Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

by Mark Kurlansky

  The significant advances in medicine and epidemiology led governments to conclude that they could master the spread of disease, and so in the second half of the nineteenth century there was a huge upsurge in public health measures, which reached the Bitterroot valley at the turn of the century. In 1901, Montana established a state board of health. But there had already been a Ravalli County board of health since 1896.

  Once agencies were established to monitor disease, they started noticing a large number of patients in the Bitterroot valley with diagnoses such as black typhus fever, blue disease, and black fever. These diseases were not unique to the Bitterroot valley. There were also outbreaks in neighboring Idaho, in Colorado, Oregon, and Wyoming, and possibly earlier in California, Washington, Nevada, and Utah. But it was a much more severe illness in the Bitterroot than anywhere else. Colorado was thought to have a mortality rate of 23 percent, yet Montana had fourteen cases in the spring of 1901 and all but four died.

  People in the Bitterroot were becoming terrified of this deadly disease. This was the age when the West, western photography, and Indian art were becoming fashionable, and westerners were beginning to recognize the economic potential of tourism. The Bitterroot valley, rolling flatlands of native pine and fruit orchards below the jagged crests of the high Rockies, was one of the most beautiful spots in the region. It had been a fruit-producing area since 1871, when the first apple seeds were mailed from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Fruit and dairy agriculture was prospering, and land values were rising. Special trains from Chicago carried prospective eastern investors to look over the valley. The Bitterroot, it was believed in Montana, was poised for a boom. But tales of a deadly disease were crushing such plans.

  The leading theory was that these black measles were somehow caused by melted snow—a fusing of the fact that the disease began with the thaw and the fairly new discovery that many plagues were waterborne.

  In 1889, a particularly well-educated Montana physician who had studied the work on yellow fever noticed a tick on a patient and suggested that this might be significant. In 1902 a new breed of investigators turned up. Since the disease never struck before mid-March, they arrived in the spring. Two pathologists from the University of Minnesota, Louis B. Wilson and William M. Chowning, headed the new team. Wilson and Chowning shocked both the public and the medical community by documenting eighty-eight cases that had occurred between 1895 and 1902, of which sixty-four were fatal—an unheard-of mortality rate of 72.7 percent.

  The pathologists explored all the newly discovered sources of disease, including water, insects, and arthropods—ticks and mites. In every case that Wilson and Chowning examined, the patient had been bitten by wood ticks two to eight days before symptoms appeared.

  In 1904, with property values in the Bitterroot plummeting, the Montana State Board of Health obtained a commitment from the U.S. surgeon general to sponsor research in the Bitterroot until the nature and causes of Rocky Mountain spotted fever were completely understood. But one of the effects of this commitment was to emphasize that the answers were not yet known, and so with plans for tourism, irrigation, and orchards in the works the local press started to avoid mentioning the disease. There was a shame attached to it, and as in the AIDS epidemic seventy years later, when someone died of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the obituary avoided giving the cause of death.

  The locals, especially those who worked outdoors, adopted the habit of examining their bodies nightly for ticks They started carrying small bottles of carbolic acid with them while working outdoors, especially on the contagion-prone west bank of the river. Carbolic acid was one of the miracles of the new age. The British surgeon Joseph Lister, who had pioneered the idea of keeping surgery safe from dangerous microorganisms, developed it as an antiseptic. The problem was that if you applied it directly to the skin—the Bitterroot people would open the bottle and hold it upside down over the tick bite—it left a red acid welt. Still, this was better than the killer fever. Not surprisingly, given the level of fear, many fraudulent medicines guaranteed to save you, including sarsaparilla, were sold in the Bitterroot. This trade was much slowed down in 1906 by the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, a piece of legislation that Birdseye would one day play an important role in revising.

  Among the new fields of science was entomology, the study of insects. After 1890, when it was discovered that arthropods, an eight-legged cousin of insects, could transmit disease-causing microorganisms, a wide range of doctors, public health officials, and veterinarians became interested in studying ticks. In 1909 the term “medical entomology” came into use for the specific study of the role of arthropods in disease. The Bitterroot project became cutting-edge medicine.

