TOLD by the PIONEERS - Washington Secretary of State

Told
by the Pioneers
and freighting out of Dawson to the various mining camps and dredges
that were being established. I was assigned to that particular
work.
,Upon my return, I continued in charge of meat inspection work, on
the Pacific coast, with headquarters in Portland. Following completion
of the work in Alaska, the Dominion government asked the Bureau
of Animal Industry to assign a man to 'work with Dr. Bowhill,
who had just returned from investigating the communicable parasitic
diseases of food animals in Australia, and who had been assigned to
similar work in Canada, with headquarters at Vancouyer. I was assigned
to represent the Bureau in conjunction with Dr. Bowhill.
Later, my activities were transferred from the office at Portland
to the Customs Service on the internatioual boundary, for the inspection
of livestock of all kinds, traveling along the borders of Washington,
Idaho and Montana. I worked with customs men, forestry officials,
and whenever a representative of the Bureau of Animal IndustrY
was needed."
•
"Almost fifty years ago, I used to dri,-e cattle from the ranges of
the Texas Panhandle up through the fiye Indian Nations, across Kansas,
Nebraska, Wyoming, into the Bad Lands of Dakota and Montana.
Our cattle, we knew, were healthy cattle, yet everywhere they traveled
they left a trail of death behind them.
If native cattle in the Indian Territory, Kansas, Nebraska, or anywhere
north of the Panhandle got mixed with our cattle, such strangers
died; if native cattle even so much as crossed the trail of our roving
southerners, those natives would surely die, and as settlers were
beginning to come into Kansas and Nebraska at that time, there was
more war than romance in driving Texas cattle into Montana.
Settlers became more numerous and more deadly. They banded together
and kept pushing us nomadic co\\rboys farther and farther
west. Finally the government took a hand, and the Lnited States Department
of Agriculture tried to find why it was that health~' cattle
would lean a trail of death for their kind behind them.
Your true scientist, however, follows every lead, seeming wise, or
otherwise, and finally the veterinary scientists from vVashington, D.
C., found within the broken down red blood cells of sick cattle the
same little twin bodies that were found in the bodies of freshly hatched
ticks, and within the blood of the Texas cattle, which didn't mind
them, because they were so used to them the~- were immune.
This was the first discovery of blood-destroying diseases, of which
malaria, borne by one kind of mosquito, and yellow fe"er, borne by
another mosquito, are later-revealed examples.
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