The Great Epizootic
Photograph of a 19th-century urban horse hotel, used to house workhorses in cramped city conditions. Public domain image.
The flu scare of the last few weeks seems to have faded away, but before it did there were many mentions of the 1918 influenza pandemic. That’s not surprising as that was easily the most deadly one in history, but it’s overshadowed another major wave of North American influenza that hit a few decades before, in 1872-73. This is probably because its victims weren’t human, but another species that’s affected by flu: not poor maligned pigs, but horses.
Unless you’re a veterinarian, horse flu isn’t normally interesting. Big waves of it happen on the same timescale as for human flu, every few decades, but since people aren’t affected no-one really notices. The Great Epizootic (an “epi-demic” requires people, from the same Greek root that gave us “democratic”) was different: it hit at precisely the wrong time and place. In 1872, North America was getting urbanized and industrialized, but the internal combustion engine wasn’t yet widespread. Horses were critical to day-to-day business, and so Canada and the United States ground to a halt.
The first cases were reported on farms in rural Markham, Ontario (today a tech corridor just to the north of Toronto) in the last week of September 1872. From there it quickly spread to Toronto itself; while not as important as it is nowadays, in the 19th century the city was still a major transport hub and cases were soon reported in Montreal and Detroit. The flu then completed the loop around the Great Lakes and was found in New York and New England. Montreal had peculiarly few animals affected, but elsewhere the lowest rate of infection reported was 75%; some cities reported that every animal to be found was sick.
This flu actually killed remarkably few of its victims, one or two percent at most, but it didn’t matter. Sick horses had roughly the same symptoms as a human infected with the flu: soreness, lethargy, fever, and weakness. In the 1870s, cities had more horses than rural areas, not less, as they were used to pull street cars, cabs, mail carts, and delivery vehicles; all of this stopped for the two weeks or so that it took for the infected horses in a city to recover. Even railways were affected—steam engines couldn’t succumb to the flu, but the coal and wood they needed were delivered by draft horses that lacked the strength to pull.
The most obvious example of the trouble caused was in Boston. A major fire broke out on November 9th at the height of that city’s crisis. Eventually several city blocks burned down and twenty people were killed, and all the while the Boston Fire Department was reduced to firemen and volunteers pulling the fire engines. Though likely not the main cause for the fire’s spread (Boston’s fire regulations for buildings were archaic even by 1872 standards), it was the one image that stuck in the mind of people describing the blaze for years to come.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, the end of the war between the United States and the Apaches was delayed for a little while as US cavalry and Apache fighters were reduced to walking into battle. There is some argument that in this one circumstance only the horse flu jumped into humans, adding one more line to the New World’s depressing litany of plagues post-1492. Whatever actually happened, the US Army recovered faster than its adversary, and by April of 1873 the Apaches’ resistance started to collapse. Small bands of them began surrendering at an ever-increasing pace, and by the end of the year the bulk of them sued for peace and were hemmed into a reservation.
Not that the United States recovered very well either. Like the 2009 near-outbreak, the Great Epizootic happened when the world economy was already in crisis. “Big Jim” Fisk and “Not Stephen” Jay Gould had tried to corner the gold market in 1869 and provoked the Black Friday Panic, which helped mire the presidency of the newly elected Ulysses S. Grant in financial and corruption scandals for the remainder of his eight years in office. Many businesses were already in precarious shape after that, so shutting down the eastern half of the United States for lack of horsepower (and, as the virus moved into new areas, successive sections of the western part over the next few months too) was what primed the world economy for a twenty-year recession. If you believe the idea that The Wizard of Oz is an allegory based on US monetary policy, well then you have the horse flu to thank for Dorothy and the Tin Man. The economic damage it did to the United States was a major factor in the US disastrously switching to the gold standard and many events from the Cross of Gold speech to the Scramble for Africa to the Oklahoma Sooners have roots back to that.
The Great Epizootic was also a critical piece of evidence for what’s needed to understand many diseases: contagion. Contagionism was only really getting off the ground in the 1860s thanks to John Snow and Louis Pasteur and, especially in the United States, was viewed by many as some sort of perverted European innovation. In the aftermath of the Great Epizootic, Professor James Law of Cornell University wrote an extensive report on behalf of the US Department of Agriculture, and it relied heavily on the clearly defined path the plague followed from Ontario in 1872 to the final outbreaks in the west.
Reading the report in the 21st century is a strange experience since Professor Law, for all that he was on the cutting edge of American veterinary medicine, spends a lot of word space fending off the seemingly medieval idea of miasmatism by discussing weather, fog, “atmospheric electricity” and the like for the late fall of 1872. And it’s worth pointing out that he doesn’t even hold to the bacterial (or in this case viral) theory of disease. He quite carefully sticks to the non-committal word “poison” when talking about the agent of infection. Despite failing to take that last step, though, he and the other scientists and medical men who followed the contagionist school of thought got so close to the modern theory of infectious diseases that most of their terminology has carried on down to the present day; “virus”, after all, is just the Latin word for poison.
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I learned something new, namely that Jim Fisk tried to corner the gold market in 1869. In a history class I took at Iowa State, in the Winter Quarter of 1952, Professor Norman Graebner told us, in a lecture, that it was Jay Gould who did that. Graebner later was a profesor at the University of Virginia.
I have a question. Wasn’t the flu, prior to the 1918 epidemic, called the “grippe?”
Another thing I wonder about was whether the 1918 influenza might have been acquired from horses. The first cases were diagnosed in March, 1918, at Ft. Riley, Kansas, which had a lot of horse cavalry.
In English, the word influenza dates back to the mid-18th century. However, you’re right that “grippe” was another word used for it, as was “catarrh”. Without knowing for sure, I would guess that this is because influenza virus wasn’t isolated until 1901 — before that you couldn’t be sure you had a hold of the same disease in different patients, so you could see how different names might be applied to different presentations of the infection in a patient.
The 1918 flu was an H1N1 virus (which explains why the WHO et al. were so freaked out about the potential pandemic this year). H1N1 is only found in humans, pigs, and birds — horses can’t incubate it. Horse flu is almost always either H7N7 or H3N8, which can infect people but generally don’t. It’s also not entirely clear that the 1918 pandemic originated in Kansas. The Wikipedia article on the Spanish flu has a good discussion of the various theories about where it came from in the section Geographic Sources