“Miranda was ill, delirious with Spanish influenza. Her landlady wanted her out. . . . ‘I tell you, this is a plague, a plague, my God, and I’ve got a houseful of people to think about.’ ”
— from “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” by Katherine Anne Porter
Miranda Gay, the central character in Katherine Anne Porter’s short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” recovered. Porter, a columnist for the Rocky Mountain News in 1918, also survived the flu in Denver.
Thousands of others were less fortunate. Between September 1918 and June 1919, influenza and its complications, particularly pneumonia, killed nearly 1,500 Denverites. Statewide, statistics were equally shocking: 7,783 Coloradans died in 10 months, most of them in October, November, and December of 1918. Sickness paralleled death. Colorado, a state with fewer than a million people, recorded 44,803 incidents of flu in 1918 and 4,603 in 1919.
Nationally, the flu killed more than half a million, accounting for more deaths than suffered by United States troops in battle during World Wars I and II combined. No one knows how many perished in other countries, but estimates start at 21 million.
Misnamed the “Spanish influenza” because Spain had suffered an early attack, the “flu,” as it was called after it became common, may have originated in the United States in the spring of 1918. More pneumonia deaths than usual were reported in April and, as was the hallmark of the autumn flu, many of the dead were in the prime of life.
Microbiologists theorize that the virus then traveled to Europe, where it mutated into an even more deadly form before returning to the United States in the late summer of 1918, probably carried by soldiers returning from World War I battlefields. At first it targeted military camps on the East Coast, particularly in Massachusetts, but soon it spread to civilians and to inland posts.
On Sept. 21, 1918, less than a month after the flu appeared in Boston, 12 soldier-trainees were reported ill at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Four days later, 75 sick students were quarantined in fraternity houses. Patriotic women gave them 40 jars of jelly with the promise that “we will back you up as much as we do the boys in the trenches.” Early flu deaths in Colorado Springs were probably military related since five cases of grippe, a malady which often really was flu, occurred at the army camp there in late September.
But in Pueblo, as in Denver, the virus apparently first infected civilians: a family of six from Newton, Kansas, who arrived in the Steel City in early October. Thus, even without the military connection, the virulent strain of flu virus would have spread into Colorado, for by late September, when it claimed its initial victim in Denver, it had killed over 1,000 in Boston and more than 100 in Chicago. Denver’s first fatality, Blanche Kennedy, a University of Denver student, apparently contracted the disease in Chicago.
In the wake of Blanche Kennedy’s death, Dr. William H. Sharpley, Denver’s manager of health, told the Rocky Mountain News that he was confident her illness “would not be responsible for any other cases in the city.” As a precaution, he ordered the house in which she died quarantined. Aware of the wildfire spread of the flu in the East and Midwest, he requested theater owners to ask patrons to cover their mouths when coughing or sneezing.
Sharpley informed newspapers of U.S. Surgeon General Rupert Blue’s rules for combating the flu. Since Blue and other physicians had only a dim understanding of the disease, some of their nostrums were not particularly useful. They advised people to avoid wearing tight shoes and gloves, to breathe deeply “when the air is pure,” and to remember the three C’s: “clean mouth, clean heart and clean clothes.”
Other rules made more sense. Doctors did not know about the virus which caused the flu. Most of them incorrectly attributed the illness to bacteria, but they correctly deduced that it was a highly contagious airborne disease that flourished in crowded places. Unable to cure the malady, Blue and other physicians concentrated on prevention. They warned people to shun crowds, to seek fresh air, to smother coughs and sneezes, to wash hands before eating, and to avoid drinking from cups used by others. As the influenza epidemic progressed, these simple notions provided the basis for health regulations in Colorado and throughout the nation.
For a few days in late September and early October of 1918, the flu scare slackened in Denver. On Sept. 29, Sharpley admitted that there were a few suspected cases in the city, but he suggested that the illness might have been misdiagnosed.
On Oct. 3, the Rocky Mountain News declared that Denver was free of flu, yet three deaths in Boulder, all of soldier-trainees, kept the city vigilant. On Oct. 4, Sharpley reported 12 cases in Denver. He asked hospitals to isolate flu sufferers, told schools to send children with sniffles home, and suggested that places which attracted large crowds might have to be closed. Colorado Springs officials, reacting to three deaths at Colorado College, considered ordering closures on Oct. 3 but decided against taking such a drastic step. There, the commissioner of public health, Perry Botts, reassured citizens: “There is no need to become panicky over the matter. The thing to do is to keep cool and be careful.”
