Updated: May 16
Not everything is bigger in Texas.
AUTHOR’S PROLOGUE: A single letter came to my attention a year ago while I was engaged in a project of digitizing the Gandy Collection of family and business records and correspondence for Montgomery County, Texas, from the mid- and late-19th century. It was a personal letter, written in October 1859 by Sarah Elizabeth Davis to her sister, Amelia Jane Davis. What struck me as so especially poignant was Betty’s discussion of the season’s dangerous yellow fever epidemic, followed a paragraph later by her personal experience of being repeatedly bitten by mosquitoes and seeing it only as a miserable inconvenience. There was no way for her to know that some of those mosquitoes could be the vectors of yellow fever. I have researched the impact of the 1859 yellow fever epidemic on Betty, Montgomery, Texas, and the region, and would like to share it now with you.
High Noon
A month of drought across Texas in August 1859 had baked the crops, greatly reducing their yields. People were anxious for better times. Houses, barns, and stores were little better than ovens on the landscape, made barely habitable by wide-open windows, handheld fans, and likely various forms of liquid refreshment.
Little changed as summer melted into fall. On September 15th, the hot, humid, sun-burned air continued to blanket the little town of Montgomery, 50 miles northwest of Houston; in other words, it was another typical Texas day. But it was also a day for celebration as the town welcomed it’s guest of honor, “the lion of the day, the hero of his country,” governor-elect Sam Houston.
Loud Cheering
A huge crowd, estimated at as many as 3,000 – more than the entire population of the town – thronged to the all-day festivities. It was the rare day like this that made all the heat, all the manual labor, and the many do-withouts of rural life bearable. It was likely a welcome diversion even for a woman like the pregnant Sarah Elizabeth Davis, who went by “Betty”; she busied herself daily with household chores in addition to her pregnancy and mothering her toddler. The celebration was a refreshing break indeed.
The air was full of sounds, sights, and smells to savor: cannons thundered tributes; the minister’s invocation lifted heavenward; the inevitably long-winded VIP speeches did their part to further warm the atmosphere; patriotic music of the brass band marched through the breeze; beckoning smells of the Texas-sized barbecue on a very long table set for 700 to be seated, and even a manned hot air balloon drifted up into the sky. Later, bright lamps were suspended over “the fair women and brave men” who danced into the night. In newspaper accounts of the celebration, no mention was made of a single mosquito; even an occasional minuscule blood-sucking puncture was a tolerable inconvenience in the mist of so much fun – it was just another fact of life in Texas and the least of their worries.
Low Moaning
Like many of the towns and villages in eastern and inland Texas, Montgomery was established close by water – several creeks along the west fork of the San Jacinto River. They were sources of water for drinking, cooking, farming, laundry, and sometimes waste disposal. Hot and humid Texas summers sometimes turned creeks into boggy swamps and the gasses emanating from them drifted under noses and into homes.
On October 10th, less than a month after the Sam Houston celebration, Betty wrote to her sister Jane in Mississippi, that with her husband away on business and her toddler sleeping, she was finally able to write the letter; she also gossiped about neighbors who were “splitting the blanket” (divorcing) and of another yellow fever epidemic breaking out nearby. In the hot season, outbreaks of yellow fever, nicknamed “Yellow Jack,” were always alarming news.
In that long season of hot, humid weather that dominates the Texas calendar, the bad-smelling air was the harbinger of sickness, the omen that people would soon die. The stink of rotting vegetation and other foulness often seemed to result in young and old getting suddenly, terribly sick. A healthy young man in one moment could become suddenly ill in the next with muscle aches, nausea, chills and a fever that could quickly push the mercury up the thermometer to dangerously high temperatures. The skin and eyes turned yellow, signifying liver failure which earned the disease its name, the yellow fever. The body became death’s barometer: the deeper and more wide-spread the yellow, the sicker the person was becoming. Within as few as three days, they often began puking what was called “the black vomit” – dark blood hemorrhaging from the nose and stomach – a sure sign that the end was near. Before Sunday dinner, the person who had sat next to you at the dinner table during last week’s sabbath was suddenly gone and often – too often – someone else at this week’s dinner table was starting to turn yellow.
Texans got sick from other lethal epidemics throughout the 19th century, like cholera, measles, smallpox, and dengue fever, but for frequency, yellow fever outpaced them all. Epidemics broke out in almost every hot season between 1839 to 1867. Doctors and patent medicine makers promised cures for the disease, but they were just guessing. The doctor’s mercury injections and mustard baths did no more good than St. Nicholas Stomach Bitters. It was advertised heavily throughout Texas during the hot weather epidemic of 1859 by incongruously using the symbol of winter, Santa Claus, sitting next to a chimney, holding a bottle of the bitters in his hands, promising that “As a Tonic in Cases of Yellow and other Fevers, incidental to Tropical Climates, it is unsurpassed.” Some may have taken false comfort in the graphic suggestion of a cold weather cure. A heavy frost (also called a “white frost”) stopped further cases and spread of the disease. Mother Nature could end an epidemic, but Saint Nicholas was a fraud.
