How the Great TB Sanatorium Craze came to the Rocky Mountain West

Part 2 of my review of John Green's "Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection." Read Part 1 here.

There was a rush in the early part of the 20^th century to isolate humans with TB, an incredibly virulent bacterium. Call it the TB Sanatorium Craze. Colorado jumped on the bandwagon early. So did New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

While I am a Colorado native, I spent 33 years living and working north of the border in Wyoming. The Wyoming State Legislature approved a TB hospital in Basin and it opened in 1927 . This probably was due to the Legislature’s tendency to parcel out important government functions: Cheyenne gets the capitol, Laramie gets the university, Basin gets the patients of a worldwide plague. It was only fair. As the years progressed, TB patients sought out famous hot springs in Saratoga and Thermopolis. The steam, heat, and sunlight were viewed as crucial TB treatments.

The Wyoming Legislature discussed a TB sanatorium as far back as 1909. During that same time, the National Tuberculosis Association sponsored a well-attended “Tuberculosis Exhibit” in Cheyenne and Laramie. The NTA traces its roots to 1904 when concerned citizens formed the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. This was their advice during the Wyoming tour, as outlined in the 1910 edition of The Journal of the Outdoor Life from the University of Michigan:

“The cure consists of plenty of good, simple food, constant fresh air during the night as well as during the day, constant rest in the fresh air until there is no fever , and then carefully and gradually increased short walks, proper care and washing of your body, and proper clothing  and, finally, a determination to get well and to be cheerful in spite of everything, and only to look on the bright side of things, however hard your circumstances may be.”

Sanatoria offered all of these things with the predictable results: The Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne shows that in 1910-1912, when most counties in Wyoming had between one and 20 cases of TB per year. Albany, Park, and Carbon counties were on the low end with one to three cases per year (Converse County had zero!) and Sheridan, Sweetwater, and Laramie counties were on the high side with Laramie County showing 18 cases in 1911.

At the beginning of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in September 1930, patient census at the Basin Sanatorium in September 1930 showed 15 women and 37 men. When effective TB treatments such as streptomycin emerged in the 1940s, the heady days of sanatoria came to a close. Old Archives photos show the building in Basin where patients struggled to breathe. Sad, isn’t it, that some settlers came West for breathing room but died for lack of breath?

Why is Green’s book important to us in the 21^st century? The U.S. has a 99-percent TB cure rate and about 10,000 patients yearly although that’s going up. Green takes pains to tell the story of Americans with TB and the tough time they had before modern meds. The Rocky Mountain West, especially, was home to a number of sanatoria for TB patients. The Wyoming State Archives has documents tracing the origins of the lone state TB sanitorium in Basin.

Construction began in Basin in 1926 and the Sanitarium was opened in May of 1927. By 1969 all references to tuberculosis were removed at the Wyoming Sanatorium due to the significant decrease in the incidence of tuberculosis in the state. It was replaced by the Wyoming Retirement Center which provides nursing care to residents with mental health, dementia and other medical needs.

Colorado boasted plenty of facilities. Green writes that some cities in the West were founded by TB. Colorado Springs is one of them. National Jewish Hospital in Denver had a treatment center for consumptives. It’s still known as one of the best pulmonary hospitals in the country. Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora opened in 1918 at the tail end of World War One and its specialty was treating men with TB and those whose lungs were damaged by gas attacks.

The U.S. Army sent my unhorsed cavalry officer grandfather to Fitzsimons as he struggled with a bad case of pneumonia aggravated by chemical weapons used in the war. My grandmother, an army nurse and veteran of a M.A.S.H-style unit in France, treated him there. They married in 1922. Their eldest was my U.S. Army Signals Corps veteran father who in 1950 married a U.S. Navy-trained nurse and here I am.

Lung ailments have figured heavily in my family. My brothers, sisters, and I struggled with asthma in our youth. I almost died after a bad reaction to horses at a Weld County ranch. This pretty much demolished my dreams of replacing The Lone Ranger.  

