This just saddens me:
On the last Saturday of the month, two visitors from Nome, Alaska, attended a standing-room-only service in the small local chapel. The Nome visitors relayed that many people back home were sick, but no one was seriously alarmed, wrote Gina Kolata, a science and medicine reporter for The New York Times, in her book “Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It.”
Two days after the service of singing, prayer and feasting, villagers became sick with the flu. Of the 80 local Eskimo villagers, 72 died and their bodies were left frozen in igloos. In one igloo, dogs had scavenged corpses.
“Another igloo looked at first like the site of utter devastation,” Kolata wrote. “And as rescuers peeked inside, they saw only a pile of corpses. Then, suddenly, three terrified children appeared from under deerskins and started shrieking. They had survived somehow on oatmeal, surrounded by the bodies of their family.”
By the end of the three-week outbreak, the village housed only five adults and 46 orphaned children. According to Kolata’s book, Clara Fosso, a missionary’s wife who didn’t get sick, wrote a regretful letter to the Eskimos years later:
“There was a spiritual revival among the Eskimos at the Mission on the last Sunday in November 1918, before the influenza disaster fell upon us. The whole settlement of Eskimos had crowded into the new school room for worship. We felt the spirit of the Lord among us, as the communicants stood at the altar and later met in prayer; many confessed to their faith. We were deeply moved. This was the last time we were gathered together.
“By the following Sunday most members had gone to a more beautiful service with their Savior. You, who are the sons and daughters of these children of God, may remember that many of them died testifying to their Lord and singing the hymn that we had shared on that last Sunday, ‘I Can Hear My Savior Calling.'” [CNN/Health]
And so 46 kids ended up as devastated orphans. The author of this article, Kristen Rogers, later interviews a religious studies dude or two, who make the case that some sects virtually require that members get together to worship, but in the eyes of Nature, that’s just a sect that dies out and doesn’t propagate.
And at the tragic loss of so many people.
Fortunately, between medical advances and a lot less grim virus in SARS-CoV-2 than Spanish Influenza, we needn’t worry so much about that, except possibly for isolated groups that cannot get medical support. But it’s not hard to see Evolution In Action here, is it? Engage in behaviors which deliberately put you at risk, and, by God, Nature will have its way with you.
But that doesn’t stop me from mourning those Inuit who died at the hands of the unthinking.
