Saturday, March 22

Small Pox History; journal entry

Annella Hunt Kartchner
By Robert Clayton, Navajo County, December 12, 1936
[an excerpt]

"During the late fall of 1877 a company of Mormon emigrants arrived in New Mexico from Arkansas. The family of Thomas West had contracted small pox from camping in a Mexican house in Albuquerque, when the mother gave birth to a pair of twin babies. They drove on to the Sevoia settlement, all of them either ill or exposed to the disease. John Hunt and his family cared for them, and for others who took the disease, throughout the long cold winter in the most terrible siege of smallpox that could be imagined or endured."

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