Covid-19 has certainly heightened our awareness of the potential for deadly disease to run through the population. The very idea of a pandemic seemed far away from American shores until it wasn’t.

Being a baby-boomer, I and the rest of my generation will recall the polio vaccinations pioneered by Dr. Jonas Salk. I got mine in a sugar cube. March of Dimes donation cards were everywhere and eventually polio became a rare malady.

My generation can easily say that we have witnessed a revolutionary change in health security. Certainly, we have Alzheimer’s, a multitude of cancers, and now we have Covid-19.

Even so, several generations of health security in the face of contagion have left us wide open to fear and panic.

Our ancestors lived with a sense of the inevitability of sickness and death. Disease in the 19th century was an all too familiar part of everyday life. People were dying from cholera, smallpox, diphtheria, typhus, and tuberculosis. Mothers and babies died in childbirth. Death was the imperceptible companion, always just beyond the sparkle of life, waiting to reveal the final destiny.

My own family experiences come from stories handed down through the generations.

My great-grandparents, George and Euphemia Gray, came to Ellsworth, Kan., from Ontario, Canada, in September of 1879. Within months 3-yearold Harry died of diphtheria on Christmas Day. His 9-year-old brother, John, succumbed to the same disease in the spring of 1880.

Life had to go on, but that sparkle was slow to return.

Another son, George Fredrick, known to the family as Fred, lived into early manhood and had two sons of his own when he contracted consumption (tuberculosis). As Fred grew worse, he, his wife Mary, and another man, who had lately contracted the same disease, set out in a wagon for Colorado Springs. The dry air of higher elevations was believed to be beneficial. But Fred continued to fail and died before reaching Colorado. Mary never remarried.

In 1903, black smallpox struck my hometown of Geneseo, Kan. A temporary worker was believed to have passed the disease to a section crew working for the Missouri Pacific Railroad at Delevan, Kan. That worker sickened and died.

The nine men working with him, from Marquette, Frederick, Geneseo, and Bushton carried the disease home to their families causing death in those towns and panic in surrounding communities. All nine men died.

At Geneseo, the first death came to a Mr. Isenhauer, one of the crew members. The Maupin family suffered severely. Brothers Bal and Dick died a short time after Mr. Isenhauer. Four others caught the disease. They were Mrs. Isenhauer, Dr. Stredder, Walter Maupin, younger brother of the Maupin brothers, and Margaret Leathers, Walter’s caretaker. Mrs. Isenhauer later died. The others recovered after receiving a vaccination.

In the fall of 1918, Spanish Influenza came to Kansas. All the aspects of the social distancing that we have come to know in 2020 were implemented across the state of Kansas. Schools, theaters, and church services were canceled. Public gatherings were banned, and store customers were limited. Even so, 675,000 people lost their lives in the United States. That was twice the number of American deaths from World War I.

My grandfather, Bruce C. Gray, Sr., worked for his brother Frank in the livery business. They had provided a buggy service for travelers who wanted to go out into the country after getting off the train. Salesmen used the service to go from house to house selling their goods to the public. When automobiles came into use the buggy was exchanged for a car.

Lince and Juanita Coulter, a popular young Geneseo couple, died one day apart, Oct. 10, and 11, 1918.

Others soon followed.

There was no hospital at Geneseo. Folks were accustomed to doctor visits in their homes. The doctors had their own autos, but the circumstances required ‘round-the-clock service.

My grandfather drove Dr. George Bush from house to house. Dr. Bush was the official surgeon for the Missouri Pacific Railroad and loved beyond measure in the Geneseo community. While Dr. Bush was in the home, my grandfather slept. Dr. Bush took short catnaps while being driven to the next home stricken with the disease. In that way they were able to go 24 hours a day saving as many lives as they could.

With time modern medicine conquered most of the diseases that had historically plagued civilization. Health security from widespread disease was supposedly assured. Little did we know that we could ever see the return of a pandemic. If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that nature will find a way to remind us of our final destiny on The Way West.

“The Cowboy,” Jim Gray is author of the book Desperate Seed: Ellsworth Kansas on the Violent Frontier, Ellsworth, KS. Contact Kansas Cowboy, 220 21st Road, Geneseo, Kan. Phone (785) 531-2058 or kansascowboy@kans.com.