Coolness and calm, however, could not check influenza. On Oct. 5, 10 flu-connected deaths were reported by the Rocky Mountain News, including that of assistant city attorney William R. Kennedy, brother of Blanche Kennedy. Sharpley still did not think closings were necessary in Denver, even though Pueblo and Colorado Springs, the state’s second and third largest cities, had ordered them. That evening, Denver’s Board of Health followed suit, telling all schools, churches, theaters, and places of amusement to close as of 11 a.m. Sunday. Shops, restaurants, and similar types of businesses were permitted to stay open, and outdoor gatherings were allowed, but other indoor meetings were banned.
On the assumption that fresh air was healthy air, the board also urged parents to keep their children outside. To ensure clean air, Sharpley asked homeowers to refrain from bunrning leaves, which he said “often causes severe colds.”
The News guessed that the closing rule would be in force for at least two weeks, a measure that it predicted would be successful since “the germ which causes the Spanish influenza is a short-lived one. Equally optimistic, Sharpley reported on Oct. 8 that the “plague under control!” Despite his reassuring words, however, he supported additional precautions: The police were instructed to prevent people from spitting on the sidewalks; the tramway was asked to keep streetcar windows open; hospitals were requested to reserve beds for flu patients; and the city sanitation department was instructed to flush downtown streets and sidewalks every night. Over the next few days, police discontinued raiding brothels and picking up vagrants for fear of bringing new germs into jail, and jailers barred lawyers from seeing their clients. Sharpley dispatched inspectors to see that rooming houses were well, ventilated and that employees at soda fountains washed their glasses in hot water.
For all of its good intentions, Denver’s Oct. 6 closing order contained several large loopholes. Not only did it fail to ban outdoor meetings, it also permitted people to travel on streetcars, to shop, and to carry on business as usual. Allowing close contact on a streetcar while prohibiting it in a theater, a church, or a lodge hall seems to defy logic; but outdoor meetings, according to the local medical establishment, posed no danger. Denverites made the most of these loopholes. On Oct. 5, the day before the closing order went into effect, 40,000 people thronged Cheesman Park to admire “the first government battle plane ever seen in Colorado”; the next day, denied the use of their churches, religious leaders held interfaith services in the parks; and on Oct. 7, 10,000 people gathered to march in a 2-mile parade to launch the fourth Liberty Loan Drive, a hoopla event designed to sell war bonds.
On Oct. 7, Gov. Julius C. Gunter urged local authorities to ban public gatherings. Following the lead of Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and Denver, other towns across the state closed their schools and theaters. By this time, Denver had tallied 37 deaths, and 11 had died in Colorado Springs. Twenty cases of the flu were reported in Fort Lupton, 25 in Alamosa, and from 8 to 12 in Glenwood Springs, Fort Collins, and Durango. Sargents, a town of 130 people southeast of Gunnison, reported 40 cases and six deaths on Oct. 8. Other towns, including La Junta, Rocky Ford, Walsenburg, and Gunnison, though they had not yet verified an outbreak, followed the governor’s advice.
Caution proved wise. During mid- and late October, the flu rapidly marched across the state, leaving few places untouched. By Oct. 14, Denver counted 78 deaths and over 1,200 cases. Nederland, a mountain town without a doctor, reported 50 cases. Sargents, where practically everyone had contracted the flu, desperately needed nurses, but the Red Cross had none available. Colorado Springs asked Denver to send oxygen. Rico in Dolores County was hard hit and without a doctor. The Montrose Daily Press discovered 15 cases in the Uncompahgre Valley. Health officer Isaiah Knott chided Montrose citizens: “If you are sick and do not stay away from social gatherings you have the heart of a hun.”
On Oct. 15, faced with a rising death rate, Denver’s Board of Health banned all meetings, indoors or out. The far-reaching order proscribed social gatherings in private homes and forbade public funerals. A few days later, the board decreed that all businesses except restaurants, drugstores, and hotels were to close by 6 p.m. Streetcars were limited to carrying 65 passengers, and drivers were instructed to keep all car windows open. “I am convinced,” said Sharpley, “that after Sunday , we will see a marked decrease in the number of deaths.”
Yet Sunday passed, and the flu remained. New cases of reported influenza declined from more than 260 on Oct. 18 to 80 on Oct. 21, but by Oct. 25 the number had risen to nearly 170. The daily death rate remained more constant and more troublesome. There were more deaths on Oct. 26 than there were on Oct. 15 when the broadened closing order went into effect. The figures gave health officials no solace, especially since an estimated two-thirds of all flu sickness went unreported.
