The Flu Season Has Arrived

The time for this year’s flu shots arrived so off we went to a pharmacy to receive our vaccinations.  The first thing the pharmacist asked was “How old are you?”  It’s hard for me to say 76, because I am in denial, but I answered honestly.  She said she was out of the high-dose vaccine recommended for people in my age group.  The next day the shipment arrived so we returned.  I asked just what was the difference between the two vaccines.  The clerk said it was recommended for the elderly.  Elderly? I jumped on that word to play some high jinks deviltry.  We ended up involving three of the pharmacists and clerks as they tried to correct the “elderly” verbiage to my liking by using such words as older, mature, grandfatherly, aged like a fine wine and others that were a bit more acceptable.  It all ended up for the good.

The ladies never did satisfy my curiosity in telling the difference between the two vaccines, so when I got home, a google search for information brought a simple non-scientific answer.  The high-dose version contains four times the antigen of the regular dose and is intended to give older people a better immune response, and therefore, better protection against the flu.  I accepted that.

What is the history of vaccinations? I wondered.  A man named Edward Jenner living in England administered the world’s first vaccination in 1796.  Jenner was a perceptive man who realized that when the area milkmaids developed a mild illness called cowpox, they never went on to contract smallpox.  He conducted an experiment by scratching the arm of an 8-year-old boy and smeared some pus from cowpox on it.  Then after a period of time he took the next step and added a bit of smallpox into the same child.  The boy did not catch it since he was now immunized.

A story from our own area’s history talks about the winter of 1884 when smallpox broke out at Owego.  One family named Knutson suffered the first tragic deaths from the outbreak when two of their four children died.   As a result a doctor came from Fargo to administer vaccinations to everyone in the community.  The thought of a long needle inserted into the arm did not appeal to everyone.  The wife of one settler refused it and hid herself thinking the doctor would soon leave.  But her husband became adamant and said, “Katherina, you must come down, the doctor is here and he says you must get ‘waxmenated.’” After much coaxing she finally relented to being “waxmenated.”

In the St. John the Baptist Cemetery near Zeeland, North Dakota, six iron crosses mark the graves of one family’s children who died during the diphtheria epidemic of 1898-1899.  This community was particularly hard hit when 61 different families suffered the deaths of 99 individuals, mostly children.  We will venture to guess that they were not vaccinated.

An engrossing interview found on YouTube features a man named Charles Challey of Lisbon, ND relating his memories of the flu epidemic of 1918.  He talked about the severity of the illness and how fast it killed some of the victims.  Challey’s father was the mortician in the community, and Charles tells of wagons and buggies carrying bodies of the victims that were stacked up behind the mortuary.

A story from the annals of my wife’s family deals with a diphtheria epidemic in 1927.  One family who didn’t believe in doctors or vaccinations experienced the death of three sons in one week’s time.   My mother-in-law recalled how they dreaded the sight of the father of the dead children walking over the hill towards their farm to order another coffin be built by her dad.  For building material he used boards he ripped from partitions in the granary because the roads were blocked in the winter and he could not get to a lumberyard for new boards.  He expressed concern that he might run out of boards.  Neighbors became insistent for action and banded together to bring by horse team a Doctor Lorenzen to the rural community to vaccinate all the families.

We need to thank Edward Jenner for identifying how we can prevent diseases through vaccinations.  Some still won’t accept vaccinations for their children.  The state allows for three types of exemptions: medical, religious, and personal belief.  A health care provider’s signature is needed for a medical exemption.  A parent’s signature is required for religious or personal belief exemptions.  That’s their choice.  My shots are up-to-date.

The End of the Line

One of my aunts recently passed away, an event which happens in families all the time.  But in this case, she was the last of the line.  My Dad’s family included eleven siblings — eleven siblings who married and begot a generation of their own descendants.  We lived amongst those twenty-two brothers, sisters, and spouses throughout their lives, only to watch the number diminish, one by one, as they left us.  My cousins and I now remain as the oldest generation in the family.  

