a professor of history at the University of New Mexico-valencia campus for 40 years. “Taos required people to wear surgical masks.”
This disease, however, was difficult to slow down, and impossible, it seemed, to stop. By the time it had run its course in 1920, the Spanish flu had killed an estimated 17 million to 50 million, maybe even 100 million around the world.
It took the lives of 195,000 Americans in October 1918 alone, and by 1920, 675,000 people had died in the United States.
Deaths attributed to the flu in New Mexico ranged from 1,000 to 5,000.
“The demand was so great, they ran out of coffins in some places,” Melzer said.
There was little chance, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported on Sept. 28, 1918, that the “epidemical malady” would inflict itself on the Southwest, because the region was so far from those eastern ports and the Southwest atmosphere so “salubrious.”
“We didn’t think we were going to get this thing,” said Nancy
Owen Lewis, a scholar in residence at Santa Fe’s School for Advanced Research. “We were unprepared. We had 70 tuberculosis sanitariums geared for out-ofstaters, but very few hospitals to treat local people. We were the only state of the 48 that did not have a public health department.”
The disease had reached New Mexico even before the New Mexican issue dismissing its danger hit the streets.
On Sept. 20, a soldier just arrived from the East Coast died of the illness at Fort Bayard in Grant County. One week later, the virus killed a 17-year-old boy in Deming.
“By Oct. 28, there were 821 cases in Albuquerque and 98 deaths statewide,” said Lewis, author of “Chasing the Cure in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Quest for Health.”
“We were a poor state,” said David Holtby, retired associate director and editor in chief of the University of New Mexico Press, whose article “A Dark and Terrible Moment: The Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918” appeared in the New Mexico Historical Review in 1982. “We were dealing with the wounded and those with other problems coming back from the war. We had few doctors and nurses, and those were depleted by the war.”
Holtby said one flu victim was taken to a veterinarian in Tucumcari because no medical doctors were available.
“Prior to the war, Tucumcari had several doctors,” he said.
Even though most people were willing to do their part to beat back the flu epidemic, some New Mexico citizens felt a little added encouragement was needed.
“There was vigilante activity, greeting committees with Winchesters who met the trains,” Holtby said during a phone interview from his Albuquerque home. “If you came from a community that was infected, you didn’t get off.”
Melzer said that in Belen, only people who were from Belen were allowed to leave trains during the height of the flu epidemic.
“As if people from Belen could not be infected themselves,” he said.
In fact, Melzer said about half of Belen’s population had the flu.
Albuquerque, however, a railroad town like Belen but much larger, suffered relatively few infections and deaths considering its size and density.
“Albuquerque, because of the actions it took, was more successful in fighting off the flu,” said Rick Hendricks, former state historian for New Mexico and now the state’s records administrator. “Albuquerque put notices on the doors of people who were ill and banned gatherings. Dawson, the mining camp (in Colfax County), had a much higher mortality rate.”
New Mexico’s American Indian population was also pummeled by the Spanish flu.
“The death rate at San Ildefonso was unbelievable,” Hendricks said.
In an article that appeared recently in El Palacio, the magazine of the Museum of New Mexico, Hendricks writes that only 85 of the 140 residents at San Ildefonso Pueblo survived the epidemic.
In a phone interview from Santa Fe, he told the Albuquerque Journal those figures are based on census reports, because just one death was officially recorded at the pueblo between 1918 and 1920.
“Those are not ironclad figures, but what appears to have been happening is that people were dying at such a rate that no one was going into the pueblo,” he said. “(Catholic) priests were not going in for funerals, no deaths were recorded.”
The epidemic in New Mexico waned in November and December of 1918. On Dec. 2 of that year, Albuquerque lifted its quarantine measures.
In “High and Dry in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Politics of Health,” a 2012 article that appeared in the New Mexico Historical Review, Lewis writes about a 1914 assessment of public health commissioned by the American Medical Association.
According to Lewis, Charles V. Chapin, superintendent of health in Providence, R.I., gave New Mexico a grade of zero out of a possible thousand points.
In a subsequent survey conducted in the flu year of 1918, Dr. John W. Kerr of the U.S. Public Health Service urged New Mexico to create a state department of health.
Embarrassed by the Chapin report and sobered by the horrors of the flu epidemic, the state Legislature did just that on March 15, 1919.
“Thank God, we have a public health department,” Lewis said. “Thank God, we started doing social distancing before we had many cases. We have come a long way since 1919.”