Movie westerns have featured tubercular characters. In “Tombstone,” Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday gambles, drinks, shoots people, coughs and sweats, not necessarily in that order. A gambler calls him a “dirty lunger” and pays the price. Gunfighter Johnny Ringo calls him a “lunger” and also pays the price. The message is clear. ”I’m your huckleberry,” Doc says, before or after shooting someone. Not bad for a lunger or consumptive patient. Doc succumbed to consumption in 1887 in Glenwood Springs, Colo. He went there in 1886 when told that the hot springs had curative powers. He apparently was misinformed. Visit his grave at the Doc Holliday Grave and Hiking Trail. Flatlanders beware: it’s located more than a mile high and it’s all uphill. Healthy lungs required.

One of our U.S. presidents, sought out the West’s fresh air and healthy lifestyle in North Dakota. Theodore Roosevelt thrived, returned to politics, declared Wyoming’s Yellowstone a national park and Devils Tower a national monument, and the rest is history and myth-making.

North Dakota’s San Haven Sanatorium in the Turtle Mountains treated TB patients from 1909 until the 1940s. As final plans were made for a 1911 opening, Superintendent of Public Health Dr. J.L. Grassick referred to TB as “The Great White Plague” because physicians marked TB-infected lungs with white arrows and healthy ones with black arrows. and assessed the illness as more a lifestyle choice than a microscopic rod-shaped bacillus with plans of its own.

“Wherever man builds his habitation, depresses his vitality by overwork or by debilitating excesses, lowers his powers of life by using insufficient or improper food, surrounds himself with the expectoration of his fellows and deprives himself of the blessings of God’s free air, there you will find it.”

Sanatoriums such as San Haven offered a higher altitude than the surrounding prairie, plenty of God’s free air, proper food, and all the available treatments. One of the more gruesome ones was puncturing and deflating one sick lung to nurture the other. During its time, more than 50 percent of the patients died.

And then came bacteria-battling antibiotics. San Haven closed. The abandoned building is billed on N.D. tourism sites as a good place for ghost-hunting. No mention of how the ghosts of The Great White Plague feel about this.

To John Green’s credit, the book includes blasts at the healthcare industry (especially – surprise! -- major drugmakers) and global policymakers. He does this surprisingly quickly in 208 pages (hardcover) and 256 in paperback. I read it on my Kindle. He requires more pages to describe faulty stars and why those turtles go all the way down, but fiction is one thing and non-fiction is another.

The story that holds “Everything is Tuberculosis” together is one 13-year-old’s journey. Green is a fine storyteller and the one he tells about Henry keeps the reader hanging on to the end.

Postscript: A big thank you to my son Kevin, a writer and tech guy in Cheyenne, for hands-on research at the Wyoming State Archives. As always, the Archives staff went out of their way to help a researcher.

Custer's ghost asks: Where have all the flowers gone?

Last week, the Wyoming Public Media page featured an article by Kamila Kudelska about a new book, Wyoming History in Art, compiled by the Wyoming State Historical Society. The book showcases paintings by Osage, Wyo., native Dave Paulley, who passed away in 2020. The paintings were commissioned in 1989 to celebrate the state's centennial. Historian Jeremy Johnston wrote the narratives that accompany the paintings. To buy a book, send an email to linda@wyshs.org

The WPM feature story showed one of the paintings, "Custer's Troops in Floral Valley, 1874." It shows troopers picking flowers and making bouquets. In the background, a wagon train rolls. At first, I thought it was a fanciful scene. "How interesting. The troopers killed at the Little Bighorn are picking flowers." I thought it might be some metaphor to what was to come two years later in another valley.

I hadn't yet read the book so I didn't know that it was a recreation of an historical scene. The soldiers are some of the 1,000-some that made up Custer's Black Hills Expedition. More than 100 wagons hauled supplies from Fort Abraham Lincoln near present-day Bismarck, N.D., down through northeast Wyoming and into the Black Hills. They encountered a flowered valley along the way. After weeks of barreling through the treeless plains of N.D., they were entranced by the wildflowers and stopped to pick them, make bouquets, and fashion wreaths for their mounts. 

