Sisters Archives - St. Charles 100

The sisters’ first test – Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 pushed hospital to the limits

Tucked between the mountains and the high desert, Bend in 1918 lay hidden from much of the outside world.

But isolation wouldn’t be enough to shield the booming lumber town from the Spanish influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 20 to 40 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1919. By some accounts, the toll from the fast-killing illness surpassed even the “Black Death” plaque of 1347-1351, making it the worst epidemic in history.

It would be the first big test for the newly arrived nuns of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton, Indiana, and the little Bend hospital they had taken over. Before the end of the year, the hospital would overflow with flu victims and the community would press the Bend Amateur Athletic Club (now the Boys and Girls Club) into service as a temporary hospital.

Among the victims in Central Oregon was Bend mayor, S.C. Caldwell, who died Jan. 8, 1919, while in Vancouver, Wash., the Bend Bulletin reported.

The deadly virus cropped up during the final year of World War I. It first showed up in Asia and Europe, picking up the name Spanish flu because it allegedly killed 8 million people there in May 1918.

The war, with its massive movements of men, helped spread the virus around the globe. The virus moved rapidly throughout developed nations wherever rail lines carried people. It first appeared in the United States among soldiers at a Kansas Army base in March 1918, but didn’t hit with full force until autumn.

In Central Oregon, 44 Deschutes County residents died out of 174 document cases in 1918, according to the Annual Reports of the Oregon State Board of Health. That same year, Crook County lost seven people out of 100 cases and Jefferson County saw two deaths from 64 cases. In 1919, 14 people died in Deschutes County, three in Crook and one in Jefferson.

The fall of 1918, the Bend Bulletin issued a call for volunteers to help at the makeshift hospital and with homebound illness around town. According to a 1917 business directory, Bend had seven physicians. They, along with the five Sisters of St. Joseph couldn’t keep up. On Nov. 11, 1918, the paper reported, “Spanish influenza cases are being treated at the emergency hospital, over 30 cases being reported at the institution this morning. Although the help situation is somewhat improved over last week, there is still a shortage and more men and women are being appealed to to give their time in aiding to care for the patients who are already there.”

Besides a shortage of beds and medical personnel, they had no proper medicine to relieve patients.

“The only drugs available were quinine, camphorated oil and moonshine whiskey,” recalled Jim Donovan, who managed Lumbermans Hospital in Bend after the sisters took over the Bend Hospital.

Yet Donovan saw a bright side amid the illness and grief, calling it “one of my most heartwarming experiences because of the help given by the community in caring for those seriously ill.”

Among those who helped were Bend Bulletin publisher Robert Sawyer and Kathleen Rockwell, both of whom were early benefactors of St. Charles Hospital. Rockwell was better known as Klondike Kate, a famous dance hall girl who moved to Bend after entertaining miners in the Yukon Territory during the gold rush of 1897.

The Sisters come to Bend – Five Catholic Sisters leave all that’s familiar to bring help where it’s needed

On a cold, bright sunny afternoon in 1917, five nuns boarded the Pennsylvania Railroad at Kokomo, Indiana and headed west.

It was Christmas Day, but the women had a rendezvous to keep. Their itinerary had been forged through nearly a decade of letters and conversations between a frontier Cupuchan priest named Father Luke Sheehan and two mothers superior of their order, the Sisters of St. Joseph.

They were leaving the familiar surroundings of their convent at Tipton, Indianan, and their three-year-old hospital at nearby Kokomo for an obscure logging town called Bend, Oregon. It was a 10-year assignment at minimum with little chance of returning home before then. Some never would.

Later writings would refer to these sisters who helped found St. Charles Health System as pioneers. It was more than poetics. What they faced was a raw logging town only a decade or two removed from the Wild West.

Bend had about 4,500 people living along mostly dirt streets at the beginning of 1918. Its fortunes swelled and shrank, often depending on weather conditions for logging. Most men had hard, dangerous jobs – logging, mill work, ranching and farming. Women faced childbirth without the medical care we take for granted. Typhoid fever, dysentery and influenza were common.

