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saddlebag dispatches
I
T’S BEEN AN INTERESTING and challenging few months since our last issue. All of us have had to change the way we do things. Working and attending school remotely is now the norm. Buying our groceries and other necessities on-line has been a new experience. We’ve accustomed ourselves to
seeing more folks wearing bandanas than on an 1860s cattle drive. Many of us have started to ask ourselves how bad it will get and when will it end. To answer that, we need only look to our history. This is not exactly our first rodeo, nor our first pandemic. Most of us, by now, are somewhat familiar with the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19. That one resulted in 500 million confirmed cases and 20-40 million deaths worldwide. It was said to be the deadliest epidemic in history. More people died in a single year than in the Black Death Plague epidemic of 1347-1354. In modern history, we’ve seen seven Cholera Pandemics. The first struck in Bengal 1817 and killed hundreds of thousands of Indians and over 10,000 British troops. By 1820 it had spread to China, Eastern Europe, and Indonesia, where it killed 100,000 on the island of Java before dying out in 1824. The second Cholera Pandemic lasted from 1829 to 1837. It originated in Russia but soon spread world-wide. In California,