Quiet Buzzing
In her October letter to her sister, Betty wrote that two local friends were away when yellow fever cases began showing up on the river (she didn’t specify which one), and they would therefore probably stay away until about Christmas. It was a common response to the earliest reports of confirmed cases of yellow fever – many would travel far away to protect themselves from the disease; residents of Galveston and Houston often ran away from the city to the interior when new cases were emerging in the coastal cities; Betty’s friends were doing the same thing, waiting until a heavy frost ensured the end of the epidemic.
The only effective defense to prevent the fever’s spread was quarantine, isolating the infected from the healthy. She explained further,
There is some excitement in town about yellow fever. Two persons have died with it[;] one a white man the other a negro belonging to Dr. Price[;] both had been exposed to it at Cypress City where it is now raging – The Town Authorities have been yesterday and today passing some [quarantine] regulations to keep any more cases from coming here -
Betty and her husband, Nathaniel Hart Davis, a lawyer and Montgomery’s first mayor (in 1848) would have been well aware of the yellow fever epidemic that had devastated the town of Cincinnati, Texas, in 1853. That small country town was only 44 miles to the northeast of Montgomery and it lost a quarter of its population, about 150 people, to the disease. Betty wrote to her sister that the 1859 epidemic was “now raging” in Cypress City, 33 miles to the south of her Montgomery home, and two men exposed to the yellow fever in Cypress City had come to Montgomery and died there. One report stated that 33 of the 54 residents of Cypress City were sick with Yellow Jack and there were three deaths within the last few days of the report: “The conditions of the place [are] truly deplorable.” Betty bravely told her sister that she didn’t “apprehend any danger unless some of the citizens here were to [catch] it that had not been exposed to it [elsewhere].” She was hoping that the new town quarantine regulations would prevent it from coming any closer to her house and family.
Then Betty’s letter shifted to more pleasant topics, like the new spotted flannel material she bought to make her toddler some winter clothes and the calico and gingham dress she had bought for herself. She tried to keep her focus, but she had become so tired, she couldn’t even finish her sentence: “You must tell me if you get any nice dresses – I am getting sleepy.” Then she told her sister that what was really messing up her focus as she wrote was not sleepiness but mosquitoes:
The musketoes are worse than I ever saw them. I can hardly stay in the house for they bite me so. I don’t know what I am writing scarcely. I wish we could have a white frost to kill them for we will be annoyed with them until we do have frost.
This woman, wife, and mother lived during an epidemic outbreak in a town with terminal cases, nearby another town where it was “raging” and strangers were stopping at and passing through her town that may themselves have the disease. The chances that an infected aedes aegypti mosquito would land on Betty or her babies were, in deed, elevated – she and her family were certainly at risk. Two weeks after Betty finished the letter to her sister, three more deaths occurred in Montgomery and two more men were expected to die. By November 30th yellow fever deaths had totaled 15 in the town, including one of its doctors; he was a 36-year-old husband and father of four small children, which included a newborn. The future of the Davis family of Montgomery, Texas, could have been far different if just one of those mosquitoes that were driving Betty to distraction as she tried to write her letter had been the lethal kind.
But don’t worry, happy ending lovers. Betty had not inadvertently written her own eulogy. She and Nat and their toddler all survived the yellow fever epidemic of 1859 and she successfully delivered a healthy baby girl on December 30th, whom they named after her sister Jane. A thick frost had settled in on November 12th, the temperature having dropped from 80° to 25° Fahrenheit in less than 24 hours and a newspaper reported.
The wind continued all Saturday night, and Sunday morning found ice everywhere, ice in the prairie, and ice in the town, ice in the gutters and ice in the houses, ice in the kitchens and ice in the bedrooms, And cold? – guess it was cold! Cold enough to keep lazy people and invalids in bed half the morning; … cold enough to freeze the horns off from a Billy goat! And of course, cold enough to freeze Yellow Jack’s ears off. Runaways can come back now. The frost we have had has killed the fever if frost will do it. Last night we had another heavy frost. And to-day is bright and beautiful, but not brighter or more cheerful than the faces of our citizens, who are all rejoicing that the dark days are over.
In the decades to come, Texas outlaws would become infamous for being the bad boys of the Wild West – mean, unpredictable, and dangerous. All combined, Texas-based outlaws like James “Killer Miller,” Sam Bass, Doc Holliday, John Wesley Hardin, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid were said to have killed about 63 people. Amateurs. There was another killer in Texas – Yellow Jack – a deadly terror that killed an estimated 4,000 in Texas alone during the 19th century, without a single bullet being fired from a six-shooter. It was the meanest, most unpredictable, and most dangerous killer of them all – and it was just a quarter-inch long.
