Obituary of a Three-Century Man, Chapter 3
1911: A National Tragedy, a Family Disaster, and the Discovery of a Stone-Age Man
Mr. Calloway was also preceded in death by his siblings Debra Ann “Girly” (1911), . . .
The next national news that made an impression on the Calloway family was when 146 people died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City in March of 1911. The shockingly large loss of life caused by shameful negligence on the part of the factory owners saddened and angered the Calloways. Still, the event did seem somewhat abstract to them due to its distance from their home (all the way on the other side of the country) and because they didn’t know any of the victims. The Calloways couldn’t quite grasp the magnitude of such a disaster. Perhaps Josef Stalin was right when he said, “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths”—or 146, even—“is a statistic.”
Unfortunately, a single death struck the Calloway family just four months later, and it did prove to be the tragedy of tragedies for them. On July 2nd, their daughter Debra May (“Girlie”) was bitten by a rattlesnake. She died the next day, and was buried the day after that—on the 4th of July, 1911. Decades later, Debra’s mother Gertie wrote about the incident:
The 2nd of July, 1911, Dad and Jackson and Kenneth were up on top of the hill, working in the hay. Girlie took Howard up, walking with him around the side of the mountain, through the woods and the brush. She hadn’t quite reached the field when the rattlesnake bit her on the inside of the instep. She pushed Howard out of the way, and cried for her daddy. They ran to where she was, and carried her to the house. She begged for water but someone told us to give her whiskey, and keep all the water away from her. Howard was 2 1/2 when Girlie was taken from us, and Jackson was 11 and Kenneth was 7. She was a little over five years old. She is buried in her family’s beloved Mendocino County, in the Anderson Valley, real close to where Jackson and Robert live.
Whether refraining from administering Girlie whiskey and/or allowing her to quench her thirst with water would have saved her life, it is impossible to say. The American Indians who lived in the area had what they considered a sure-fire way of preventing death by rattlesnake bite. Che-na-wah Weitch-ah-wah, whose “English” name was Lucy Thompson, wrote about this in her book To the American Indian, Reminisces of a Yurok Woman as follows:
. . . the doctors . . . used roots and herbs of different kinds, and they are hard to beat as doctors in a great many kinds of sickness. They can cure the bite of a rattlesnake, not one of them ever dying from the bite. I knew many of the people that were bitten by the rattlesnake at different times, and they were cured and lived to be very old. For this cure they use saltwater out of the ocean and the root of the onion of what you call kelp and which is taken out of the ocean. They pound the onion of the kelp and make a poultice out of it, place it over the wound and keep it wet with the saltwater, at the same time letting the patient drink all he can of the saltwater. The patient is kept perfectly still and not allowed to move about more than is necessary. They bind the limb or place where the part is bitten to prevent the free circulation of the blood through these parts.
Would the Indian cure have worked in Girlie’s case? No one knows. It’s interesting to note the radically different medical approaches to the problem taken by the two cultures, though.
Gertie later wrote more on the subject of Girlie’s death, saying about the 4th of July:
This day is a hard one for me to be happy on. There was the annual picnic and Dad was carrying mail at the time. He asked John Woodruff if he would carry the mail that day, as he had to bury his girl. John said he couldn’t as he had to be at that picnic and it was too bad that she had to die just at this time. This answer made us both feel real bad, as it was too bad she had to die at all, and she certainly couldn’t help what day the Lord took her home.
Anyway, Dad asked Mr. Caar to carry the mail so he could attend Girlie’s funeral and Mr. Caar said yea, right away. He also made the coffin and lined it all with sheets. Mrs. Frank Lampley came to help us out. She came and spent the night with us, fixing up her body for burial. They also went to the cemetery with us. They were the only ones except for the grave diggers to come to her funeral. Everyone else had to go to a 4th of July picnic and this has never ceased to leave a horrible feeling with us.
Dad always said we buried her about the same as they’d bury a dog. There wasn’t a minister and Dad had to say what was said. We had no songs or no service of any kind. We’ll never forget that horrible day. Just put the box in the ground, Dad say a couple of words, & put the dirt on the box. All the neighbors at a picnic.
Due to the deep despair the family was feeling, they paid little attention to an event which took place a couple of months after Girlie’s death: the discovery, in Oroville, California—150 miles east-by-northeast of the Calloway homestead—of a Native American who came to be called Ishi. The unusual thing about this discovery—the thing that made his turning up in that town and being taken into protective custody noteworthy—was that Ishi had been living a stone-age existence in the hills above Oroville his entire life (he was about 50 years old at the time he came down the mountain, apparently driven by hunger). Ishi came down from the mountain because the rest of his tribe had died, and someone hiking in the hills where he lived had taken his tools (perhaps thinking they were artifacts that had been lying around unused for decades). Ishi needed those tools for hunting and cooking, so he was soon driven to seek sustenance among “civilization.”
The next year, 1912, another far-off event would occur that would be front-page news all over the world.
You can read chapter 1 here.
You can read chapter 2 here.
Chapter 4 can be read here.