With permission from Larry B. Massie
The following are excerpts from "Voyages into Michigan's Past"
If you would like your own personal copy of Larry B. Massie's "Voyages into Michigan's Past", please contact him at:

Larry B. Massie
2109 41st St.
Allegan, MI 49010-8906

THE SHAKES

"Don't go, to Michigan, that land of ills;

The word means ague, fever and chills."

So ran a popular chant of the 1830s. The pioneers who fanned out across the southern parts of the peninsula in the 1820s and 1830s to carve homesteads out of the wilderness counted wild animals, loneliness, lack of creature comforts and backbreaking labor among the least of their worries. It was the ague (pronounced A'gue), what we have come to call malaria, that they feared the most.

Few, if any, escaped a bout with the disease. Lenawee County pioneer F.R. Stebbens remembered that during the fall of 1838 there were three persons sick with "chill fever" to every one well. Anson Van Buren, who settled in Calhoun Count y in the 1830s, described two brothers who were the last ones in the settlement to get the ague. They had begun to boast that they were immune to the disease when they both came down with an especially severe case. Martin Mapes, according to Van Buren, sh ook so hard that "the dishes rattled- on the shelves against the log wall." Another account tells of workmen scrambling down from a roof they were shingling because the ague-ridden inhabitants shook the cabin so.

Frontier vernacular termed the disease the "FevNag," the "Ag-in-Fev," the "Shakin Ager," or simply the "Shakes." Whatever they called it, pioneers quickly learned its symptoms. First came yawnings and stretchings and the fingernails tur ned bluish. Then, as Van Buren recalled, a cold sensation "crept over your system in streaks, faster and faster, and then colder and colder in successive undulations that coursed down your back." Following cold chills that set the patients's body to shaki ng came warm flashes that increased into burning fever. In a few hours, or sometimes several days later, the fever broke in a sweat.

Some patients experienced the cycle every day, others every other or third day, in a predictable pattern. The disease was so widespread that pioneers accepted it as part of life in Michigan territory and they learned to work around its disabling symptoms by dividing their calendars into "well days" and "ague days." Ministers, lawyers, judges and doctors scheduled their appointments so as to accommodate the "shakes." Housewives planned their washing, ironing and baking around times when they expected to be down with the "fits." According to Van Buren, beaus who "went sparking" on their well nights were sometimes disappointed to find their beloved chattering with the ague.

The ague made pioneer life miserable but rarely proved fatal. Yet many, weakened by its effects, succumbed to more virulent diseaseses. Doctors treated patients with diverse remedies according to their school of thought. Some victims g ot bled, or blistered by irritating poultices. Others swallowed massive doses of poisonous mercury compounds. The lucky ones received a prescription of "Peruvian Bark," the source of quinine and a genuine cure and preventative of malaria. By the 1840s ref ined quinine became available.

Those who could not afford a doctor or distrusted his hazardous techniques treated themselves with exotic folk remedies. Some recommended a dose of slipperyelm bark tea as an emetic. You had to be careful to shave the bark off with an u pward stroke however; if you cut downward it would produce an opposite effect on the system. Others quaffed a brew of mullen and sassafras roots or swallowed three large pills made of cobwebs at the onset of the shakes. Van Buren tried what he had been in formed was a sure cure. He pared his finger and toe nails, wrapped the clippings in tissue paper, placed the package in a hole bored in a maple tree and bunged up the hole. He distinctly remembered that his symptoms increased in severity following the exp eriment.

Pioneer physicians accounted for the disease with a number of imaginative theories. One school held that the ague came from the rotting vegetation produced by settlers cutting trees. Another that the disease was buried in the soil and r eleased through plowing. The most common belief blamed the stagnant water standing in marshes from which emanated a "miasma," very unhealthy to breathe at night. Whatever the cause, pioneers early learned that the ague was more prevalent near swampy areas and avoided building nearby.

The answer seems obvious today, thanks to the work of Drs. Walter Reed and George W. Goethals who identified the bite of the mosquito as the true cause of malaria. But pioneers knew nothing of vector-host relationships. As late as the 1 880s a researcher experimented to find that the use of window screens reduced the prevalence of malaria. But he theorized that the screens kept out minute particles of vegetation that caused the disease.

Commonly, when pioneers recalled their worst experiences they mentioned the ague and mosquitoes, sometimes in the same paragraph. But they never understood the cause and effect relationship. Mosquitoes were a nuisance that sometimes dro ve settlers off. Screens were unheard of. The sole protection lay in smudge fires, outside around the clearing during the day and within the cabin at night. The only way possible to milk cows at the height of the mosquito season was to build a smudge fire . The cattle learned to enter the protective smoke themselves. Pioneers considered eyes smarting from smoke far better than tormenting hordes of mosquitoes.

When settlers gradually reclaimed marshes for agricultural purposes and drained swamps to eliminate mosquitoes, the ague gradually disappeared in Michigan.