  Howard Taylor Ricketts, a pathologist at the University of Chicago, became interested in Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and he successfully identified the organism that caused the disease, for which he won the dubious honor of having it named after him, Rickettsia. He then went off to study an outbreak of typhus, a somewhat related disease, in Mexico and died while working on it. Field epidemiology was very dangerous work.

  As more and more disciplines and more and more government agencies got involved in the Bitterroot project, infighting developed. It was centered on the belief of the physicians that the new scientists, the pathologists and entomologists, were not really qualified and should defer to their greater learning and training. Physicians would sneeringly refer to entomologists as “bugologists.” Many of the locals felt the same way and openly laughed at the hypothesis that the disease was caused by ticks. After all, carbolic acid hadn’t worked.

  In February 1910, Robert Cooley, Montana’s official state entomologist and a man deeply committed to solving the Bitterroot spotted fever problem, went to Washington to ask for help from the U.S. Biological Survey in studying the connection between wild animals and the life cycle of the tick. The Biological Survey and the Bureau of Entomology were both housed in the same small brick building in Washington, and Cooley left with three recruits for the Bitterroot. Willard V. King, a gifted entomology student from Montana, had delayed his senior year to work for the Bureau of Entomology. The U.S. Biological Survey sent Arthur H. Howell, a thirty-seven-year-old zoologist who would publish 118 works on birds and mammals by the time he died in 1940, and Clarence Birdseye, a twenty-three-year-old college dropout.

  No one else had been willing to volunteer because the work seemed too dangerous. Howell, a married man with children, agreed to work in the field camp but only on condition that a younger volunteer, single with no children, would come with him to go trapping and shooting in the highly infested areas. This was Birdseye’s kind of adventure, and he eagerly volunteered. According to legend, when C. Hart Merriam asked for volunteers in the Biological Survey, the reply was, “Why not ask Birdseye?”

  An abandoned log cabin that had once been a farmhouse became the home and research center for Cooley, King, Birdseye, and a cook named Paul Stanton. They named it Camp Venustus, after the scientific name for the dangerous tick, Dermacentor venustus. The four men posed for a picture in front of the cabin, Stanton in his cook’s apron and the other three in suits and ties. Birdseye in his tweedy three-piece suit, thinning hair, and spectacles did not look that different from the famous inventor and entrepreneur he would become in his fifties. The photograph gives no clue that this small man in the suit risked his life every day on horseback wandering into the canyons with his hunting rifle.

  After World War II, Esther Gaskins Price, a former researcher at the Mayo Clinic, decided to write a history of the campaign against spotted fever in the Bitterroot. She lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts, only a short drive from Gloucester, where Birdseye was living, and so she went to ask him about the Bitterroot campaign. Typical of Birdseye, he said little about his significant contributions to the medical research. He was asked many times about this period, and he always talked about how many animals he killed, sometimes pointing out that it was well over the usual limit, and then he lik
ed to throw in a few good yarns like the one about the calendar. The cabin had a calendar with a picture of a naked woman in a bathtub. Birdseye, who loved photography, documented all his work in the Bitterroot with photos that he submitted to Washington with his reports. King managed to shoot a picture that showed the girl without the calendar, so it appeared to be an actual voluptuous naked woman in a bathtub. In the foreground was a sign reading, “C. Birdseye’s Office.” This he slipped between photographs of mountain goats and bears that Birdseye shipped off to Washington. They spent a lot of time out in the wilderness playing practical jokes on one another, and King thought this would be a great joke on Birdseye. But he had misjudged Washington, and the photograph created such an uproar that King was nearly removed from the project.

  The closest Birdseye ever came to talking about how dangerous his work had been was the story he told Price about the trick he and King played on Howell.

  While the different agencies and the bugologists and physicians were all competing on this small turf, Birdseye and King could see that this was a young man’s game. They would take all the risks while Howell would remain in the cabin writing a paper on their work on which only his name would appear. Howell had made clear from the outset that he intended to avoid danger. Birdseye and King remembered how back in Washington, Howell was the one who talked about how he was married with children and the job was too dangerous. While King and Birdseye had made arrangements with a nearby doctor in the event a tick infected one of them, Howell often stated that at the first sign of a tick being embedded on him, he was packing for Washington.

