The Terrible Sickness

The fall season of 1917 was fine weather. The month of December was very cold. The sky was clear and cloudless. In those days Mary’s Igloo had a population of 300 or 400 Eskimo people. This included the people living at the four reindeer camps some distance from the village.

In December, most of the men were busy fishing, hunting and trapping. The children were in school. Their teacher was named H. D. Reese, and he had two children in his home.

There were four separate Mary’s Igloo reindeer herds. These were cared for by the herders and their families who help them. Each herder had a camp located some distance from the village on the grazing land assigned to the herd. Herd Number One was located at Sawtooth Mountain and five families resided at the camp. Herd Number Two had its camp on the north side of Salt Lake. There were three families there. Herd Number Three was located in the interior area of the Kougarok drainage. There were four families at the camp. Herd Number Four, a large five-family camp. was on the Kuzitrin River.

About December fifteenth a message came through a telephone, from Nome, directed to John Oquilluk, mayor of the village. The message read, “The flu will be coming to the northwestern part of Alaska.” But the warning was too late, for early the very next day two dog teams left Aukvaunlook to go beyond Teller to hunt seal. They were away over one week.

At Aukvaunlook an easterly wind began. The weather changed. It stayed stormy for three days. Then three days later, the easterly wind turned to the south. No one expected anyone to travel in such bad weather so no one was expected to come to the village. Meantime, John Oquilluk was trying to phone Nome. He wanted to ask about the sickness and to ask if there was an epidemic going on. But, the phone line was broken somewhere between Aukvaunlook and Nome.

By this time, the seal hunters were ready to come back to Aukvaunlook. While they were hunting on the ice, the mailman with the mail from Nome had come by their camp and stayed with them. The hunters did not know about the flu. They did not know they were carrying it until it was too late.

On their way home it began to storm. They stayed over at Teller for three days. On the fourth day they left Teller bound for Agiapuk Village. Another man, with his dog team, was also staying at Teller during the storm. He was from Agiapuk and left with the other two teams. When he got home he got sick and later died at Agiapuk Village. After one night at Agiapuk the other two teams went on to Aukvaunlook. No one there knew those two teams had arrived until late that evening when one of the men began to get sick.

When he heard the news, Mayor John Oquilluk called the Councilmen together. When they heard about the sickness in the village, they told the families of the sick men not to visit between any of the families in the village. There was someone in the village who did not obey the rule. He spread the flu around to all of his relatives.

On the third day after the sickness started in the village, most of the families did not have any fires in their stoves. John Oquilluk, now an old man, picked three men to be his helpers in this time of trouble. They were to help whoever needed help in any way possible. The three men chosen were Tom Axlawak, Frank Okleasik, and William Oquilluk, John’s son.

The most important job was to keep the houses warm. Wood had to be cut and brought into the homes of the sick people. Water had to be brought up from the frozen river and delivered to every house. The weather was clear and very, very cold. Much walking had to be done to keep all the stoves going because people were too sick to tend their fires. Every time the helpers made a round from house to house to bring firewood, someone else was found dead in every place.

On the fifth morning, William did not see his helpers. He went to their homes to investigate. He found them both dead. This left only William to do as best he could, all alone, because there were no others in the village able to help the sick. By two o’clock on the sixth morning, William was terribly tired, but there were still survivors and he could not leave them helpless and alone without fire or water. Each dead person that William found, he had to carry out of the home to an empty house away from those still alive. Here they would remain frozen until they could be buried.

Finally, on the sixth day, when the morning light came, William went to the school teacher, Mr. Reese. He told him about the conditions in the village. He told him how sick the people were, and how many were still alive at that time. He told him that the wood was almost gone. He asked the teacher if the survivors could use the schoolroom as a home. He answered the question with, “Okay.” He asked William to haul the survivors and sick to the schoolhouse.

The government had brought lots of coal to use at the school. William asked if the people could use the workshop at the school for a kitchen. The teacher suggested William ask the Number One and Number Two herders to get reindeer meat to feed the survivors. William told him that there were lots of fish traps out for lingcod. He said he would take care of the people with fish. (It might bring the flu to the herders to go to the camps after reindeer meat.)

