A few years ago, I encountered in the archives a young American Indian woman who worked in the influenza pandemic of 1918–20. Haunted by a letter she had written in October 1918, I had to follow her story. It is probably an exaggeration to call a 19-year-old with almost no medical training a “nurse,” so perhaps Lutiant, a Minnesotan who toiled at a military hospital just outside of Washington, DC, was more of an aide. Still, with a worker shortage, she was recruited to a nursing position that required her to shoulder heavy responsibilities soon after arriving in the city.
When I first came across her letter, all I knew of Lutiant was her first name and that she was a recent graduate of the Haskell Indian Boarding School in Lawrence, Kansas—a school whose records I had used for my first book. But it was the way Lutiant wrote about her experiences in a thoughtful and often humorous seven-page letter to a school friend that made me care about her so deeply. To me she was funny, in an Ojibwe way. She portrayed wartime Washington as “certainly a beautiful place” and described the influenza’s toll with “so many deaths and sick people in the city.” It was the best social history I had ever read about the pandemic, and that it was written by someone so young was heartbreaking.
Lutiant’s letter showed that she was deeply moved by the young men dying in the hospital to which she was assigned. She described her job at the hospital, where she was part of a group of “Indian girls” who were also boarding school graduates. Of her cohort, she was one of only three who had not yet contracted the influenza. Her work life was exhausting. Nurses were required to work 12-hour days, with duties she listed as “give medicines to the patients, take temperatures, fix ice packs, feed them at ‘eating time,’ rub their back or chest with camphorated sweet oil, make egg-nogs, and a whole string of other thing[s] I can’t begin to name.” She told her friend, “I liked the work just fine, but it was too hard, not being used to it.” The death that surrounded her did not pass unremarked. When four officers she cared for died, she wrote, “The first one that died sure unnerved me—I had to go to the nurses’ quarters and cry it out. The other three were not so bad. Really, Louise, Orderlies carried the dead soldiers out on stretchers at the rate of two every three hours for the first two days [we] were there.”