  In the cabin the three checked one another for ticks every morning and night. So Birdseye, as he later told Price, proposed to King that “if on one of the nightly inspections, we could just discover a tick between Mr. Howell’s shoulder blades where he could not possibly see that it was purely imaginary, he would be off for Washington and we could do the paper work as well as the field work.” The idea, Bob told Price, had come to him while skinning a coyote he had shot and putting the ticks they had found into vials. They put one tick engorged on coyote blood in a separate vial. At night while examining Howell, Birdseye claimed to find a tick between his shoulder blades. Howell was so upset he insisted that Birdseye not only cut it out with a scalpel but also cauterize the wound, which Birdseye obligingly accomplished with a heated blade while Howell winced in pain. Then King handed him the vial with the tick from the coyote. It worked even better than the two young men had anticipated. First thing the next morning Howell was making arrangements to return to Washington.

  Some weeks later Birdseye had a remarkable hunting trip during three days of pouring rain. He shot three wild mountain sheep and a brown bear and collected an enormous quantity of ticks from the bodies. He was so excited that he neglected to check himself for ticks, and when he finally did by an evening campfire, he found seven—three of them thoroughly engorged with his blood. For several days he had the aches and nausea that were the well-known symptoms of spotted fever. He spent three terrified days before he realized that he simply had a grippe from being out for days in the rain. But it left him feeling that his joke on Howell was not as funny as he had thought it was.

  Bob Birdseye liked and got along with most people, even Howell. Years later he told Howell what he had done, and according to Birdseye, Howell laughed. He had probably been happy to return to Washington anyway.

  Now the two young men, Birdseye and King, were on their own, along with the cook Stanton and occasional visits from Cooley. Their task was to gather ticks to be studied, and an unknown percentage of these tiny creatures could deliver a fatal bite. There was the possibility of taking an untested horse serum to possibly protect them from the disease, but Birdseye and King thought this as risky as facing the ticks.

  While they were in the field, Josiah J. Moore, a University of Chicago pathologist, concluded from experiments that the minimum amount of time that a tick needed to attach to a guinea pig in order to infect it was one hour and forty-five minutes, and on average it had to stay in place, feeding on the host, for ten hours. Based on this research, Cooley instructed Birdseye and King to stop their work every two hours to inspect each other’s bodies for ticks. They did occasionally find a tick, but neither ever contracted spotted fever, either because of luck or because Moore was right about the necessary feeding time.

  Because of Birdseye and King this became a standard procedure in tick collecting for spotted fever. The clothing they devised also became standard. They wore high shoes to which cloth leggings were attached and fastened to their calves by drawstrings. Their outer clothes, cotton for the summer weather, were soaked in kerosene, which at least for a short time served as a tick repellent. At night they left their clothes in an airtight closet with carbon bisulfate, a common insecticide.

  King worked late into the night at his microscope. By day he went into the brush with his collecting flag and vials, while Birdseye, with a hunting rifle on his shoulder and as many traps as he could carry, went out into the most infested canyons. King had a white wool flag on a pole, later replaced by lighter flannel, and he waved the flag in the brush to attract ticks. Birdseye photographed the animals, and King photographed and studied the ticks. At night the two young men lay in their cabin having lively debates about the future of the spotted fever campaign. They wanted to document the complete life cycle of the tick and determine what animals served as hosts at which stages.

  Birdseye shot and trapped gophers, chipmunks, pine squirrels, woodchucks, ground squirrels, wood rats, snowshoe rabbit, cottontail rabbit, several species of mice, flying squirrels, badgers, weasels, muskrat, and bats. He also shot and killed the large and dangerous brown bear, the elusive mountain sheep found in remote and rugged rock ledges, coyotes, both mule and white-tailed deer, and elks. He shot most of what he saw, but he also set traps and collected 4,495 ticks. In the process he killed 717 wild animals, though he had said his goal was to get 1,000. He was Buffalo Bill at last. (According to Price, he killed over 1,000 animals, but the 717 figure from the project seems more likely. Apparently, Birdseye exaggerated the kill when talking years later to her.) He had been exempted from the normal hunting restrictions. Still, when the game warden J. L. DeHart learned of the quantity of animals he had killed, he angrily referred to it as “wanton slaughter.”

