WAYBACK WITH THE JOURNAL: Weight Loss Drugs Bring Malnutrition And Scurvy – Like In The Alaska Gold Rush

THE COPPER RIVER COUNTRY JOURNAL 

Doctors Say Weight Loss Drugs Lead People To Eat Badly, And Not Get Enough Nutrients 

They Are Getting Scurvy 

The Inbound Miners Who Came Over The Valdez Glacier In The 1898 Valdez-Copper Valley Gold Rush Got Scurvy. And It Was Very, Very Bad 

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HISTORY WITH THE JOURNAL  

THE SCOURGE OF SCURVY

Gold miners escaping from the Copper Valley in 1898, 
after a terrible summer. (Photo, Neil Benedict collection)

Out of the North they came, broken, destitute, scurvy ridden; as sad a company as was ever seen poured out of Copper River country in that winter of 1898-1899. They were unfit for the Northland hardships and the country broke them... Those who stayed in the Copper River valley were often just too proud to turn back.".....

Lone E. Janson

The Copper Spike

“Scurvy.” It’s one of those funny nautical terms that brings up thoughts of Peter Pan, Captain Hook, and walking the plank. In modern America, “scurvy” is linked to comical pirates who growl “Ahoy Matey”, and have patches over their eyes, wooden legs and carry parrots on their shoulders. 

Today, even the very word “scurvy” sounds like a big, fat joke. Nothing particularly serious. 

As “Cassandra,” on a website called ChrisWarcraft wrote in a tweet on the internet, pondering how tough life had become:

“Remember when all buccaneers had to worry about was scurvy and running out of rum? Now it's all flesh-eating bacteria and crap.”

The strange thing about scurvy is how soon we’ve forgotten. Scurvy is not a funny situation -- any more than losing your arm, or having your eye poked out. 

Scurvy is every bit as bad as flesh-eating bacteria... And crap. 

HUMANS, MONKEYS & GUINEA PIGS

Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C. This essential vitamin is required by all animals to live, and almost very single animal in the world can produce its own vitamin C. 

Except for humans, monkeys and guinea pigs. 

Unfortunately for us, we all have mutations that keep us from synthesizing our own enzymes.

Those of us creatures in our tight little “scurvy outgroup” need vitamin C as much as all the other animals. But we can only get it through a balanced diet that includes vitamin C. 

Surprisingly, although we often think of orange juice as the best way to get this vitamin, potatoes have probably done more to help keep scurvy at bay, around the world, than any other food. (In fact, the ordinary potato is one of the few foods you can eat all by itself, for months at a time, and not starve or get scurvy.)

In general, scurvy isn’t a problem in modern days, since most people eat a variety of foods. Including potatoes. So we get adequate vitamin C. You can go your whole life never getting scurvy, of course, since the condition occurs only when food sources become greatly limited, and vitamin C is cut off. 

Deprivation usually causes scurvy. During the Irish potato famine of 1845-1852,  there was a terrible potato blight and scurvy suddenly sprang up in Ireland, which depended heavily on the potato as a basic source of food. 

During the treks west to Utah, along “the Mormon Trail” settlers who were on the move  and without fresh food came down with scurvy, too. One of the Mormons, George A. Smith, became known as the “Potato Saint” after figuring out that eating raw potatoes cured the affliction.

WHY THEY’RE CALLED LIMEYS

In general, though, we tend to think of scurvy when we talk about those historic long voyages in big-sailed vessels made of wood, circling the world. School history books frequently show swooping trails drawn on maps of the continents signifying the exploratory trips of the great seafaring explorers, showing their back-and-forth spice routes and the like. What those maps don’t tell you is the interesting stuff: the raw reality of scurvy.

Vasco da Gama lost most of his crew to scurvy on his way to India in 1499. Magellan famously crossed the Pacific -- and lost 80% of his men. Frankly, scurvy is way more interesting than nutmeg. 

Vitus Bering (who they named the Bering Sea and the Bering Straits of Alaska after) got scurvy. When Bering died, he was said to have been half buried in a hole in the ground, desperately trying to cure himself through direct physical contact with Mother Earth. People knew that somehow you didn’t get scurvy when you were on land; but they weren’t aware that it was eating plants that grew in the soil that cured you, not the dirt itself. 

Eventually, British sailors, who are still called “Limeys” discovered that adding the vitamin C of lime or lemon juice to sailors’ drinks kept them from getting scurvy.

TONS OF FLOUR, BUT NO VITAMIN C

Considering how hard it was to find food in Alaska during the great Gold Rushes  it’s no surprise that scurvy was a huge problem. 

In 1899, the Reno Gazette of Nevada reported:

“Word comes from Dawson that parties arriving there over the Edmonton route, report a sad state of affairs on the Wind River, a branch of the Peel. About 75 prospectors, who are wintering there, are invaded by scurvy. Fifteen or twenty are reported to have died from the effects of the disease.”

In the Gold Rush, people were aware of scurvy. But overall, the attention given to allaying the scourge by taking along vitamin C-rich foods was minimal. So they skimped on what they really needed to survive -- paying far more attention to all the hundreds of pounds of flour, beans and bacon they dragged through the countryside, none with any vitamin C.