Denverites did not need statistics to tell them that the crisis was grave. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Miranda Gay’s friend, Adam Barclay, describes the situation: “It’s as bad as anything can be all the theaters and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night.”
The newspapers covered especially sad stories and ran items about the illnesses of the socially prominent, including Mayor William F.R. Mills, millionaire Verner Z. Reed, and Gov. Gunter. So many died daily that most of them only rated a single line in long lists. State Board of Health officials counted their blank death certificates in November and concluded that at the rate they were being used, the 1,500 that were on hand would last only two weeks.
As Denver vainly struggled with the epidemic, other towns, some of which had been spared until mid- and late October, also tried to cope. To cut down on visiting, Colorado Springs placarded flu victims’ homes with signs that read “Sickness.”
In Cañon City, teachers mailed homework to students. Pueblo canceled trolley service on two lines because drivers were ill. Montrose pool hall and drugstore proprietors removed their stools to keep people from loafing. In remote Moffat County in the northwestern corner of the state, the local doctor reported a case of pneumonia, the first he had seen in 15 years. By late October, the flu had reached the Southern Ute Indian Reservation in extreme southwestern Colorado where more than 40 Utes eventually succumbed.
While most towns initially relied on closings and home quarantines to tame the epidemic, some went further. Durango, which suffered its first flu death, that of 8-year-old Loisa Bass, on Oct. 8, feared that train passengers would introduce more flu. When Jacob Knapp, a passenger on a Durango-bound train, died, authorities burned his bedding and fumigated the railroad car. Several weeks later, they asked the State Board of Health to prevent salesmen from traveling to Durango, to order fumigation of the cars, and to require train passengers to wear masks. The board agreed only to require fumigation.
Montrose told pet owners to keep their animals at home. Monument prohibited customers from entering stores; instead, they ordered their goods at the door and waited outside until their requests were filled. Ignacio adopted a similar rule.
Some towns looked for scapegoats. The Durango Evening Herald blamed the large number of deaths at the Southern Ute Reservation on Utes who “have paid the toll of negligence and disobedience to the advice of their superintendent and nurses and physicians.” In Sterling, Red Cross women found the flu prevalent in Petersburgh, a neighborhood settled by German-Russian immigrants. “There is talk of quarantining this part of the city. The people from this section are notoriously careless regarding health rules.
Denver also cast a suspicious eye on its foreigners, especially on North Denver’s Italians. According to the Rocky Mountain News, Sharpley attributed the city’s difficulty in dealing with the flu to “the foreign settlements of the city.” Italians, the paper reported, did not understand health rules. As many as 25 crowded into the rooms of sick persons, and their disregard for the ban on public mourning led Sharpley to send in the police to break up at least one funeral.
Although quarantining individual homes was common — Denver placarded 5,000 houses in November — large towns could not keep out incoming travelers. That option, however, seemed sensible to smaller towns. Hayden in Routt County discouraged salesmen by telling them that local merchants would not buy from them. Ouray in the San Juan Mountains was even more serious about banning outsiders: It recruited guards to turn back miners from Silverton and Telluride, a measure that might have been effective except that the virus had already infected local residents. In mid-December, the Durango Evening Herald reported that Ouray’s “shot gun” quarantine had failed and that there were 150 cases in the town and 60 at the Camp Bird Mine.
Through luck and design, Gunnison, a college town and supply center in west central Colorado, avoided the full fury of the virus. The disease indirectly touched nearby Baldwin in late September, when the body of David A. Anderson, a soldier who had died of influenza at Camp Dix, N.J., was sent home for burial. By Oct. 11, Gunnison residents were reading of an outbreak of a then-unidentified sickness at Sargents, 32 miles to the southeast. But as late as Nov. 1, the Gunnison News-Champion doubted that a single local instance had been verified. Like most other towns, Gunnison had banned gatherings and had closed schools in early October. Remaining substantially free of the disease, the town decided to quarantine itself “against the world.”
Gunnison rigorously enforced its rules. County lawmen blocked roads and turned back motorists who tried to enter. Two Nebraskans on their way to Delta tried to run the blockade on Cochetopa Pass, south of Gunnison, and were arrested and jailed. An Alamosa man who tried to sneak into Pitkin, a hamlet northeast of Gunnison, was fined $43. Train conductors warned passengers not to alight at the station, where a step onto the platform meant five days in quarantine. A similar threat at La Veta, more than 100 miles southeast of Gunnison, discouraged motorists from driving north. The Gunnison News-Chronicle urged continual vigilance: “This disease is no joke, to be made light of, but a terrible calamity.”
