The Magic City of the Southwest is a podcast inspired by the work of an informal group of local history enthusiasts in Durango, Colorado.
For the podcast, KSUT reporters Kirbie Bennett and Jamie Wanzek unearth archival documents, oral histories, and new details not accounted for in the common telling of Durango's history.
Here's the story of one man's close encounter with a forgotten piece of history.
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In 2018, Guy Walton was sitting in front of a computer at the Durango Public Library, reading archival newspaper articles published a century earlier.
Walton is a retired nurse. At the time, he was researching Durango’s medical history.
But as he scrolled through grainy headlines and columns of text from the fall of 1918, he stumbled on the era of the Spanish Flu, when influenza started infecting and killing people.
“There were carts going through the street once a day, picking up dead bodies,” he recalled. “You couldn't believe how quiet it was everywhere. People were afraid to go out to get the newspaper.”
Walton was doing this research in 2018, before the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, the Spanish Flu was a forgotten piece of history. But sitting in the library, Walton found that history again. It was right there, in the pages of the Durango Democrat and the Durango Evening Herald.“Influenza… could act very quickly,” Walton said. “Somebody could wake up with a sore throat in the morning, a little bit of body ache, and be dead before supper.”
Then he came across an article from October 1918, next to the headlines about World War I, Germany’s surrender, and US Troop casualties. It was a short blurb about Durango’s first Influenza death–an 8-year-old girl named Loisa Bass. “I just happened to come across the story of Loisa…and discovered that she was the first person who died,” Walton said.
We don’t know much about the little girl. She lived with her parents in an apartment on Main Avenue. Her family had moved from the small town of Cokedale, near Trinidad, Colorado. She died on her birthday.
“When I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh, what a terrible thing to happen to this little girl on her eighth birthday,’” Walton said. “I mean, how many things did she end up missing out on?”
Between 1918 and 1920, influenza killed an estimated 675,000 people in the US and 50 million people worldwide. But the death of an 8-year-old girl stuck with Guy Walton. He couldn’t stop thinking about Loisa Bass.
He decided to visit her gravesite.
He knew from his research she had been buried at Greenmount Cemetery, so one day he drove there with his wife.
“I was fully expecting to see a worn-out gravestone that maybe had her name and her date of birth,” he said.
They found the plot, but no headstone, just a slight depression in the grass. It turned out Loisa’s grave was unmarked, and that bothered Walton.
“I didn't think that there needed to be a big billboard and flashing lights or anything like that,” he said. “But I thought there should have been some way to recognize that this was the first person who died in our community.”
It turned out there were people in Durango who felt the same way Guy Walton did. When he wrote about Loisa Bass in the Durango Herald, readers sent letters to the editor agreeing that her grave should be marked.
Then, the La Plata County Historical Society raised money to pay for a gravestone, and a year later, on Loisa Bass’ birthday, Walton attended a ceremony to commemorate the marking of her grave.
“After the ceremony, I got up and walked to the headstone,” Walton recalled. “I thought about how this is really the way it should have ended for her, if it had to end at all. So there was a sense of completion.”
No Memorial Day for the 1918 Flu
On a recent morning, pulses of water from sprinklers drenched the green lawns of Greenmount Cemetery.
Loisa Bass is buried underneath a row of old cedar trees, and a small slab of gray, polished granite marks her grave.
There’s an angel etched into the stone, and a few words: “Loisa Bass died of the Spanish Flu on her 8th birthday on October 8th, 1918.”
Cemetery head of operations Bob Talamante stood next to the gravesite. Seven years ago, he helped Guy Walton find Loisa Bass.
“She was already in our system and was pretty easy to find,” he said.
Headstones crowd this section of Greenmount Cemetery. But the patch of grass around Loisa Bass had no other markers, only small indentations in the ground.
“It looks like maybe there are 10 people buried here,” Talamante said. “Maybe eventually we'll find out who else is buried here with her. It might be a bunch of babies. I don't know.”
There are many well-known people from Durango’s history buried at the cemetery: city luminaries, infamous outlaws, and at least one sheriff who died in a gun fight. But accordingly to Talamante, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of unmarked graves.
“You know, as time goes on, if you don't have a headstone, seems like you weren't on the planet,” he said. “You'll be forgotten.”
Anyone who’s gone through an 8th-grade history class in the US knows the story of World War I. We know who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. We know why US soldiers fought and died in Europe.
The Spanish Flu killed 15 times more Americans, but most of us don't know that history.
“We don't talk about it. Why has there never been a Memorial Day for that?” Walton said. “We have a Memorial Day that celebrates all the deaths in war. I wonder why there's never been a Memorial Day for the 1918 Flu.”
Here’s one possible answer: Perhaps the global pandemic of 1918 was so overwhelming and full of grief that we couldn’t handle it. Perhaps 100 years later, we still had not made sense of it, even as the next pandemic arrived on our doorstep.
That’s what is remarkable about Loisa Bass: a century after her death, a stranger became interested in her story. Now her gravesite is marked, and the details of her brief life have a place in Durango's history.