(Although fresh meat can also provide vitamin C, it was not easy to get. The thousands of miners who flooded the region drove down the game populations significantly, and sometimes rarely came across wildlife.) 

Montgomery Ward, in its literature directed at potential Alaska miners warned about scurvy:

“You should bear in mind that in a wild and inhospitable country, such as the Yukon is, where vegetables and fresh fruits are unknown, unless imported and sold at fabulous prices, something in the way of fruit is absolutely indispensable to ward off the dreaded scurvy. But there are other commodities which one's personal liking may induce him to take, as for instance, rice, syrup, oatmeal, hardtack and lime juice.” 

But food-suppliers didn’t truly understand the amount of vitamin C that was actually needed. Miners were urged to buy a 10-pound medicine chest for their years-long trip -- with 45 items in it, including medicines for colds, diarrhea, heart ailments, headaches, piles, toothaches, worms, gonorrhea -- and 50 cents worth of anti-scurvy medication.

It takes about two or three months to develop scurvy on a diet that doesn’t have vitamin C in it. And when it happens, scurvy’s symptoms are surprisingly horrendous; scurvy is every bit as bad as flesh-eating bacteria.

Scurvy starts with muscle and joint aches, fatigue and depression. Then it goes on to bleeding gums, teeth falling out, and serious pain. Followed by gums rotting and bleeding, gangrene, and pus and bleeding erupting all over the body, in a manner that seems quite similar to the horrors of Ebola. The eyes bulge out and bleed.  Old wounds open and ooze. This is accompanied with unbearable pain, cartilage separating from bones and ribs like a boiled chicken, high fever, blackening of the skin, bleeding in the brain and heart, convulsions -- and an agonizing death.

Apparently, at any time in the process of decline, the introduction of food with vitamin C can save your life.

On the Alaska Gold Rush of 1898, the problems of crossing icy streams and drowning; freezing to death; running into wild animals -- it was all compounded by the dreaded scurvy.

Surprisingly, the miners of 1898 weren’t always sure what was wrong with them. One of them, Horace Conger (who, back home in Minnesota had actually been a pharmacist), wrote in March, 1899, a year into his Alaska ordeal, about his fellow miners:

"Many have frozen some member of their body and turned back, while others have gone on, minus a toe. I have met a good many unable to stand on their feet, with rheumatism, scurvy and black leg..." 

All three of those ailments are one and the same: scurvy. 

The fear and terror during the Gold Rush of being in a faraway, incredibly cold place -- dying of frostbite and of scurvy -- was almost beyond understanding.

As Captain Abercrombie noted when he arrived to assist miners who had just spent a winter in Copper Center in makeshift log cabins, after a year in Alaska:

“As the long nights and deep snow crept in on them an uneasiness began to pervade every cabin, and when a sickness appeared, the character of which they were unable to determine and universally diagnose as black rheumatism, frost bite, and everything but scurvy, they were driven well nigh into a fever of desperation. To flee from these conditions was their one thought and topic of conversation, but where to, was the question on every lip, and when a number, regardless of the consequences, attempted what was considered an impossibility at that season of the year, the passage of the dreaded Valdez Glacier, leaving two-thirds of their party frozen to death on the vast ice fields, far up above the clouds, the panic was complete... I do not think there was a single cabin in the Copper River Valley during the winter of 1898-99 that did not lose at least one of its party from being frozen to death or by scurvy..."

The foods of the Gold Rush linger on in modern Alaska life. By 2013, locally gathered indigenous foods, like salmon, moose and caribou, had been fully integrated with purchased foods in rural Alaska.  Surveys by the Alaska Native Health Board and Native Epidemiology Center showed that in the Tanana Chiefs region the space-age drink known as Tang was the #1 food item in the region -- wild or purchased. Tang was popularized on NASA manned space flights, and heavily advertised in Alaska in the 1970’s when Joe Redington Sr., (who invented the Iditarod Sled Dog Race) and Ray Genet (a famed Denali mountaineer) were both featured in full-page newspaper ads, celebrating “Hot Tang” as an Alaskan drink.

Because there are few roads in Alaska, even today, people who live in “Bush” (or off-road) Alaska frequently buy their food by mail. The Greatlander Bushmailer, which mails out free newspaper-like flyers to all rural Alaskans, gives a pretty good indication of what rural Alaskans were choosing to eat.

At the top of the list of items in the Bushmailer you’ll usually find Tang, available in 22 oz cans -- a relic of the Gold Rush and the desperation that miners felt as they succumbed to scurvy. (Other Gold Rush type foods, like pancake mix, and syrup are also popular.)

Tang has got a few drawbacks. It’s not real juice, and it has a lot of sugar. But every 8 ounce glass also gives you 100% of your required daily dose of vitamin C -- that giver of life, health and hope. Bush people have long memories.  

Besides, having grown up on Tang, folks like it. In Alaska today, when you go to a rural funeral potlatch or wedding, you might easily find a table full of plastic cups – alongside a fancy spigoted urn of iced Tang.