By taking the threat seriously, Gunnison County survived it with only 58 cases reported in 1918, a per capita rate one-fifth the state’s average.
Gunnison’s fortune contrasted with Silverton’s misfortune.
High in the rugged San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado, this town of some 2,000 enjoyed a measure of isolation, which probably postponed the onset of the flu. Following the practice of other places, Silverton closed its schools in early October. On Oct. 14, Dr. R.C. O’Halloran informed the town council that he knew of no local flu cases. The council authorized the health board to close businesses if necessary and instructed the marshal to clean up the alleys. Readers of the Oct. 19 Silverton Standard would not have guessed from the paper that Silverton was about to face “the worst week ever known in San Juan County.”
In fact, the next week’s Standard devoted half of its first page to obituaries. Many of the dead rated only a line. Some were poorly identified: “Mexican from Sunnyside Austrian from Iowa Mine.”
Over 125 deaths were chronicled in that issue. On Dec. 14, the Standard published a complete necrology with 146 names. Official enumerations later showed 833 influenza and 415 pneumonia cases in San Juan County for 1918, a sickness incidence 12 times the state’s norm.
Except for its extraordinarily high morbidity and mortality rates — numbers explainable in part by its altitude and by the susceptibility of miners to influenza and its attendant pneumonia — Silverton’s macabre encounter with the virus typified that of many other communities. As if animated by malicious intelligence, Spanish influenza defied expert analysis and commonsense predictions. The disease fooled Yuma in southeastern Colorado by lightly touching the town in early November. Then, after the schools reopened, it returned with a vengeance in late November. Other towns which thought they had been spared suddenly found the disease rampant. Steamboat Springs, among the more isolated spots in the state, coasted through most of November without much trouble until suddenly, late in the month, the flu struck. The Steamboat Pilot explained that it could not list all the sick, for simply mentioning the “names of those who were visited by the malady would be almost equivalent to compiling a city directory.”
The epidemic overwhelmed doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Some towns had no doctors, while others had sent them off to war. Denver, with a population of more than 240,000, counted only 300 doctors. Many became ill and some died. Horace Burns was the first in Denver to be felled by the flu. On Oct. 17, although the epidemic still had months to run, the News noted that “every physician in the city is overworked and threatened with exhaustion.” To get medical help at the Royal Tiger mining camp near Breckenridge, mine owners paid a Denver intern $1,000.
Nurses also suffered. Within three days of Denver’s closing order, authorities asked idled teachers to volunteer as nurses. On Oct. 19, 20 nurses at Denver’s St. Joseph’s Hospital were down with influenza, and one had died. By mid-December, half of Denver General Hospital’s 53 nurses had caught the flu — they were given a separate ward. When Minturn, a mountain village, requested nurses from the State Board of Health, none was available. In late October, Aspen, Red Cliff, and Dolores asked for help from the state health department. By Oct. 24, three of Silverton’s six nurses were sick, and the town had to import an undertaker from Durango to replace its disabled mortician. Nurses in Lamar’s emergency hospital took sick, to be replaced by a dozen naval hospital apprentices stationed at Fort Lyon. In Montrose, nurses commanded $100 a week salaries.
Sometimes fear overcame mercy, but usually decency prevailed. Ouray understandably tried to keep sick miners out of town, and gravediggers in Leadville refused to handle any more bodies. But in Cripple Creek, a priest accompanied a doctor on house visits, and Laura Evans, a Salida madam, sent her employees to nurse the ill. Grand Junction women set up a flu office to give help to the sick, and Durango’s women took soup to Silverton. Nurse Bessie Finegan recalled that when the plague struck Durango, “they didn’t have nurses, even in the hospital. The nurses were sick. So people, good people, just volunteered.”
Hospitals quickly ran out of space. Katherine Anne Porter, who took ill in early October, could not get into a hospital and was threatened with eviction before friends finally secured her a hospital bed. As the number of ill people increased, towns had to set up emergency hospitals. Salida converted the Hotel Denton at the train station into a hospital. Craig turned a school into a hospital; Silverton, the city hall; Fort Collins, a Presbyterian church; Leadville, a rooming house. In Pueblo the Fraternal Hospital advertised: “Got the Flu — Bring Your Own Physician — Terms Reasonable.”
