It would be hard to overestimate the impact of the Civil War on late 19th-century American culture…. As veterans returned home at war’s end and people began to reconstruct their lives, disease and war were irrevocably linked in the popular imagination.1
—DALE KEIGER
LIFE IN WICHITA may have seemed sweet as huckleberry pie for Catherine McCarty, at least on the surface. Her steamy City Laundry did a brisk trade thanks to the bundles of soiled hotel and whorehouse linens left at the door and the piles of grimy clothing regularly deposited by working stiffs and cattle drovers. In the evenings at the homestead, she could see to it that her sons learned their letters and numbers after they tended the farm chores. Henry and Josie toiled alongside Antrim, who earned fair to middling wages from part-time bartending and carpentry work.2
Yet Catherine remained uneasy. Moving her family to the piece of land just outside town did little to dispel her concerns for her boys’ welfare on the unruly Kansas frontier. Her anxiety for both herself and her family, amid the dangers of the prairies and the disorder on the streets of Wichita, was fed by a new factor in her life. By the beginning of 1871 she had become mindful that she was not physically well. Because of the lack of public health precautions and the prevalence of unsanitary conditions, from raw sewage in the streets to polluted drinking water, disease like typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, pneumonia, pleurisy, and smallpox beset frontier communities. Wichita was no exception.3 “Pedestrians on Main, Market and Water Streets, anywhere north of Douglas Avenue, were regaled with quintessence of putrefaction,” reported the Wichita Eagle at the time. “All agree that some sanitary measures are needed, and heavy fines should be imposed on those who will throw slops, old meats and decaying vegetable matter at their doors or on the street.”4
Catherine’s illness may have started earlier than the move to Kansas. She might have realized for a long time that something was wrong before she sought help. She may have experienced constant fatigue, loss of appetite, and night sweats, some of the symptoms associated with tuberculosis. To confirm her fears, especially if she had begun to run sharp fevers or coughed up blood, she could have consulted one of the local physicians, Dr. Edwin Allen or his partner, Dr. Andrew Fabrique.5 In the 1870s contracting tuberculosis anywhere in the world was practically the same as a death sentence. Called consumption, lung sickness, the long sickness, “captain of the men of death,” and the “white plague,” this chronic infection, caused by airborne bacteria, typically attacked the lungs. Spread by coughing or sneezing, it was the nation’s greatest killer at that time and for many years to come.6
The druggist on Wichita’s Main Street would have offered Catherine an array of balms, powders, herbal nostrums, and patent medicines heavily laced with alcohol, but affording little relief. The few doctors available would not have been much more helpful. Most physicians believed consumption could not be cured.
Difficult to diagnose, tuberculosis in the mid-nineteenth century was often confused with other diseases. Doctors prescribed all manner of cures and concoctions, including worthless “snake oil” medicines. Some doctors believed opium could cure tuberculosis. Others said the most effective remedies were vigorous horseback riding and adherence to an all-meat diet. Folk medicine called for a sick person to pack a pipe with dried cow dung and inhale the fumes. The worst of the charlatans prescribed eating mice boiled in oil and salt or using butter made from the cream of cows that only grazed in churchyards.7 Most sufferers became desperate enough to try any cure. Some of them believed that the disease was a punishment from God.
A German doctor developed turtle serum as a healing treatment and sold the bottling rights to an American syndicate. In Denver, patients often took the “slaughterhouse cure,” gulping down tumblers brimming with the blood of freshly killed animals. Some physicians treated their patients with so-called heroic therapies: sweating, purging, vomiting, and bleeding. One medical practitioner promoted men growing beards, a sure way, he claimed, to ward off consumption since facial hair protected the throat and lungs from infection.8
Tuberculosis claimed lives at all ages and at every level of society. Some famous victims from history include John Calvin, Wolfgang Mozart, Frédéric Chopin, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson, Simón Bolívar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, the Brontë sisters, Stephen Foster, Florence Nightingale, Jay Gould, and Stephen Crane. For the most part, however, consumption was considered a disease of the urban poor because they were the most affected social class, the inevitable result of the unsanitary conditions and overcrowding in the teeming slums of large cities.
Tuberculosis could lie dormant for many years before becoming full blown. Caring physicians believed the highly contagious disease was best treated by the patient’s eating plenty of wholesome food and getting as much exercise and fresh air as possible to clear the lungs of harmful pollutants. Those afflicted who had a modicum of horse sense knew they had to cover their mouths when coughing and as much as possible avoid physical contact with loved ones.9
As with other diseases, the contagious sick in large towns and cities were sent to community pesthouses. Those deemed incurable entered almshouses to await slow but certain death. On the frontier, however, there were hardly any hospitals and certainly no pesthouses. Sick folks, even those carrying tuberculosis, had few options but to rest at home as much as possible. Those who could manage to leave sought a cure elsewhere instead of slowly wasting away. That was Catherine McCarty’s choice. Restless and in all probability motivated by the quest for a better clime, Catherine opted to leave the prairie and move to a healthier locale. Tuberculosis was a disease of time, as anyone with this long-term illness knew full well.
A stifling hot laundry was far from the ideal place for someone battling a chronic respiratory illness. In leaving Wichita, Catherine was leaving behind tubs filled with dirty clothing to be scrubbed with brushes and bars of strong yellow soap on metal washboards, linens boiling in soapy water with a tub of cold water nearby into which she could plunge her hands and prevent scalded flesh. Gone also would be the wet sheets and clothing that she had to lug outside to hang on backyard lines or drag to the attic to dry when the weather was bad. In short her never-ending arduous life in Wichita would be over.
Apparently William Antrim was also ready to leave Kansas with Catherine and her sons. His decision to uproot came even though some of his family had moved from Indiana to Wichita in the spring of 1871. After incorporation as a city in 1870, Wichita experienced an immigration boom that ballooned its numbers up to make it the third-largest city in Kansas within a couple of years. Among those who came were Antrim’s parents, a sister, and his brother James, who became a well-respected citizen and a popular law officer.10
Although blood family may have been important to Antrim, by this time he was fully committed to Catherine and her boys. “Of more concern to Billy Antrim and her two sons was Catherine’s deteriorating health,” writes Frederick Nolan. “Whether she already had tuberculosis before she arrived in Wichita or whether, as seems likelier, she contracted it there, it can only have been exacerbated by the constant heat and damp of the laundry in which she spent her every waking day. Her condition must have been serious enough for her doctor to recommend, as was the custom then, a higher, drier climate: Colorado, perhaps, or New Mexico.”11
Catherine began to sell off her properties on June 16, 1871, when county records show she sold her improved quarter section. Although he was ready to leave with Catherine and the boys, Antrim filed on yet another unimproved claim directly northeast of Catherine’s land the very next day. Some historians theorize that possibly Antrim acquired the land because he hoped that someday Catherine’s health would be restored and they could return to Kansas. That was not to be.12
In a flurry of activity that summer, Catherine and Antrim disposed of their properties in town. By late summer the foursome was ready to depart. After August 25, 1871, there is no further record of any of them residing in Wichita.13 Catherine, her pubescent sons, and Antrim vanished, at least from a trail of later historians, for more than a year and a half.