I feel a bit of sadness after learning the last one of anything has disappeared from the earth.  I even felt a bit gloomy when I read about the death of the last passenger pigeon, a species that once was the most common bird in North America.  The word “irreversible” connotes strong meaning, and once the last beating heart stops, that’s it.

Fred Baguhn, an old Owego pioneer, wrote about the huge numbers of pigeons that visited our area.  He said, “So numerous were they reported to have been that they completely obscured the sun when in flight and completely covered the trees of the woods when they alighted.”  Scientists at the time estimated there were three to five billion pigeons in North America.  But after their numbers were greatly depleted through hunting and netting that bagged as many as 500 at a time, the end came about 1900 when a boy shot what was thought to be the last surviving bird in the wild.  Some were held in captivity, and the last of these died in 1914.  

We have become interested in family genealogy as that found in both Scandinavian and German-Russian history.  I found an interesting passage written by an old Catholic priest when he compiled a history of families living in the Dickinson area.  He wrote of rolling steppes in the southern part of Ukraine that lay idle for a long while until the Empress of Russia Catherine the Great invited German farmers to settle and farm the virgin soil.  On that land Russian wolves had multiplied to great numbers and Monsignor Aberle wrote “It took those brave settlers and their descendants almost one hundred years to wipe out the ever hungry and vicious wolf pack.”  

References can be found where wolves, buffalo, bears, eagles, crows, and all manner of wildlife once lived here.  Consider the huge buffalo herds roaming the prairie, and it stands to reason that many kinds of predators and scavengers once thrived here.  Buffalo dying from natural causes or injuries made for easy pickings for wild animals to dine on their meat.  Then civilization happened with people, towns, and fences to thin their numbers and make their light die out and disappear from our region.

Even the ground we live on enters the picture.  Since we now make our home in Fargo, this old farm boy can’t ignore the fact of his residence sitting on a piece of beautiful farmland taken out of production so some developer could build on it to make a one time profit from its sale.  We always learned the Red River Valley is among the richest land in the world, which is not a stretch of the imagination after seeing the bountiful crops grown on these fields year after year.  Driving to the outside boundaries of the city, heavy machinery continues to prepare the cropland for another building and asphalt street.  The line from a Joni Mitchell song hits the mark, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”  The end has come for many things.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Some people don’t like the subject of history saying it’s dull and boring.  They live in the present and worry about paying their bills in the future.  So the past doesn’t much affect them, they think.  But the old platitude about our standing on the shoulders of giants speaks quite well to the topic, I think.  The simple explanation states that each generation builds on the knowledge of the one before.  Even more simply, anyone standing on the shoulders of a giant can see farther than the giant himself.  

To illustrate, consider the invention and development of internal combustion engines.  They just didn’t appear in their present form to power vehicles along I-94 at 75 miles per hour.  Prior to 1860 and as early as 200 BCE in China hand cranks were developed and in the 300s a crank and connecting rod mechanism saw use in Turkey.  In the 1700s the first idea of a rudimentary internal combustion piston engine using gunpowder to power a water pump appeared.  A variety of developments kept showing up at this time such as two-stroke compression, carburetors, plus many more.

A big moment in engine development came with Nikolaus Otto’s invention of the Otto gasoline engine in 1876.  It was the forerunner of our familiar four-stroke engine operating with intake, compression, power, and exhaust strokes.  An example of one can be seen at Rollag, Minnesota during the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion. A video of it in operation can be found by doing a brief google search.  Inventions, improvements, and perceived uses kept piling up, a topic about which a curious person could spend hours reading about.  

Personally, I’ve read history dealing with many topics and follow whatever trail I find myself on.  One dealt with my maternal grandfather and his experiences in World War One.  After learning the name of the army division and regiment that he marched with, I gathered a good deal of knowledge about the battles they fought, the conditions they struggled in, and the death and destruction that surrounded them.  

