With the invention of the telegraph, and the resulting wire service for news, coverage of far-flung events still had its faults. These telegraph reports would still be missing information, and any updates on the same story in the same paper were not combined in a single story. To make sure you read everything about a story, you would have to read the entire telegraph section.

Even with a faithful wire service, weekly publications sometimes wouldn't print the telegraph reports until the next week, keeping readers in suspense, particularly with news of sickness out East.

This blog takes a look at the coverage of the 1879 yellow fever outbreak in the Southern United States, from the vantage of newspapers in the Washington Territory.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

October & November

October started to see the decrease in fever reports in Memphis. In the first three weeks, only 12 new cases and nine deaths were mentioned in the Puget Sound Mail. On October 17, three Howard nurses went to Forrest City, Arkansas to help with the fever cases there. Three days later, Washington, D.C. authorized a picket and quarantine of the city to prevent further spreading.

A telegram from October 23 was published in the Mail on November 1, reporting the board of health would allow Memphis refugees to return to their houses by Sunday (October 26). That Sunday, 200 people came back to Memphis along the Louisville road.

"Resumption in Memphis" was the title of a longer report from October 27, in both the Mail (Nov. 1) and Puget Sound Weekly Argus (Nov. 6), describing that shop owners were reopening their businesses, restrictions on railroads were being lifted, and "the streets present their wonted animated appearance."[19] A November 2 telegraph in the Mail (Nov. 8) announced no new cases had been reported, and physicians "all agree that the cold winds of last night swept away all lingering germs of fever."[21]

A telegraph titled "Memphis All Right" from November 3 told of the cold weather, physicians giving the all clear, and ended plainly: "Thus ends the epidemic of 1879."[22]


I could not find any other telegraphs in the Mail or Argus after that point; Memphis had the all clear, end of story. Despite other communities still having lingering cases, in all appearances to Western U.S. readers, the yellow fever epidemic of 1879, that lasted 116 days, had been vanquished by skilled physicians, and a twist of cold weather.

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