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1835–1900 · the valley's fevers on township ground
The valley's own physician-historian is the source, and his account is this ground's epidemic beginning: Dr. Louis Humphreys of South Bend, addressing the County Medical Society in January 1858, in the paper Chapman prints as "Diseases of the St. Joseph Valley," records that before 1835 the valley held "an almost fabulous reputation throughout the Eastern and Middle States for its exemption from disease of every kind" — the first settlers wrote home, "We know no sickness." Then, with the breaking of the prairies and the filling of the country, came the agent "generally known by that of malaria": the pale and sallow faces, the "chills and intermittents," a sickness the well regarded with little commiseration because it was "only the ague," of "slight consequence, only from loss of time and inability to work." Most sufferers, Humphreys says, took little medicine and simply wore out "their relation to the disease"; some were left with impaired constitutions, and a few died of the organic diseases that followed repeated attacks. There were, he notes, "but few physicians in the country at that time, and remedial agents were scarce and difficult to obtain" — on this ground, as the practitioners' entry shows, there were none at all.
The year 1838 is the address's dark center, and it is a marsh story: the winter before, the water in the lakes, ponds and marshes stood unprecedentedly low; March through mid-July of 1838 brought unceasing rain; then the rain stopped, heat followed, and the thousands of acres of superficial ponds dried under the sun, leaving decayed vegetable matter to bake — generating, in the medicine of the day, the miasma that made it "a memorable year in the annals of the entire West," in which no part of the Mississippi valley north of the Ohio could claim healthfulness over another. The settlers' own arrangements compounded it: dwellings with wooden foundations and cellars, drinking water drawn from the surface or from wells "curbed or lined with wood," rotting into the water, and a plain diet almost without fruit. Harris Township's own chapter in the same volume describes this ground's share of that landscape without naming the disease: a marsh across the township's middle and southeast, covered by "one continuous sheet of water, that lay upon the ground until late in the summer months," boggy long after the water abated. The upland prairie was the healthy ground of the settlers' choosing — Harris Prairie's first wheat was cut in 1831 — but the marsh lay inside the township's bounds, and the ague was its tax.
The cure this ground received was drainage, not medicine: Chapman's Harris chapter celebrates the state ditch cut through the marsh — the water drawn off, "hundreds of acres are mowed," the lowlands made valuable — and the Land leg of this build carries the whole drainage course of both townships, the ditch districts, Juday Creek's legal life as an open drain, and the wells-and-septic regime that followed, whole. What this section adds is only the health meaning the county's physician printed in 1858: the fevers belonged to the wet ground, and they receded as the wet ground was drained and tiled. The later fevers of the checklist belong to other ground: the cholera years moved along the river and the roads, and no cholera course on this upland appears in any record reached; typhoid's dangerous years were the river towns' water years, whose course is the South Bend build's epidemics leg, whole. On this ground the wells were the water system — and their record is the Land leg's.
Sources:
- Chapman (1880), Chapter VI: Dr. L. Humphreys, "Diseases of the St. Joseph Valley," address of January 1858, pp. 397–399 and following (the pre-1835 reputation, "We know no sickness," the ague's course and treatment, the 1838 year whole).
- Chapman (1880), the Harris Township chapter, pp. 713–714 (the marsh, the standing sheet of water, the state ditch and its good).
- The Land leg of this build (the drainage course, Juday Creek, the well-and-septic regime), cross-referenced; the South Bend build's epidemics leg (the river towns' typhoid and cholera years), cross-referenced.