  But the slaughter was not wanton. The insects that were collected led King to discover that the tick had a two-year life cycle and not a one-year cycle, as Ricketts had thought. This was significant because it enabled Birdseye to determine that the tick fed on small animals such as mice when it was young but as a mature adult moved to large animals. Birdseye showed that it was pointless to have a campaign only against small rodents, including the gopher, correctly called Columbian ground squirrel, which had come to be regarded by the pathologists as the leading culprit. Birdseye and King concluded that spotted fever could be controlled if a campaign against small rodents were combined with a program treating the large animals, principally domestic livestock, with repellents. It was an important breakthrough. This was not what ranchers wanted to hear, because they did not want the expense of treating their livestock and had liked having everything blamed on the little gopher that was for them a hated destructive pest.

  Now Cooley erected livestock-dipping vats throughout the valley for ranchers “voluntarily” to run their cattle through. But the program was not really voluntary, because ranchers who did not dip their livestock faced quarantine on their animals. Adding to the unpopularity of the initiative, in a community that tended to be distrustful of any government programs, it took some experimenting to get the right strength of arsenic in the dipping vats so it would kill the ticks but not hurt the livestock. Hides and udders got burned before the right formula was found. The ranchers had been much happier with Ricketts, who simply endorsed a program to exterminate gophers.

  In the fall the ticks and the disease vanished, and the study packed up until the following spring. Birdse
ye probably stayed with the Biological Survey and went back to Washington, where he could spend time with Eleanor. According to a journal in Birdseye’s handwriting, he remained in the Bitterroot for at least part of the winter of 1911 trapping and experimenting with various poisons, even though there were no ticks and therefore no medical project during those months. Perhaps he was taking advantage of the fact that winter is an excellent time to lay poisoned bait because food is scarce. In times of plentiful prey most wild mammals will not eat carcasses. In his journal he repeatedly explained that he was exterminating animals at the request of local farmers. In the spring of 1911 he returned to his dangerous work with wood ticks.

  Birdseye’s ideas for a program to control spotted fever were laid out in a report initially published by the Biological Survey in 1911 with Henry Wetherbee Henshaw, the head of the survey, as the first author and Birdseye as the second. A more extensive report came out the following year in the Department of Agriculture’s Farmers’ Bulletin with Birdseye as the sole author. The report borrows a little from the newly emerging medical knowledge of spotted fever and has some of what King learned of ticks, but most of it is pure Birdseye. The report, Some Common Mammals of Western Montana in Relation to Agriculture and Spotted Fever, reveals a great deal about both Birdseye and the U.S. Biological Survey. The report contains no notion of the need to preserve nature or the natural order. The larger issue was how nature could best serve human endeavor, in this case agriculture. This was the point of view of the U.S. Biological Survey, which, after all, was a subdivision of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The report called for the extermination—that was the word used—of gophers, chipmunks, ground squirrels, pine squirrels, woodchucks, rabbit, and badgers in western Montana. Birdseye discussed the life cycle and habits of these animals with the thorough observation and insight of a trained and experienced biologist. He then explained how best to kill them—when to shoot them, when to trap them, when to poison them, which poisons to use, what time of year to do so, and how to apply the poisons for each species. While he did discuss each species’s relationship to ticks and spotted fever, a great deal more attention was paid to the destruction to agriculture caused by these unwanted animals. Although he argued that his and King’s research showed the Columbian ground squirrel, a.k.a. the gopher, to be the most important host to young ticks, he goes on to point out that the gophers’ habit of eating growing grain and garden vegetables and burrowing in planted fields “is sufficient to warrant their destruction.” Pocket gophers, on the other hand, are seldom tick hosts, and Birdseye stated that their relationship to spotted fever couldn’t be of much importance. But then he goes on to point out that because they destroy irrigation ditches, kill fruit trees, damage hay fields, and eat garden vegetables, they ought to be exterminated too. Weasels were to be spared because they killed so many rodents. To prove his point—always a scientist testing a hypothesis—he kept a weasel in a cage and periodically placed the largest gopher he could find in with it and observed the weasel devour the newcomer. He felt this way about badgers as well, that they were great rodent hunters, but reluctantly conceded that they did host a lot of ticks so should probably be killed.