From that experience, another area of interest developed - the use and abuse of horses in that war.  Millions died from disease, malnutrition, injuries, overwork, and wounds from being targeted by enemy fire.  One particular horse stood out, a South Dakota horse rejected by French buyers because he could not be tamed to ride or pull loads.  Tipperary’s owners turned him into a rodeo horse, was used up in arenas until he could no longer perform, and was turned loose on the open range to die a lonely death in a blizzard.

One topic, still untold, begs for attention.  It centers on my home ground, more or less defined within the present day boundaries of Ransom County.  In general, I find it significant because that ground became the highway that settlers and freighters used to drive their wagons westward, at least, that is, until the Northern Pacific Railroad built its line from Fargo to Bismarck.  It’s a slow process to dig up information because not a lot has been written about it, but it’s worth the effort.

The term “scouts” comes up in some of the literature, especially that dealing with Fort Ransom and Pigeon Point.  I could never quite determine what was meant by it, until recently, while attending a family history workshop I found a publication that tells me, The Fort Sisseton Dakota Scouts and Their Camps in Eastern Dakota Territory, 1863-1866.  The aftermath of the U.S. - Dakota War of 1862 had spilled over into our part of the country and Indian men who had remained friendly to the whites were hired as another layer of defense.  More about that next week. 

  

Leadership in Turbulent Times

I visited the Barnes and Noble bookstore the other day thinking I might purchase the new Woodward book — Fear: Trump in the White House.  After picking it up and riffling through the pages, I realized I’d already read several excerpts and heard much about its contents debated on cable news. I decided to wait to check it out of the library, but instead reached for my wallet to buy Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book— Leadership in Turbulent Times.

She has previously written books about Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.  Now, she returns to those four presidents to take another look at their leadership abilities during the periods for which they are remembered.  While I have only dipped into its pages briefly, it begs to be read completely through to the end.  

It seems as though turbulent times stick by our sides on a permanent basis; today is certainly not an exception.  The years prior to the Civil War saw disruption in the legislative process when the subject of slavery came under consideration.  In 1856 while deliberating the issue of slavery in Kansas, the anti-slave Senator Sumner of Massachusetts gave an impassioned speech against it.  It so inflamed one man, a member of the House of Representatives, that he entered the floor of the Senate and repeatedly struck Sumner on the head with his cane.  Reasoned discourse had broken down.

Two years later in 1858 the subject of slavery in Kansas still raised ire.  During one debate a Republican and a Democrat argued to the point of exchanging blows.  Before the sergeant-at-arms could bring order to the chamber, more than thirty members had joined in.  Two Republicans ganged up on one Democrat and successfully ripped the hairpiece off his head.  When things settled down, Kansas entered the Union as a free state.

Fiery personalities appeared before that.  In 1818, General Andrew Jackson invaded Spanish-controlled Florida to attack a gathering group of Seminole Indians.  Henry Clay, the speaker of the house at the time, was infuriated by Jackson’s action.  Little good it did for his side because Jackson went on to become elected president and was responsible for the Indian Removal Act that resulted in The Trail of Tears forced march.  Jackson was very much the authoritarian while Clay became known as the Great Compromiser.  At this period heated debates over tariffs came about.  For the record, President Trump has expressed admiration for Jackson and his style of governing.

Since “fake news” has entered the recent dialogue, I found it interesting to look for examples where other presidents abhorred their press coverage.  The first example looks at Thomas Jefferson who was pro-press, that is until the stories were about him.  Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams used the press to insult each other.  Newspapers that supported Jefferson called Adams such things as a hermaphrodite, while Adams’ press support accused Jefferson of being the “son of a half-breed Indian squaw.”

Teddy Roosevelt shrewdly used the reporting to his own end.  He’d give reporters a story on Sunday and then waited to base his decisions on how the public reacted on Monday.  In the Spanish-American War he took along his own reporter to write positive stories about him and his actions during the war.

I found it surprising to learn how far Woodrow Wilson went with attempts to control the press in World War I.  He tried censoring their reporting or writing his own propaganda stories to submit to them.  He wanted desperately to be granted the authority to exercise censorship over the press, but the senate and the  house of representatives never consented to it.

