U.S. death toll tops 100,000 on centennial of a frightful epidemic in Interior Alaska

It was exactly 100 years ago Tuesday that Presbyterian pastor Robert J. Diven wrote from Nenana about nonstop processions to the cemetery during one of the final deadly chapters of the flu pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide.

In Nenana, the 1920 death rate from flu was staggering, but not nearly as high as it had been in remote Alaska coastal Native villages in 1918-19, when entire communities were wiped out. Hundreds of children were orphaned.

“It will be impossible to ever receive a full account of all the distress caused by the epidemic of October, November and December,” Alaska Gov. Thomas Riggs Jr. wrote on Sept. 26, 1919. In some villages, only dogs survived and they fed on corpses, the governor told his superiors in Washington, D.C.

He estimated the death toll at 2,000, but no one knew for sure. The entire territory had a population of about 55,000.

He said the flu “swept through our coastal regions like flames through a forest.” The national government had been too focused on Europe “to be able to note our own wards, seemingly protected by solemn treaty with Russia, dying by swarms in the dark of the northern nights.”

Riggs and others thought that Fairbanks and many other Interior towns had been spared by the deadly disease. The Presbyterian church reported that the “light, dry air” in places like Fairbanks and Nenana had provided protection from the epidemic.

What they didn’t understand was that it was the only the lack of contact with infected humans from distant places that provided protection. Sometime in the spring of 1920, an infected person traveling along the Richardson trail from Southcentral changed all that.

The flu spread rapidly in April and May, afflicting about 1,530 people within a few weeks. The worst of it was in Nenana, where 360 people got sick and 60 died.

“We had great difficulty to keep the dead moving to the cemetery fast enough,” Diven wrote to friends in his hometown of Albany, Ore.

Diven, an 1896 graduate of the Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, also served in Sitka, Petersburg and Wrangell during his years in Alaska.

It seemed that everyone in Nenana, including Diven and his daughter, Lucille, were stricken by the flu. Twenty-six of the 60 who died in Nenana were Natives.

All told, 105 of the 1,530 victims died. Fifty-six were Alaska Natives. In Fairbanks, 831 people fell ill and 10 died. There were 14 deaths at Wood River, 5 in Minto, 8 in the Native village of Chena, and 12 in the Circle mining district, the territorial health officer said.

“The graves took much work, even much blasting. We were short of help to nurse, and that is why so many people died, perhaps. It was pneumonia in each case that killed the folks. They went quickly. We had a very malignant type of form here,” Diven said of the scene in Nenana.

A man in Nenana named J.H. Steele, who worked for the Alaska Railroad, then under construction, wrote later that his wife was among the many volunteers who cared for the hundreds of sick. “My wife was a martyr to kindness,” said Steele, quoted in a 1921 newspaper article that appeared in various U.S. newspapers.

In early May, with the disease out of control, Nenana asked Fairbanks for help. News-Miner editor W.F. Thompson wrote in the News-Miner that men had to answer the call because too many women were sick.

“You couldn’t pick 14 women in Fairbanks who are strong enough today to go thru another siege of flu nursing immediately and to send them there would probably to send them to their death,” he wrote.

The “sick and the well of Nenana were on the verge of panic, in consequence of many deaths in rapid succession,” and the arrival of the volunteers from Fairbanks made a big difference, the Nenana News reported.

“It is true that the epidemic first made its appearance among the employees of the Alaskan Engineering Commission at Bridge 5,” the Nenana News said. “They were taken to Fairbanks for treatment on April 23 and on the day following the town was placed under quarantine.”

The Nenana paper said a train that went to Nenana from Fairbanks April 25 brought the flu to the banks of the Tanana River.

On May 22, Thompson revealed in a telegram to a friend in San Francisco, what he had yet to publish in his newspaper—”The finale of the story which took the heart out of the heart of Alaska for the time being and made everyone look at their hole card, is 59 dead at Nenana out of 231 cases; 9 dead in Fairbanks out of 800 cases.”

Fairbanksan Edith Neale worked for 46 hours straight in “a regular pesthouse where 50 percent of those who were taken into it were taken out dead,” Thompson wrote about Nenana,

He said Neale, Harry Abercrombie and Nell Wilson won acclaim for tending to the sick.

“The boys tell us that those three can have a deed to the Nenana townsite, if they have any use for such excess baggage,” he wrote.

“The epidemic crippled every industry and business in Fairbanks. When the disease was at its height, whole families were stricken at the same time leaving them absolutely helpless,” the Juneau Empire reported May 15.

The Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church, writing in 1921, said “the scourge of influenza, which had seemingly passed by the Interior while the coast lands of Alaska were in places almost depopulated in 1919, visited Fairbanks and Nenana with accumulated violence in 1920.”