I've lived in Wyoming 30 years and never heard this wonderful story. History is so filled with oddities. We see the echoes of those events down through our times. Custer was charged with exploring the area that hadn't yet been properly mapped by white folks. As an aside, Pres. Grant's staff mentioned that if he finds any gold, be sure to let The Great White Father know before telling anyone else.

Custer found gold among the wildflowers and all hell broke loose. A gold rush commenced and lands sacred to Lakota and other Plains tribes were invaded by rough men with demonic gleams in their eyes. Treaties had insured that the Black Hills wound remain in Indian hands. The Plains War erupted in earnest. It led to the pillaging of the Black Hills and the enmity of the tribes. Some 200 of the flower gatherers followed Custer into an ambush at what Native Americans call the Battle of Greasy Grass. 

It eventually led to the killing and atrocities that culminated at Wounded Knee. And the beat goes on.

The painting deserved a poem. So I wrote one, a prose poem. It was be a prose poem or it may be flash fiction. There doesn't seem to be a clear dividing line and maybe that's a good thing. 

Custer Botanicals

Custer’s Troops in Floral Valley, July 1874. It’s beautiful this painting by David Paulley. Oil on canvas, 24 by 16 inches. Mounted troopers on the Black Hill Expedition pick wildflowers under an azure sky of a Dakota Territory summer. A bearded trooper on a black horse clutches a bouquet of Goldenrod, Blackeyed Susan, blue flax. He looks behind him, over his bedroll, sees his young love back home run to him through Floral Valley. She wears a yellow dress, looks just as she did when her lover left for the West’s Indian Wars. She wants to send him away with a final kiss. She smiles, tears streak her skin. The sun dodges behind a cloud and when it reappears two years on, his love’s shining face is replaced by the paint-streaked dusk of a Lakota Sioux warrior. He wields a stone war club and runs to the fight. A revolver replaces the flowers in the soldier’s hand. The warrior charges. The soldier fires. The warrior falls, face pressed into the field of mashed flowers. The soldier looks up and more Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho charge him. They scream. Why are they screaming? Seemed like only moments ago he picked flowers in a valley, surrounded by fellow flower-mad troopers. In the distance, wagons rolled north, loaded with guns and butter, trinkets and liquor to becalm the natives. “It was a strange sight,” Custer reported to Congress in 1875, “my men with beautiful bouquets in their hands, while the head-gear of the horses was decorated with wreaths of flowers fit to crown the queen of May.” In Montana, 2021, Custer’s soldiers lie beneath the prairie, reach out for the roots of tickseed and yarrow, sunflower and beardtongue. Tell us your flower secrets. Tell us what it feels like among the bees and butterflies and sweet summer rain. Let us hold you again, wreathe our horses with you, inhale the blossoms of Floral Valley on this slow march to Valhalla.

Little nukes on the prairie: how our Air Force missileers are being trained

A slide from a PowerPoint presentation for nuclear missile officers cites St. Augustine's Just War Theory to teach missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons. Image: United States Air Force. Re-posted from truthout.

Very interesting set of blog posts today for those of us who are neighbors to the many nuke missile silos that dot the Wyoming prairie.

The U.S. Air Force has pulled a missileer training course that enlists former Nazi Party member (and one of the architects of the U.S. space program) Wernher von Braun as a moral authority and leans heavily on the Bible (and St. Augustine) to justify throwing nukes at our neighbors.

Truthout broke the story and now notes today that the USAF has pulled the Powerpoint program. I was first alerted to the story by problembear at 4&20 blackbirds. This is appropriate since Montana and North Dakota and Wyoming are home to the majority of U.S. land-based nukes.

First read problembear, and then move on to truthout's original piece and today's follow-up.

And then go read The Confessions of St. Augustine (I read it in the eighth grade to little effect) and see what he has to say about throw weights and MAD and nuclear winter.

UPDATE: Read problembear's post and then spend time reading the incendiary comments. Yowzir!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Satirist Tom Lehrer's take on Wernher von Braun' opportunistic politics at http://youtu.be/TjDEsGZLbio

Can it happen here? It's already started...