While hospital personnel tried to make patients comfortable, they could offer no cures. Katherine Anne Porter ran a fever of 105 degrees for nine days. In a last-ditch attempt to keep her alive, interns gave her a shot of strychnine. Perhaps it was this that saved her, or perhaps she survived through her own indomitable will to live. Her fictional counterpart, Miranda, fought the flu until “there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay.”
Trusting that point of light probably proved as effective for most people as trusting to medical science. Not that the doctors did not try. In Pueblo, they vaccinated steel workers without success. In Montrose, 2,119 people were given shots of the Mayo vaccine without success; Greeley also experimented with the Mayo concoction. Sometimes, as in Porter’s case, doctors hazarded bizarre treatments.
The newspapers regularly repeated Surgeon General Rupert Blue’s strictures, to which they added their own. “Swat the flies,” said the Steamboat Pilot, which also added some doggerel advice: “Cover up each cough and sneeze. If you don’t you spread disease. The Rocky Mountain News editorialized: “It is not reasonable to suppose that man is helpless before a germ so small that the microscope has been unable to discover it.” The News recommended that people cut down on meat. If one ate “fruit and vegetables and less meat you may snap your fingers at the Spanish influenza germ, the pneumonia germ and hundreds of other germs as well.”
It also advised citizens to vote Republican “and you need have no fear of the flu.”
Dr. Erlo B. Kennedy of the State Board of Health warned of dirty soda fountain glasses “where the germs of the town are pooled and redistributed.” In Colorado Springs, Dr. G.B. Gilmore suggested that people stop shaking hands and kissing.
Patent medicine vendors offered potions for the disease, and even the makers of Vicks Vaporub claimed that it helped, as did the manufacturer of Kolynos Dental Cream. The Denver Post advertised Pleasant Purgative Pellets, pills made of Mayapple, leaves of aloe, and root of jalap. The paper also recommended “a clean mouth, a clean shirt and clean bowels.”
With their eyes on their cash registers, Glenwood Springs boosters argued that the vapors from their hot springs would steam the disease away. Citizens proposed home remedies. One wrote Sharpley that carrying an acorn in the left-side vest pocket would do the trick.
Alcohol, an old standby in times of sickness, was less readily available to Coloradans in 1918 than it was two years earlier. In 1916 the state had gone semi-dry, forbidding the manufacture of spirits and liquor store or tavern sales of liquor but allowing importation of alcohol for medicinal and religious purposes. The flu gave many Coloradans a good reason to send away for a bottle. J.E. Sanchez, a Costilla County judge, wanted to skip the middleman. He wrote to Gov. Gunter: “The spanish influenza epidemic is very bad here increasing and danger spreads all around this place.” He asked permission to give away a small amount of confiscated whiskey, which he wrote “is a very good aid in checking it good many people dying here every day.”
Unmoved by the judge’s plea, the governor’s office instructed Sanchez to legally dispose of the illegal brew.
Since neither alcohol, doctors, nor vaccinations could stop the flu, Denverites gradually concluded that the disease would have to run its course. Ordinary people took to the parks, where one teenage girl lamented, “I don’t know how anyone could live where they can’t see anything but the sky and a few trees.”
The wealthy escaped to the mountains — Mrs. Genevieve Chandler Phipps gave parties at Graystone, her estate in upper Bear Creek Canyon — or amused themselves by playing golf. Socialite Bulkley Wells defied the ban by hosting a party, a transgression which brought an admonition from Sharpley, but officials could not do much about widespread violations. “Obviously,” said Denver’s city magazine, Municipal Facts, “it is impossible to arrest the entire citizenship of the city and this is what the health authorities would have to do if they attempted to enforce rules to the letter.”
Sharpley did punish flagrant violators, however. When he learned that the owners of the Specialty Garment Company at 1342 Lawrence would not provide heat for the 60 women employed there, he ordered the place closed. “These,” he explained, “are epidemic times.”
Others lived with the restrictions. Denver’s juvenile court judge, Benjamin Barr Lindsey, canceled lectures because of the ban. Public speaking was even more vital for U.S. Sen. John F. Shafroth, who was seeking re-election. “I reached Denver about the 10th of October,” he wrote to his son, Morrison, an army captain in France. “Could not make speeches since everything closed due to Spanish influenza. Our work confined to sending out literature and to some extent handshaking.”
When millionaire Lawrence Phipps beat Shafroth, Morrison partly blamed the flu: “It is too bad,” he wrote, “that the influenza prevented meetings, because campaigning would have helped you a lot.”
