Smallpox Scare Triggers Camp Quarantine
Fear grips the Kittitas country as laborers flee a camp riddled with the 'dread malady' before authorities can secure a quarantine.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The upper Kittitas country is in a fever of excitement over the breaking out of smallpox near Easton in a camp of laborers who are clearing the right-of-way for the new Kittitas county irrigating ditch. Sheriff Mead, with a force of deputies, placed the camp in quarantine, but during the early part of the day forty or fifty laborers packed their blankets and escaped from the camp before the officers could effect a total shutdown. There are three well-defined cases in the camp and these have been isolated and placed in charge of competent physicians. At Easton today, every man with a pack on his back from the direction of the camp was met at a distance by a committee of citizens and directed to keep away from the town. Tomorrow there will be a wholesale vaccination of people in Cle Elum and at Roslyn.
“At this place today every man with a pack on his back from the direction of the camp was met at a distance by a committee of citizens and directed to keep away from the town.”
The fear of contagion and the immediate 'not in my backyard' response from local citizens remains a persistent theme in public health crises. Even today, the tension between regional infrastructure needs—like irrigation or transit—and the transient labor populations required to build them reflects ongoing anxieties about who belongs in our communities.
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