An Unprecedented Time? Not Really

By Margaret Sweet, photos courtesy of Ely Winton Historical Society.

We are living in a most extraordinary time. Those of us who are not epidemiologists didn’t expect to experience a worldwide pandemic on the scale of Covid-19, but here we are. It’s not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, and although it has been called unprecedented, it really isn’t. Some historical epidemics would probably have become pandemics except that the human race had a long way to go in international travel. There was Hamin Mangha in northeastern China where 5000 years ago the entire population was stricken with a disease that so completely annihilated the population that the site was never again inhabited.

The Black Death, which devastated Europe from 1346 to 1353, wiped out over half that continent’s population. Spread by fleas living on infected rodents, the bacteria that likely caused it is considered extinct today. This plague changed the course of Europe’s history, ended serfdom, and brought about better pay for workers. Historians who study that period have concluded that higher wages meant better living conditions, better food, and may have contributed to the industrial revolution in later centuries.

While pandemics aren’t new to the human race, others that we didn’t even consider in that category include the AIDS/HIV epidemic that began in 1981. While there is no cure and it continues to this day, the development of drugs has brought the death rate down and, in fact, two people have been pronounced cured of it just this year.

Other pandemics we have lived through include the “Asian flu” of 1957- 58. Over a million people worldwide died of it that year with 115,000 deaths in the United States alone. It was determined to be a variation of an avian flu. Eventually schools closed due to the flu spreading rapidly through the school population. [Editor’s note: I was in 3rd grade and never completely learned my times tables because school was closed so long that year.]

2009 and 2010 brought us the H1N1 Swine Flu. In a one-year period roughly 1.4 billion people came down with this flu, and around the world as many as 575,400 people died according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Other very serious illnesses which never quite reached pandemic scale include Ebola and Zika. There are no cures for either of them.

Going back to 1918 we come to the “Spanish Flu.” It was called that because Spain wasn’t fighting in World War I, so the Spanish press wasn’t under the restrictions imposed on the press of the nations who were fighting. Governments of the warring nations were in a panic to keep the troops flowing into the battle zones, so they played down the spreading of this deadly disease. Especially rampant in U.S. military bases, the disease was already killing American soldiers when the United States put its young men onto ships and sailed them to Europe where they spread the disease. More died in the trenches of influenza than of enemy fire. Spain let the cat out of the bag, you might say, by informing the world of this particularly dreadful illness that could kill in hours. Although it didn’t originate there, the pandemic was named for the country that disclosed its presence.

Check out two articles from the Ely Miner, published on October 25, 1918 and November 15, 1918, respectively.

The Ely Miner newspapers of November 1 and 8, 1918 printed column after column of death notices. Some of the deaths reported were of Mike Usheff, age 27, of the Vienna Bakery. He left relatives in Bulgaria. Mrs. Matt Gorshe died at one hospital just hours after her husband and two children were discharged. They had just arrived home in Zenith Location when word was sent of the passing of the wife and mother. She was 27. George Kattilius died on a Friday and was buried on Saturday. He left a widow and three children. John Cosgrove, former city treasurer, died. Mrs. John Pikkarainen, age 30, died at the emergency hospital leaving a husband and five children. She was ill only a short time. Sakri Jokela, age 41, remembered by many as a janitor at the schools, was brought in from Section 30. He was survived by a wife and two children. Three other children had died in a house fire three years earlier. John Smuk, age 20. His older brother, Matt, had just died of wounds received in France. Louis Mestnik, 17 months old. His mother died the day the baby was buried. Threeyear-old Louis Bernhart, four-month old Otto Nykanen, two-year old Gertrude Williams, and two-and-a-half-year-old Angela Papesh all were lost to the pandemic. The flu was no respecter of age.

This list went on and on and was only a fraction of what was reported in two issues of the paper. The Miner’s editorial of November 1st read that Ely had seen as many as 600 cases of the flu at one time. “Not only are the mines affected, but business of all kinds is practically at a standstill.”

The paper reported that Doctors Parker and Sutherland were assisted by Dr. Stanley of Section Thirty and Dr. Metcalf of Winton. These men were making an average of 100 house calls each day besides attending to hundreds more patients at the hospital.

A special train carrying officials of the Duluth & Iron Range railroad and of the Oliver Iron Mining Company arrived in Ely to look over the situation and to distribute a quantity of anti-flu vaccine. Several hundred were vaccinated at the Shipman hospital. This vaccine was for prevention and anyone wanting to be vaccinated was asked to call at the hospital. The vaccine was free.

If the world hadn’t been fighting “the war to end all wars,” perhaps better efforts would have been made to contain the spread and this would have ended differently.

Mike Hillman, Ely’s consummate storyteller, wrote about how Ojibwe Chief Blackstone of Kawa Bay on Kawnipi Lake snowshoed for help when his people were dying from the Spanish Flu. Mike’s story, taken from one that the famous guide Bill Magie told, was printed in the Summer 1999 issue of the Ely Summer Times and will soon be available at RavenWordsPress.com in the archive section. Magie’s version is printed in a book of his stories collected by Dave Olesen, A Wonderful Country.

Mike ended his article with: “The last time I visited Kawa Bay I left tobacco for the spirits of Chief Blackstone and his people, and I also left a little extra in memory of my friend Bill Magie.” Now Mike’s friends leave a bit of tobacco to honor him.

More recently Staci Lola Drouillard wrote about the Ojibwe of northern Minnesota and Ontario in Walking The Old Road. She includes Blackstone’s sad story.

Probably those who lived through previous pandemics have said, as we do today, that these are unprecedented times. Sometime in the future other generations will say the same as they look back on the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020.

A photo from California during the Spanish Flu pandemic.