Whatever effect the ban on public gatherings may have had on Shafroth’s campaign, it unquestionably hurt the theater business, which was left without audiences and without revenue. At first, theater owners backed the rule, but as October wore on they grew impatient. Anxious to reopen, they and other businessmen looked for a break in the epidemic. When Denver’s death rates fell slightly in early November, citizens seized on the good news. Finally, on Nov. 11, Sharpley lifted the meeting ban. It would have done no good to enforce it that day, for Denverites could not be stopped from celebrating the armistice ending World War I. In the morning, thousands jammed downtown streets, shouting and yelling, while tin cans trailing behind cars and bicycles added to the din.
In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Miranda Gay heard the cacophony from her hospital bed: “Bells screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in mid-air, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress, sulphur colored light exploded through the black window pane and flashed away in darkness.” Over 8,000 people poured into the municipal auditorium to sing and listen to speeches. In the evening, theaters, many of them redecorated during their idle weeks, reopened to entertain huge crowds. At the Strand, the sublime Ethel Barrymore starred in Our Mrs. McChesney. At the Broadway, the vamp Theda Bara shimmied in Salome, a film which followed with “few variations the biblical chronicle.”
Sharpley initially feared that the victory celebration would lead to another outbreak of flu. Yet when only two deaths were tallied in mid-November, he concluded that the “epidemic was virtually over.”
With the city returning to normal, the News reported that in seven weeks Denver had suffered nearly 6,000 cases of influenza and nearly 500 deaths. On Nov. 21, Sharpley stated: “I believe that by the end of another week Denver’s death rate will be normal.” But, as he had in early October, he spoke too soon. The city had not even reached the epidemic’s halfway point. Eleven days after the armistice celebration, on Nov. 22, 18 flu sufferers died.
On that day, Sharpley and Mayor Mills reinstated the closing order. They banned meetings, religious services, and parties held in conjunction with Thanksgiving dinners. Theaters were told to shut their doors again. On top of the closing order, Sharpley added a new set of rules requiring people to wear gauze masks when shopping. These had been used in Denver on a voluntary basis since mid-October and had been required in other Colorado towns, including Glenwood Springs and Pueblo.
Previously Sharpley had questioned the efficacy of the masks, and Mills had remarked that it would take half the population to make the other half wear them. But with the late November outbreak, officials were desperate to try anything.
Businessmen, particularly theater owners, were also desperate, but for a different reason. On Nov. 23, 75 theater proprietors and movie representatives, all wearing masks, marched on Mayor Mills’ office to demand that theaters be allowed to re-open. They told the mayor that without audiences the movie houses would lose $50,000 and the live theaters $30,000 each week. Under fire, Mills and Sharpley withdrew the closing order scarcely 24 hours after it had been issued. They had little choice.
Six weeks of closings in October and November may have slowed the flu, but the disease had not been stopped. Denver looked at other cities, such as New York, which had not closed and which had not experienced an inordinately heavy flu rate. Sharpley and his advisors, it seemed, did not have the answers. “Now, in its own place the medical profession is admirable,” said the News. But, contended the paper, “when it becomes administrative the profession is out of its depths in strange waters.”
Adrift in uncharted political and epidemiological waters, Sharpley paddled to his last significant line of defense — masks. Citizens were ordered to wear masks in theaters, though not in churches; in shops, but not in hotels. Pool hall patrons needed masks; soda fountain customers did not. Waiters were supposed to wear them; their customers could dine without them. Denver Postmaster Benjamin F. Stapleton instructed mail carriers to don masks. Bank tellers and clerks also tied on the “little gauze germ catchers.” At streetcar stops, policemen urged passengers to put on masks.
An alarming increase in cases — 22 deaths were reported on Nov. 26 — did not stiffen community resolve. The Denver Post straddled the fence, arguing that the medical profession should do something, without suggesting what that should be. Denver set up three emergency hospitals; schools stayed shut. Theaters limited the size of their audiences and ministers passed a resolution supporting doctors in their efforts to control the plague.
Resolutions did not help. The mask order, like the closing order, irked people and was irregularly obeyed. Women volunteers at the Red Cross worked all night on Nov. 22, but they could not make enough masks to meet the demand. Theaters provided a limited number that could be purchased for a nickel. Patrons without masks were instructed to use a handkerchief. Many refused to wear them. One saleswoman complained to the News that wearing a mask caused her nose to fall asleep. Another said that she relied on powers higher than the officials of Denver to protect her. The News published an anti-mask editorial arguing that germs could get through the gauze, that a mask interfered with the lung’s ability to get fresh air, and that “compelling thousands of people to wear masks tends to lower the morale of the community.”
