Elmore County Republican. [volume] (Mountain Home, Idaho) 1910-1915, 1915-01-16
CHAPTER III.
The Survival of the Fittest.

The Survival of the Fittest.
New York city and Chicago were
In chaos. And what happened with
them was happening in all large cities.
A third of the New York police were
dead Their chief was also dead, like
wise the mayor All law and order had
ceased. The bodies were lying in the
streets unburied. All railroads and
vessels carrying food and such things
into the great city had ceased run
ming, and mobs Of the hungry poor
were pillaging the stores and ware
houses. Murder and robbery and
drunkenness were everywhere. Al
ready the people had fled from the
city by millions--at first the rich, in
their private motor cars and dirigibles,
and then the great mass of the popu-
lation, on foot, carrying the plague
with them, themselves starving and
pillaging the farmers and all the
towns on the way.
THE man who sent this news, the
wireless operator, was alone with his
instruments on the top of a lofty build
ing. The people remaining in the city
he estimated them at several hun
dred thousand-had gone mad from
fear and drink, and on all sides of
him great fires were raging. He was
q hero, that man who staid by his
post-an obscure newspaper man,
most likely.
For twenty-four hours, he said, no
transatlantic airships had arrived, and
no more messages were coming from
England. He did state, though, that
message from Berlin-that's in Ger
many-announced that Hoffmeyer,
bacteriologist of the Metchnikoff
school, had discovered the serum for
the plague That was the last word,
to this day, that we of America ever
received from Europe If Hoffmeyer
discovered the serum, 1t was too late,
or, otherwise, long ere this, explorers
from Europe would have come looking
for US We can only conclude that
what happened in America happened
In Europe, and that, at the best, some
several score may have survived the
Scarlet Death on that whole continent
For one day longer the dispatches
continued to come from New York
Then they, too, ceased The man who
had sent them, perched in his lofty
building, had either died of the plague
or been consumed in the great con-
fagration he had described as raging
around him. And what had occurred
In New York had been duplicated in
all the other cities 1t was the same
in San Francisco, and Oakland, and
Berkeley. BY Thursday the people
were dying SO rapidly that their
corpses could not be handled, and
dead bodies lay everywhere. Thurs
day night the panic outrush for the
country began. Imagine, my grand.
sons, people, thicker than the salmon
run you have seen on the Sacramento
river, pouring out Of the cities by
millions, madly over the country,
ubiquitous death. You see, they car
ried the germs with them. Even the
airships of the rich, fleeing for noun
tain and desert Businesses, carried the
germs.
Il was telling about the airships OF
the rich They carried the plague
with them, and no matter where they
fed, they died | never encountered
but one survivor of any of them-Mun-
gerson, He was afterward at Santa
Rosa, and he married my eldest daugh-
ter He came into the tribe eight
years after the plague. He was then
nineteen years old, and he was COM
PEELED to wait twelve years more be.
fore he could marry. You see, there
we're no unmarried women, and some
of the older daughters of the Santa
Rosans were already bespoken. So he
was forced to wait until my Mary had |
grown to sixteen years. 1t was his
son, Gimp-Leg, who was killed last
year by the mountain lion.
"Mungerson was eleven years old at
the time of the plague. His father was
one of the Industrial Magnates, very
wealthy, powerful man. 1t was on his
airship the Condor, that they were
heeing, with all the family, for the