Epidemic deaths shaped Texas from beginning
We have been through this before, you know. From the mid-19th century until nearly into the 20th, deadly epidemics regularly ravaged Texas towns and cities. Yellow fever and other insidious maladies swept through Houston, Galveston, Huntsville, San Antonio, Navasota and elsewhere, often leaving hundreds of dead in their wake. Those experiences changed the way Texans lived —and died.
The state’s busiest port city was particularly vulnerable. In the summer of 1852, a yellow fever epidemic killed more than 500 Galveston residents; it was one of nine mass outbreaks of the mosquito-borne illness to sweep across the island city between 1839 and 1867. That final epidemic killed more than 1,100 before spreading to Houston and to Corpus Christi, Indianola and other coastal towns.
Cemeteries around the state bear mute witness to a more recent mass illness, as Native Texan reader Walker Taylor of Houston recently discovered.
On a family trip to far West Texas in late February B.C. — before COVID-19, that is — the Taylors drove into Terlingua, the desolate, old quicksilver mining town west of Big Bend National Park. Wandering through the cemetery, Walker Taylor and daughter Kathryn Taylor Reddy discovered that many of the men interred in the rocky ground beneath weathersilvered wooden crosses were miners who died of the Spanish flu.
“If we think the Big Bend country feels remote now, imagine how remote it must have felt in 1918!” Taylor emailed a few days ago. “And yet the contagion had made its way there and wreaked havoc. That little history lesson taught us that no place in Texas or the U.S. was going to be able to hide from the coronavirus.”
My own encounter with a relic of the Spanish flu pandemic took place on a long-ago Thanksgiving morning. That may have been the Thanksgiving when my brothers and I realized that the feast the five of us (plus a stray relative or two) enjoyed every year didn’t just miraculously appear on the
dining-room table. Maybe Mom deserved a break. Why not a cookout?
Early Thursday morning we loaded steaks, baking potatoes and salad makings into an ice chest and headed to our granddad’s farm outside Hillsboro. Turning off the gravel road onto “the Place,” as my dad and his siblings called the small cotton farm where they had grown up, Dad slowly drove our Plymouth sedan into a post-oak woods beyond the old farmhouse. Once he got a fire going for Mom — traditional gender roles prevailed even in the woods back then — he led my brothers and me on a meandering hike through the woods he had known as a boy. I can still see Lady, our black and white fox terrier, racing ahead nose to the ground and tail wagging, chasing squirrels through fallen leaves. I can still hear her echoing bark.
The oft-told family story usually focused on finding Mom in tears when we got back. Using the open front door of the car as a wind break, she explained, she had laid a hot metal cooking fork on the front seat. The wovenplastic seat covers had burst into flame. (Cars had seat covers back then, young readers.)
All turned out fine, including the steaks. Eventually, Mom herself could laugh when the story was told. These days, though, another part of the tale is more pertinent.
We had ambled through the woods for an hour or so that morning when we came to a clearing atop a small rise. There among dry grass and weeds stood a dozen or so irregularly shaped sandstone slabs, reddishbrown and about knee-high. They were homemade tombstones, with names and birth and death dates crudely carved into the soft rock. The men, women and children buried on that lonely hill had all died within a few days of each other. In 1918.
As we headed back through the woods, Dad explained that they were victims of something called the Spanish flu. I don’t remember whether he knew the people or whether they were members of the same family. I do remember him saying that what happened to those Hill County farm folks happened to people the world over.
Surviving the flu
One fall morning a couple of decades after our Thanksgiving hike, I found myself sitting outside the office of an English professor at Columbia University. I had never met him, but I had read about him. As I waited, I could hear his voice on the phone. His jovial East Texas twang made me homesick.
In his book-cluttered office four floors above Broadway, the late William A. Owens was a long way from his birthplace near Detroit — Detroit, Texas, that is — in a Red River County hamlet called Pin Hook. Bill grew up around Pin Hook and Blossom and other tiny farming communities. His widowed mother and her five kids toiled in the cotton, corn and peanut fields to keep from starving to death in the early decades of the 20th century. Bill wrote about those years in two remarkable memoirs, “This Stubborn Soil” (1966) and “A Season of Weathering” (1973), both still available in libraries and on Amazon.
The writer I consider my mentor is the only person I ever met who experienced the 1918 pandemic firsthand. In the simple, unadorned prose of “This Stubborn Soil,” he recalled how his older brother Dewey came home from the Great War afflicted with an illness that killed more people than the war itself.
Bill’s brother recovered in a few days, but with his mother it was a different story. Struggling to breathe on a night when death was near, she shivered under blankets even as she burned with fever. Her only hope was a doctor from Detroit — if he could get to the farmhouse in time through a cold, driving rain.
Bill’s Aunt Nellie called him into the kitchen. “Your mammie’s about to die,” she said. “If the doctor don’t come quick, there won’t be a thing in the world he c’n do.”
Jessie Ann Owens survived, although she was still in bed when the flu struck her children. Bill had it almost as bad as his mother.
“It was February and corn planting time before the smell of the flu and fever was out of the house,” he wrote. “With all of us just going to bed or just getting out of it, we were better off than many families we heard about on the way to Blossom and Paris. We were going to get well and strong again. In some families the last one was taken to the graveyard.”
Some 50 million people around the world took that last, lonely trek. The pandemic claimed approximately 675,000 American lives, including more than 2,100 Texans. Soldiers living in close quarters in places such as Camp Logan in Houston and Camp MacArthur in Waco were hit especially hard. Houston’s death toll was an estimated 111 people.
Shaping the state
Sociologist Robert Wuthnow, author of a 2014 book about Texas called “Rough Country,” contends that our forebears’ familiarity with danger, disease and epidemic death helps explain why Texas is like it is. Their encounter with hardship has shaped our politics, our culture, our religious views.
If Bill Owens were still with us, I suspect he would tell you that the 1918 epidemic helped shape him. It hammered home life’s mutability. It reminded him that we’re all in this together.
We too will be shaped by COVID-19. Will we be stronger, better people? We’ll know in due time.