A few days later, two bandits, their faces covered with flu masks, shot and killed a north Denver grocer. By then Denver had abandoned compulsory mask wearing. On Nov. 31, 1918, Sharpley rescinded the mask order.
The Denver Post argued that vacillating policies were useless. Denver businessmen, it stated, “are entirely too magnanimous and too unselfish and too heroic to ask or expect the abatement of any regulations that will lessen this epidemic of influenza.” The facts belied the assertion. Denver’s businessmen chafed under the first closing order; rejoiced when it was lifted; and opposed it when it was reinstated. Vacillating policies were not Dr. Sharpley’s fault. Unfooled by the Denver Post’s posturing, the Glenwood Springs Post blamed “selfish business reasons” for allowing Denver to “play fast and loose with this deadly scourge.”
Denver’s businessmen, however, were not alone in their opposition to health regulations. In Grand Junction, the Mesa County Council of Defense favored quarantining the sick in their homes rather than closing theaters. When Grand Junction churches were allowed to reopen in late November, Baptists placed an advertisement in the Grand Junction Weekly News: “All regular members are urged to attend and to bring their contributions of the weeks that we have been closed.”
Like Denver, other towns and cities debated about lifting the closing order. In mid-November, it was canceled in the eastern Colorado counties of Lincoln, Washington, Elbert, Kit Carson, Cheyenne, and Phillips, rural areas where the flu had done generally less damage than in other places. Some towns reopened schools and then had to shut them down again. Gunnison, which had largely escaped the ravages of the flu, decided not to reopen schools until late January and required students and faculty returning to the State Normal School to spend two days in quarantine. Many other towns, including Denver, reopened schools in January.
By early 1919, the epidemic had begun to wane. Deaths rose in Denver in December, peaking in the middle of the month, and then declined. On Dec. 30, only one death was recorded, and by January two of the city’s three emergency hospitals had closed. Most other towns also indicated that the flu had disappeared or was tapering off, although sometimes the disease would ease only to reappear again. Durango faced it in October and November, again in January 1919 and, among schoolchildren, again in March.
Delta County saw 42 percent of its cases reported in 1919, and Clear Creek County 35 percent. On the other hand, 47 of Colorado’s 63 counties reported no flu in 1919. Denver tallied 1,004 instances in 1919, most in the early months, which amounted to less than 10 percent of its 1918-19 total.
National statistics on the epidemic are not entirely reliable, since many states did not report their influenza deaths.
Of the 24 that did, the excess death rate from both the flu and pneumonia was 528 per 100,000 people. With a 586 rate, Denver moderately exceeded the national average. Compared to Minneapolis, St. Paul, Indianapolis, Rochester, and Seattle — cities with rates between 305 and 428 — -Denver would appear to have been hard hit. But compared to Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Boston, San Francisco, and Nashville — cities with rates ranging as high as 1,026 — it would appear to have been only mildly scathed.
On the whole, Denver fought the flu at least as vigorously as many other cities of its size, and, like many others, it made mistakes. San Francisco, like Denver, put itself in harm’s way by staging mass events to sell war bonds, while in EI Paso, as in Denver, authorities lifted the meeting ban before Armistice Day, in time to expose thousands of people to the flu at victory celebrations. Yet Denver’s death rate was in line with that of other cities, and it was below the average for Colorado, a state whose excess death incidence of 681 per 100,000 put it among the worst of those reporting; only Maryland, Montana, and Pennsylvania were higher.
Some Coloradans drew public health lessons from the grim numbers. Dr. A.L. Davis told the Durango Evening Herald that in 1918 the state of Colorado spent $25,000 to control livestock diseases — about $5,000 more than on the State Board of Health. “Judging by the amount of money spent by the Government,” he said, “sheep and cattle are more valuable than people.”
The doctor had a point. That year the secretary and executive officer of the board, Dr. Erlo E. Kennedy, received $2,500 while the state bank commissioner was paid $3,600, and the commissioner of mines $3,000. Kennedy’s salary matched that of the state boiler inspector and the state historian.
At the height of the epidemic, Kennedy wrote to Gov. Gunter telling him that the board of health was in an “embarrassing condition because of the lack of funds to meet the emergency.” The governor allowed the board to siphon money from a $5,500 appropriation earmarked for venereal disease control, a pittance in comparison to the need. The board had not published a report since 1916, nor would it issue one until its 1921-22 compilation, which appeared in 1923. Four years after the state’s worst epidemic, Colorado remained unenthusiastic about supporting public health.