It took two days for William to carry all the survivors up to the schoolhouse. When everyone was together in one place, it was much easier to take care of things and to help the sick ones.

At the time people moved into the schoolroom, some of the families did not have the flu. They had stayed in their own homes away from others. These were the ones that had obeyed the rule not to leave their houses to visit anyone. These were the households of John Oquilluk, John Kakaruk, Jim Okleasik, Sekoglook, Otoyuk, Kugsruk, and two of the reindeer camps.

After William took care of the survivors, his job was to take care of the valuables left behind. He went from house to house, gathering up, for those who would live, those things they had the right to own. The things to be saved were money, fox skins, parkas, mukluks, mittens, and other useful things. He carried everything to the school where Mr. Reese put the names of the dead owner on each piece in order to save them for the rightful survivors. The only thing that could not be saved were the dogs.

Each house had many dogs. In those days every family had to have dog teams for hunting and hauling ice to melt for water, and for traveling.

William went to the teacher and told him the dogs were getting dangerous. They were missing their owners and it was best to kill them all. William found enough rifle shells from each house to take care of each man’s dogs. Then he had to shoot them all. After that, he had to haul all the dead dogs down to the river. There were hundreds of dead dogs laying on top of the river ice until the spring thaw came in April.

After December, early in 1918, there were many dead bodies still in some of the houses. These had to be taken from Igloo to Pilgrim Hot Springs for burial. It was still very cold and the ground was frozen. At Pilgrim Hot Springs the sand was not frozen close to the springs. Here the people could be buried.

In 1917-1918, a mail carrier named Peter Jeager ran mail from Nome to the gold mining country at Kougarok. He had many strong dogs in his team. He needed sixteen to twenty dogs to pull a big, long, thirty-foot sled. He agreed to haul all the dead bodies from Mary’s Igloo to the hot springs. First a deep and wide trench was to be made in the sand by the springs. Each body was placed in the trench and covered with sand. This was done in three or four layers, laying one body on top of the sand-covered body of another.

William helped Pete Jeager load his sled with the bodies. Death, and the sight of dead bodies was not new to William. Still, he noticed something strange when he entered the houses to pick up the bodies of those who had died from the flu. The grownups mostly looked as if they had been nicely taken care of by someone after they died. They were peaceful and looked like they were sleeping. The children were different. It seemed as if they did not have any trouble in dying. They just stopped what they were doing when the sickness hit them and life left them suddenly.

Two round trips were needed to carry all the dead over the nearly seven miles between Mary’s Igloo and Pilgrim Hot Springs. The disaster left William, the only helper at Igloo, to live through the sickness, exhausted in body and spirit. Now he and the other survivors had to rest awhile before they began once more to rebuild the village from those few families left to carry on.

After the sickness, there were only ninety to one hundred people left alive. This included the four reindeer herder camps. The families tending the reindeer at camps Number One and Number Four did not get the flu. Only two survived at camp three. The families from camp Number Two were in Igloo at the time the epidemic came. There were four or five families living nearby at the upper end of the Agiapuk River. Three of the families had the flu with only a few surviving in those houses. At the lower end of the Agiapuk there were four families. All had the flu, and there were very few survivors. The sickness came to nearly all the villages of western Alaska. Sometimes there was no one left at all and today, their village is gone. Today, Mary’s Igloo is a ghost village with some of the descendants of the old families going back to camp there sometimes. One or two of the surviving families still keep their houses ready to use, but hardly anyone stays there all the time.

Over at Shishmaref they heard about the flu. They heard that it had reached as far as Wales, only a few miles away. The Village Councilmen decided to stop the flu from coming to their village. They forbade anyone to enter or leave Shishmaref. Everyone obeyed, and the flu did not come. This is how they saved themselves.

The other villages around Nome did not have a chance to stop the epidemic. Travelers and hunters had passed from place to place carrying the flu. They often did not even know that they had it, or that they were leaving it behind. There was no way for the villages to be warned so they could have done as Shishmaref and closed off their place. There were no radios in those days. The few telephones worked only part of the time and many were out from the storms in December.

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