Early in 1918 the Spanish Flu spread across Europe with a vengeance.

World War I was raging. In France, Germany launched Operation Blücher-Yorck, beginning the offensive at the Aisne River on May 27.

From the Aisne the Germans drove swiftly toward the River Marne. Fifty thousand allied troops and 800 big guns were captured. German forces crossed the Marne with Paris in their sites, but were driven back by American troops in one of their first major engagements of the war. The exhausted and

The exhausted and battered German forces withdrew on June 6 with 130,000 casualties. The combined casualties of the allied forces were 137,000 soldiers.

News of the influenza outbreak was censored by both the Allied and German agencies. The only source of uncensored information with reference to the spreading pandemic came from Spain, a neutral state in the war.

King of Spain Alfonzo XIII and many of the leading men in the Spanish government contracted the disease, sensationalizing the association with Spain. The news led to the belief that the flu had originated in that country, and so, it was identified as the Spanish Flu.

The Spanish believed that the strain of influenza that was devastating their county originated in France, and began to call it the French Flu. They had every reason to suspect a French origin, because even though news of the outbreak among soldiers was suppressed, the Spanish origins could be traced to the military movements across France.

German troops were suffering as well, but kept the outbreak hidden for fear of an Allied attack on their weakened forces. The black-out on the spreading disease allowed it to explode virtually unchecked across the European continent.

Today, the common explanation places the origin not in Europe, but Camp Funston, a cantonment within the Fort Riley reservation, established to handle incoming recruits in response to the American war effort.

Camp Funston was one of 16 regional cantonments established across the county. Fort Riley was home to the U.S. Cavalry Mounted Service School. The horses and supporting mule teams generated an enormous amount of manure that was routinely burned.

The flash point supposedly came March 9, 1918, when a dust storm rolled across Fort Riley as the burning was taking place. The wind blew the ash from the burning manure into the air and, mixing with the fine wind-blown dust, produced “a stinging, stinking yellow haze.”

When the storm abated men were detailed to clear the post of accumulated dust and ash. No one wore masks to protect themselves from the fine particles.

Early the morning of March 11, Pvt. Albert Gitchell reported to the camp hospital with fever, sore throat, and a headache. A series of soldiers followed. The sudden lineup of sick men overwhelmed the hospital with more than 100 ailing soldiers by the end of the day.

More than 500 soldiers reported sick by the end of the week, and a staggering 1,127 men by April 1. Forty-six soldiers died from the initial outbreak.

In the meantime, men were being conducted between camps. By March 18 the flu struck both Camp Forest and Camp Greenleaf in Georgia. Hundreds of soldiers were reporting to Army hospitals across the nation by the first of April. Significantly, troops sent to France silently introduced the disease to Europe.

But, was Camp Funston truly the original source of the deadly Spanish Flu?

In 2004 the Journal of Translational Medicine published, The Site of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, research by John M. Barry. Barry suggested that the original presentation of the world-wide pandemic occurred in sparsely populated southwest Kansas.

In late January 1918, a virulent form of influenza struck Santa Fe, Kan., the county seat of Haskell County. Santa Fe 25 miles south of Garden City. Dr. Loring Miner realized that he was seeing something unusually contagious and dangerous. The Santa Fe Monitor reported Feb. 21, 1918, that “most everybody over the country is having lagrippe or pneumonia.”

Timing was critical to the transmission of the disease. Young men, many recently exposed to the flu, were passing back and forth from Haskell County to Camp Funston.

Most of the men initially reported to Camp Funston between Feb. 26 and March 2. The local influenza outbreak might have remained a local phenomena if not for the active war effort that mixed an otherwise isolated population with soldiers destined for the European front.

By the second wave of the pandemic soldiers who contracted the disease in France were returning home, resulting in an estimated six hundred seventy-five thousand deaths across America. Worldwide estimates range from 50 to 100 million deaths. Santa Fe, Kan., may well have been the epicenter of the Spanish Flu, and like the deadly malady, the town has vanished from existence to melt into the boundless western landscape on The Way West.

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