“We have,” Dr. Tracy Love lamented in 1922, “but one medical inspector and he is paid for part-time work only; yet he is expected to spend days at a time investigating our health problems throughout the state.”
Unwilling to wage a protracted war against an invisible enemy, Denver meekly accepted the flu’s retreat. As the disease faded, physicians grew lax in reporting it. in 1921 and 1922, the city suffered a smallpox epidemic. Yet in 1927, when James Wallace surveyed public health in Denver, he found a town “richly endowed by Nature as a health-giving locality” which annually spent less than 60 cents per capita on public health, an expenditure far below that of Newark, Milwaukee, Buffalo, or Indianapolis.
Hindsight suggests that Denver and Colorado might have fought the disease more effectively. Epidemics, though not of the magnitude of the 1918 flu, regularly ravaged American cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Denver’s typhoid record, for example, was abysmal. However, in an era before penicillin and similar drugs, many Americans accepted such unwelcome visitations with resignation. Some lived; some died. Little could be done about it. In a different context, historian Richard Hofstadter summarized this attitude as “a kind of naturalistic Calvinism in which man’s relation to nature is as hard and demanding as man’s relation to God under the Calvinistic system.”
But resignation was only one aspect of Colorado’s — and the nation’s — response to the flu. In an age of marvelous invention — electric lights, automobiles, radio, motion pictures — and at the end of a great war designed to make the world safe for democracy, optimism and belief in progress warred with attitudes of pessimism and fatalism. Americans liked to think that they could defeat any enemy — Germans or germs. Unfortunately, the flu moved so fast that health officials rarely got ahead of it. Had towns imposed severe restrictions on group contact, movement, and in-migration before the flu appeared, they might have been spared the worst of the epidemic, but usually this was either impractical or impossible. Without risking economic suffocation, cities could not exclude all outsiders. Smaller towns, like Gunnison, could afford to quarantine themselves against the world, but normally they did not become convinced of the danger until it was upon them. Denver had time to prepare, since the flu struck Boston and Chicago several weeks before entering Colorado. Like many other cities, however, it tarried until the disease had appeared.
Perhaps it was more difficult for Denverites to respond to the calamity in Chicago, 1,000 miles away, than it was for Gunnison’s citizens to recognize a threat from Sargents, some 30 miles distant. Perhaps it was also easier for Gunnison, with its relatively homogeneous population, to enforce health rules than it was for economically, socially, and ethnically diverse cities to do so.
The prevalence of flu in immigrant sections of Denver, Pueblo, and Sterling suggests that overcrowding in poor neighborhoods and lack of knowledge about disease compounded health officials’ problems in fighting the epidemic. But it was not the poor alone who refused to wear masks, or who violated the closing order. Wealthy Bulkley Wells ignored the ban on parties, just as North Denver Italians ignored the ban on public funerals.
Many Coloradans had come to the state for their health. Convinced of the curative power of the sun and fresh air, they refused to listen to health officers. Moreover, the doctors did not seem to have the answers. Sharpley regularly predicted that the epidemic’s end was near, and just as regularly the flu fooled him.
As the crisis passed, Coloradans, like other Americans, pushed the nightmare to the back of their minds. It was, after all, a war they had lost. Alfred W. Crosby notes in his excellent study, Epidemic and Peace, 1918: “The average college graduate literally knows more of the Black Death of the fourteenth century than the World War I pandemic, although it is undoubtedly true that several of his or her friends and relatives lived through it and, if asked, could describe the experience in some detail.”
Journalist H.L. Mencken explained why his generation tried to forget it: “The human mind always tries to expunge the intolerable from memory, just as it tries to conceal it while current.”
Colorado — and America — wanted to forget the flu, but there remained an unforgettable legacy. Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” praised by Alfred Crosby as “one of the twentieth century’s masterpieces of short fiction,” etched the flu in Denver into history. Porter’s beau, an army officer, died. So did Miranda Gay’s fictional friend, Adam Barclay. Porter, though she developed complications that included loss of her hair, lived.
Miranda Gay also clung to the bright light of life. She emerged from the maelstrom, as did the Miranda of Shakespeare’s Tempest, into a brave new world. For Miranda Gay, for Katherine Anne Porter, and for thousands of others, survival meant rebirth: “No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.”
Stephen J. Leonard is the chairman of the History Department at Metropolitan State College of Denver. This article was reprinted without footnotes from “Essays and Monographs in Colorado History (Essays Number 9 1989),” a publication of the Colorado Historical Society.