The “hospital” the sisters were to take over was a small wooden building along the banks of the Deschutes River where the city’s Mirror Pond parking lot now sits. With 14 beds, it couldn’t keep up with the injuries generated by the two mills, the Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon companies, let alone with all the illnesses and injuries inherent in life in those harder times.

The nuns who came to Bend were Sisters Theresa Thistlewaite, De Sales Burns, Evangelista McKenzie, Blanche Ress and Brendan Donegan. Little is recorded about these women as individuals or about their daily lives, but one anecdote tells volumes about their mission.

Shortly after arriving in Bend on Dec. 28, 1917, the sisters visited the facility they were to take over on Jan. 1, called the Bend Hospital. Drs. Urling Coe and Barnard Ferrell had opened it in 1915 to replace the one Fern Hall started. They had hired Mr. and Mrs. Jim Donovan to manage it.

They had also contracted with the Shevlin-Hixon Company to treat injured mill workers. Jim Donovan reportedly informed the sisters they were to treat only mill employees.

“When the sisters took it over, they were told they could only take care of the workers and we said, ‘No, we take care of everyone or we take care of no one,’” said Sister Catherine Hellmann, years later. “They only took care of the workers to keep them working, and in those days lumbering there were a lot of injuries.”

Hellmann, who became the hospital’s administrator in 1969, wasn’t there in the early days but she worked with some of the original sisters when she first came to St. Charles in 1948. Donovan backed down to the strong-willed sisters. The hospital opened its doors to everyone.

The Bend Bulletin reported the changes taking place in the first weeks of 1918, “Today the Bend Hospital begins the New Year under the management of Catholic nursing sisters … Since their arrival, they have moved into the hospital and are now completing arrangements for the accommodation of twice the number of patients formerly cared for … Instead of providing patients principally for mill employees, the Sisters will take in patients from the city at large. Remodeling of the interior of the building has provided space for 28 beds instead of the original 14.”

The expansion came just in time for the great flu epidemic of 1918.

Upon meeting them, Father Sheehan remarked in a letter to the Rev. Charles O’Reilly, Bishop of the Baker Diocese, “From what I saw and heard about these Sisters, they are excellent for the needs of the diocese. They have all the fervor of youth and seem not to be afraid of the pioneer conditions.”

That would turn out to be important. For years, the sisters labored without pay. They subsisted partly on the chickens, eggs and occasional side of beef many of their impoverished patients used to pay hospital bills, and tended a vegetable garden.

Far from considering this life a hardship, Sister Evangelista, writing about her experiences in 1950, looked back upon those years as an adventure. The trip west glowed in her mind. She recalled with humor five nuns bunking in three berths on the three-day trip west. And the excitement of what lay ahead echoed in her description of the country.

“The Rocky Mountains were wonderful to see, however, they do not compare to the Cascade Ranges in size and scenery. We were thrilled with their huge massive peaks, waterfalls, canyons, rivers. The natural scenery which almost beggars description,” she wrote.

A legacy born: 1919-1941

The five Sisters of St. Joseph who came to Bend to establish a hospital knew quickly the clapboard building that passed for a hospital wouldn’t do. Bend was booming.

The sisters started planning a new hospital almost immediately. In 1922, they dedicated the first St. Charles Hospital. In doing so, they established a legacy: A medical facility anchored in the bedrock principles of faith, yet responsive to the needs of a changing community.

Those first decades were often difficult for the struggling new hospital. The sisters started by caring for the sick during the Spanish Flu epidemic.

The Great Depression brought grinding poverty and hungry people to the doors of the hospital. The end of this period saw a war that would touch everyone and everything.

Despite those challenges, the sisters and St. Charles Hospital persevered. They were shaped and tested by these often-difficult times, yet they were also imbued with the compassion only hard times can teach.