Morning appeal. [volume] (Carson City, Nev.) 1877-1906, 1878-08-30
THE GREAT PLAGUE IN THE SOUTH.

Eacn sunday and from many AFFAIRS arises
the prayer to God to deliver his children from
Pestilence Famine and War. Each has its
almost unspeakable horrors A general Oth
Ger after the Battles in the Wilderness in the
Spring of 1864 told with agonizing closeness
of estimate how many mon of his division had
been burned TO death in the fires which swept
through those deadly jungles. Something
Ulore than two Thousand wounded soldiers had
thus persisted Defoe, in his account of the
Plague in London, relating as he does, with
h;s CHASTITY circumstantiality the dreadful par
tculars of the dead and the dying, fails at the
utmost stretch of his imagination to relate
anything more horrid than the stories which
reach us from New Orleans, Grenada, Vicks-
burg, Memphis and the other infected parts.
But he does, in the following sentence, allude
TO IL condition of affairs which seems to have
only too painful parallel in the state of i'm
providence in which the yellow fever when it
came upon them, found the masses of the
Southern people Says he: 81 often reflected
upont the unprovided condition that the body of
the people were in at the first coming of this
calamity upon them, and how it was for want
of timely entering into measures and manage
nlents, as well public as private, that all the
confusions that followed were brought upon
us; and that, such a prOdigious number of
people sunk III that disaster, which, if proper
steps had been taken, might, Providence con-
curing, have been avoided, and which, if
posterity think fit, they may take a caution
and warning from; but | shall come to this
part again. in one of his descriptions he says:
In our parish of Aldgate, the dead carts were
several times as have heard, found standing
at the churchyard gate, full of dead bodies;
but neither bellman or driver or anyone else
with it, Neither i'll these, or many other cases,
did they know what bodies they had in their
cart, for sometimes they were let down with
ropes out of balconies and out of windows;
and sometimes the bearers brought them to
the cart, sometimes other people; nor, as the
men themselves said, did they trouble them
selves to keep any account of their numbers.
lie also tells us that Latin account written
by physician says "that in one week there
died twelve thousand people; and that par
ticularly there died four thousand in one
night Defoe closes his wonderful story with |
these lines:
A dreadful plague in London was,
In the year sixty five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls |
Away: yet | alive!
Parton, in his account of the occupation of |
New Orleans by General Butler, revives some |
Of the statistics of the yellow fever in that |
city in 1853. Out of about 10000 deaths, |
from May % until the abatement of the dis
ease in the Fall, Z, 439 were from yellow fever.
On the 22nd of August of that year two hun |
bred and thirty nine persons died there OF |
this dreadful disorder Terrible as was the
loss by the great plague in London in 1865,
the proportion of deaths in New Orleans in |
1853 was greater One person in every Is |
died in the London pestilence, one in every |
10 of the total population and one i'll every 4 |
Of those susceptible to the disease died in
New Orleans Parton elsewhere says that |
New Orleans had never escaped the fever be- |
fore under such circumstances as existed in
1862, when the fever ragod in Nassau and |
Havana Butler, self-informed of the fact |
that the yellow fever never originates in
countries where there is a frost each Winter, |
shrewdly concluded that unless it was impor
ted from the tropics ii could be kept out. He
maintained a rigid quarantine, such as can
only be kept up by military rule, and to the
thousands of unaccimated NOrtherners, ex
posed to the heat and debility of a New Or
leans Summer, not case of fever came. One
case did occur there. 1t brought from
Nassau The house to which the patient was
taken and where he died was quarantined
and SO was his attendant Not another case
ACQUIRED in all the city that year Butler
himself writes: sit is safe for any person to
come to New Orleans and stay. 1t has been
demonstrated that the quarantine can keep
away the fever
We intended by referring TO some of Miss
Florence Sightingales notes upon the famine
III India 10 illustrate some of the horrors of
that direfuI visitation, but space forbids.
Suffice it to say that ia Salem out Of a pOpula-
ton of two millions, more than five hundred
thousand more than one fourth persisted. In
Madras no less than STA million people died
something more than sixth of the ell
tire population dispatch from New Or