A bawling bovine, mad with a virus sweeping the West, stood between Sarah Olds’ children and the house.
For two hours the children had been stranded on a haystack on the family’s Nevada ranch, unable to get home as the rabid cow pawed and raged outside the house. It was starting to get cold, and the children pleaded with their mother to let them sprint for the house as the sun dipped low in the sky.
“No, sir!” she yelled at the kids from the front porch. “Burrow down under the hay to keep warm, but don’t dare come home.”
Olds awaited her eldest son, hopeful that he’d come home soon from a day of hunting, and with enough ammunition to shoot the crazed cow dead.
It was 1916 and there was a virus spreading in Northern Nevada.
‘Greatest calamity’ to hit the state
While many scholars have drawn parallels between today’s COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, Nevada fought another virus 100 years ago, one very different from today’s novel coronavirus.
In many ways, however, the battle was the same, marked by public pushback against mitigation measures and the difficulty of balancing the protection of livelihoods with the fight against an infectious disease.
From about 1915 to 1920, the state was grappling with an outbreak of rabies that threatened not only the health of people and animals, but also the state’s culture and economy.
It was considered the “greatest calamity that had ever occurred in the state,” according to the 1984 article “Rabies in Rangeland Environments,” published by the scholarly Rangelands Journal.
Ranchers’ livelihoods were particularly at stake as their livestock were bait for wild animals that roamed the desert in search of something, anything to bite.
Like the resistance seen toward measures to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, there were Nevadans then who also were reluctant to change their practices to prevent the spread of rabies. Ranchers most of all feared changes could irreversibly affect their viability as a ranch. One misstep could end an entire operation.
Animal activists and wealthy elite alike also balked at top-down orders, the most controversial one at the time being to quarantine and muzzle all dogs.
In her own home, Olds, the pioneering cattlewoman, bickered with her family about whether rabies was worth worrying about. The bickering stopped when Babe the cow went mad.
“She bellowed … the most maniacal bellow I’ve ever heard. She dug holes two feet deep in the ground with her hooves and horns. She chased birds, chickens, anything that moved, and her whole body twitched and writhed all the time,” she wrote in her book, “Twenty Miles from a Match: Homesteading in Western Nevada.”
