There was a certain irony in the determination of immigration authorities and aroused citizens of the early twentieth century to turn back immigrants at Ellis Island on account of the eye disease, trachoma. It was true that many Germans from Russia and others arrived with telltale granules of the disease under their eyelids. But it was also true that trachoma was already established extensively in the United States. It could not be kept out. There is no reason to think trachoma had not been present here since the early days of the republic — at least ever since Napoleon’s woebegone soldiers, shielding their diseased eyes from the sun, returned from the Nile in 1801.
Drake, North Dakota, reported a local outbreak of trachoma in 1909, but at that time, most settler communities were still in denial. News reports pointed to Indian reservations as the locus of the problem. In 1910 Commissioner of Indian Affairs Robert G. Valentine toured most of the reservations in North and South Dakota and reported what he called an “annoyance’ — trachoma — at multiple sites. He gave vague orders for inspection and quarantine.
No doubt there was a considerable problem on the res — except for Standing Rock, which remained free of the disease. When guard units were called up and recruits sought for service in the Great War, newspapers reported large numbers of inductees from Fort Totten and Turtle Mountain rejected on account of trachoma. They were less assiduous in reporting the rejection of non-Indian recruits for the same reason.
In considering the issue of trachoma on the res a century ago, it is good to begin with recognition that Native America had no trachoma until white settlers arrived. Also, consider the reports that came from the boarding school at Bismarck after Dr. W. H. Harris, an eye-ear-nose-and-throat guy, conducted an inspection in 1912. He found an epidemic in progress, with Matron Farrell trying heroically to isolate, treat, and comfort the diseased students.
However, as the Bismarck Tribune reported, “the two worst cases in the school were white employees who were serving temporarily.” So I’m suggesting that trachoma came to the boarding schools from the white settler community, propagated in the close quarters of the schools, and was then dispersed to multiple reservations when the children went home. Indeed, a respected Bismarck physician in 1916 affirmed that trachoma was present in every community in Burleigh County.
Within two years the whole country was aware of a crisis situation in Lamoure, Dickey, and Barnes Counties. By this time there were multiple trachoma hospitals set up across the mid-south and the mid-west, federally funded, and in 1918 a nurse named Rose Schaub accompanied five Lamoure County students to one of them, in Kentucky, for treatment. County officials and Governor Lynn Frazier huddled to implement emergency measures — inspections in schools, isolation, quarantine — which were challenged in court, but sustained in the state supreme court.
Then Major J. H. Oakley of the United States Marines hospital arrived to inspect students in every little country school across the outbreak counties and declare the seriousness of the problem. And he brought help: establishment of a federally funded trachoma hospital in Oakes. It was modest, just a residence converted to a treatment center, but effective.
What was not effective, or helpful, was the scapegoating of immigrants and natives. The trachoma outbreak was stopped only when it was addressed in the settler community where it lived.
