Typhoid!

           Around 1910, Edmund Gates, Sr. was living in a tent on the Sherman Deal place northwest of my parents’ farm. (For more about my grandfather’s experiences as a tent dweller see the blog post entitled Calamity in a Tent posted on March 30, 2014.) Obviously, the living conditions would have been primitive to say the least. Grandpa contracted typhoid fever. How he got the bacteria called Salmonella Typhi is unknown. He could have been exposed to a human carrier, may have drunk contaminated water, or eaten food washed with contaminated water.
         At the worst point of Grandpa’s illness, his temperature was 105 degrees Fahrenheit accompanied by severe stomach cramps as well as a headache.  Nettie Black, his future mother-in-law, did all she knew. She gave him morphine. (Pharmaceutical history shows that at least one teething remedy sold over the counter in the early 1900s was over 50% morphine according to the National Institutes of Health website! This product was removed from the market in the 1930s.)

Nettie Ann Venator Tripp Black,
the mother-in-law of Edmund Gates, Sr.

         Upon ingesting the morphine, Grandpa passed out. Bob and Nettie Black loaded him in the wagon and started to Ralston. However, the doctor met them at the Bates Place now owned by the Hightower family. It is located about a mile east of the Belford Bridge that spans the Arkansas River. Dr. M. W. Gaymon, a doctor practicing in Ralston at the time, asked Edmund, Sr. how he felt. Under the influence of the morphine he answered, “Fine!"


A Couple of Other Accounts Relating to Contaminated Water and Typhoid 
(Aren't we blessed to have filtration and purification systems today?)


Since typhoid fever develops due to impure water, it prompted my father, Edmund Gates, Jr. to recount this personal memory when he was relating the above account to me. Dad recalled how frequently toads fell in the well’s opening or casing underneath the slab. He said the water didn’t taste bad but smelled awful. The water looked clear. They would go to the windmill well for drinking water if it got too bad before they could “pull and flush” the well near the house.

Ruben Hopper was friends with my maternal grandfather, Calvin Callcayah “Cul” Smith beginning in their home community of Hickory Grove, Oklahoma, located in the eastern part of the state. In his later years, Mr. Hopper shared with my mother that his mother died when he was quite young due to typhoid fever contracted by the use of water from a contaminated cistern.

Grave marker at Hickory Grove Cemetery
in Delaware County of Mr. Hopper's mother.
 A distant relative of my mother's told me that the
 land for this cemetery was donated by Calvin
Callcayah Smith's great-grandmother, Susan
Spaniard Smith Miller who came on the Cherokee Trail of
Tears in 1838. Many of Grandpa's relatives are 
also buried in this same cemetery.