Loss and Comfort in the Time of Cholera and COVID
By Sarah Keyes
Nearly 200 years ago a mother outlived her young adult son because he refused to stay home. In letters Sarah sent to her son George after he left their home in upstate New York she pleaded with George to return and not travel to California where, she said, “war, famine, pestilence—murder,” (the four horsemen of the apocalypse) lay in wait. But George felt invincible. He was being careful, he wrote to his mother. And besides, the disease she feared didn’t affect people like him. Cholera, 19th-century Americans believed, was worse for those who had loose morals, drank or ate too much, or who slept outside and exposed themselves to frigid temperatures or the wetness of the early morning. George didn’t have loose morals, he was being careful not to overindulge, and he hadn’t yet had to sleep outside. But George’s reassurances failed to comfort Sarah who could see no way she could go on living if George died.
In the end, Sarah’s worst fear came to pass. On a packed steamboat headed up the Missouri River George fell ill. The male companions on his boat came to his aid. They rubbed his legs to alleviate cramping that resulted from cholera’s rapid dehydration of his body. George’s father, Samuel, who was with his son, praised the men for acting “as Fathers & brothers to my dear son George.” But George died of cholera anyway. Sarah never recovered. She spent the rest of her life dwelling somewhere between “heaven and earth,” her only comfort that George’s corpse had come home and was buried in the local cemetery.
I first read George and Sarah’s story a decade ago on what was likely another beautiful, sunny day at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California. From the comfort of a padded green chair in the temperature-controlled reading room where I spent most of my time researching my dissertation (now my book manuscript) on the Overland Trail, the story of Sarah’s fear and loss and George’s excruciating demise seemed like a tale from another world. Indeed, the Nichols’ story first stood out to me simply because Sarah’s voice and writing had been so carefully preserved. The vast majority of surviving accounts of migration to the Gold Rush across the Overland Trail are written by the participants rather than the mothers, fathers, wives, sons, and daughters they left behind. Few families bothered to save the writings of those who did not go on the great adventure and even fewer libraries collected them.
But the completeness of the Nichols papers makes it possible to know their heartbreaking story. After George died, we know what happened to his body because his father Samuel kept Sarah apprised of his efforts to bring George’s corpse home. Like George, Samuel believed the potential of profits from the gold rush outweighed the risks of cholera. But when George died, Samuel emotionally collapsed. He decided to “return with the remains of my Lovely Son” to comfort Sarah. It was because of Samuel’s monumental efforts, included hiring “mechanicks” to create a two-layer coffin, with the inner layer consisting of tin filled with alcohol, and the second of wood to insulate the corpse for transport, that it became possible for Sarah to have the comfort of George’s body at home. For white, middle-class 19th-century Protestants like Sarah, gravesites provided the focal point to memorialize and commune with the dead. This focus on the gravesite seemed another facet of Sarah’s search for comfort in the face of loss that seemed distinct from our own times.
Now I wonder what our COVID-19 memorials and gravesites will look like. What steps might families, who have had to endure a loved one’s dying at a distance, take to restore proximity after their deaths? Images of hands, faces, and cheeks pressed against glass physically separating loved ones to prevent the spread of the novel virus pepper the Internet. Then and now we yearn for physical contact, especially with our loved ones. And in times of COVID-19 our desire for comfort and the traumas of our losses are not that dissimilar from those Americans experienced during the time of cholera. When I think of the Nichols family now I think about how my students are about the same age George was when he died. And I wonder what will comfort their parents if they fall sick far from home? How will it feel to be separated by time and space and unable to hold their children? To be unable to comfort and to be comforted?
In the raging debate over when, how, and which schools to open, some proponents have pointed fingers at those opposed to reopening as scared cowards seeking comfort in walling themselves off from the rest of the world. Even the language from the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) administration uses the term “comfort” or “comfort level” with the risk of the virus as one of the metrics that frames faculty’s willingness or unwillingness to enter the physical classroom. In some ways it would be comforting to go back, masks and six feet apart and all, to be physically present again, to engage in the rapid, unpredictable back-and-forth of the physical classroom. In the world of theory, with blue-paw-print marked desks, ample wipes for self-cleaning, and full bottles of the best cleaner science could imagine such a space could exist. In practice, rumors have already begun circulating that wipes have run out, that cleaning bottles are unfilled, and that students’ masks are casually slipping down to rest comfortably over chins. Moreover, the recent focus on the role of aerosolized virus in transmitting the disease makes surface sanitization seem less important and less effective.
The same economic concerns that propelled George toward California before he died of cholera are propelling students back into classrooms today. While George’s family was relatively well off, many young men fretted that not going to the gold fields would be like missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If they did go to California, they risked cholera but they alleviated the risk of being left behind in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Today, putting bodies in classroom seats means not only ensuring tuition fees but also, for residential colleges such as UNR, filling dorms. Institutions that can’t float the costs of empty classrooms or dorms for a semester or a year risk closing their doors forever. In Nevada, passage of AB3 has made the entire higher education system’s financial status more uncertain. In light of this, not barreling forward into bringing students back to campus could mean starting down a path toward financial ruin.
Ten years ago, I would never have imagined that my students and their parents would be faced with choices similar to those that Sarah and George faced in 1849. And yet, here we are, weighing the risks and opportunities of our choices in the time of COVID-19 in much the same way that George and Sarah weighed their choices and risks in a time of cholera. I worry that the novel coronavirus, of which we still know so little, could result in countless unexpected losses. In a few months, large numbers of Nevadans could be embarking on an endless search for comfort that will propel them into the same trauma from which Sarah never recovered.
Nichols, Samuel. Collection. The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Rosenberg, Charles. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Keyes, Sarah. “Western Adventurers and Male Nurses: Indians, Cholera, and Masculinity in Overland Trail Narratives,” Western Historical Quarterly, 49, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 43-64, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whx107.
Seeman, Erik. Speaking with the Dead in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Sarah Keyes is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her first book, “Death’s Purchase: The Experience and Legacy of the Overland Trail,” is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Thumbnail photo credit/L.E. Baskow.
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