Harry Truman complained about his press coverage but got the last laugh when he defeated Tom Dewey.  Newspaper publishers were mostly united in their preference and favor for Dewey.  The Chicago Daily Tribune, so certain Dewey would win, even printed their paper with the erroneous headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”  A picture shows Truman holding it up and grinning from ear to ear.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein doggedly pursued a story and coaxed an informant known as “Deep Throat” to uncover the Nixon administration’s wrongdoings.  As more information became known, Nixon even tried to get the FBI involved to kill the investigation into the Watergate affair.  Affairs became naked to the public view and Nixon resigned the presidency.

Doris Kearns Goodwin tries to answer some questions in her latest book: Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times?  How can a leader infuse a sense of purpose and meaning into people’s lives?  What is the difference between power, title, and leadership?  Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?  I’m anxious to read the book through to the end to discover the answers.

Some Days Ask Why Not?

A change in everyday routine adds a little spice to life so we did just that a couple weeks ago when we drove south on I-29 to Brookings, South Dakota.  The annual South Dakota Festival of Books had drawn my attention, so why not go and rub shoulders with some like-minded people.  It was our first year to attend and might not be the last.  To satisfy book lovers at both ends of their state, the festival alternates between east and west where last year Deadwood played host.   

Some popular writers were in attendance this year who spoke about their work at different sessions.  One that we missed on Friday was Alice Sebold who wrote a bestseller The Lovely Bones.  Saturday featured a full lineup which featured two writers that I wanted to hear speak - Leif Enger and Timothy Egan.  Enger wrote one that sold hundreds of thousands of copies: Peace Like a River.  He’s titled his new book, just out, Virgil Wander. 

The one I most wanted to hear was Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his journalism and a National Book Award winner for his book The Worst Hard Time.  I’ve been reading his material for several years now after first coming into contact with opinion pieces he’d written for the New York Times which the Bismarck Tribune reprinted.  He based his talk on the award winning book and reviewed how he went about gathering the information for it.

The Worst Hard Time centers on the severe drought that the Midwest suffered through in the 1930s.  His take is different from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath which many consider to be the story of that time.  Steinbeck’s book deals with about one-third of the residents, those who left for the West.  Egan’s book deals with the other two-thirds, those who stayed to undergo the hardships.  Indeed, the subtitle to the book states that it is the untold story of those who survived the great American dust bowl.

Our parents and grandparents told countless stories of their experiences in the dust-blowing 30s.  One of his anecdotes told of the day called Black Sunday, April 14, 1935 which was remembered as the worst dust storm of all.  To quote a passage, “The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the Panama Canal.  The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon.”

Some thought the Biblical Armageddon had arrived.  Woody Guthrie lived in Pampa, Texas, and after he experienced Black Sunday, he wrote his famous song “So long, it’s been good to know you.”  One of the verses states, “The churches was jammed, and the churches was packed - an’ that dusty old dust storm blowed so black - preacher could not read a word of his text - an’ he folded his specs, an’ he took up collection and said, “So long , it’s been good to know you.”

In Washington, DC, legislators dragged their feet on such things as a Soil Conservation Service.  A man of science named Hugh Hammond Bennett knew and understood the problem with the loose soil blowing.  Farming practices had to be changed.  He started making noise with the people in power and made his point one day when dust could be seen in the air.  He told those present that they were watching Oklahoma fly by.

Two other presentations covered the interesting topic of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.  Phyllis Cole-Dai has written a book of historical fiction titled Beneath the Same Stars which places the wife of a physician in the hands of her Dakota kidnappers.  Gary Clayton Anderson, a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, Oklahoma, is known for his specialization in the American Indians of the Great Plains and the Southwest.  His latest book is Gabriel Renville: From the Dakota War to the Creation of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Reservation, 1825-1892.

Both Cole-Dai and Anderson have centered their books on an individual.  So, too, do I hope to continue writing the story of one I’ve identified, Nancy McClure, also known in some circles as Winona.  She lived in Ransom County for some years and her experiences beg me to tell her story.  Why not?