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Epilogue
- The University of Alabama Press
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Francis R. Stebbins’s shock and grief at the passing of his good friend and neighbor Alanson Worden were profound. After escorting the body home, Stebbins assisted Worden’s widow in settling his friend’s estate.1 Performing this role under such circumstances would have seemed slight penance for luring his friend away from family and home to die in a faraway place. Stebbins’s deep remorse for his part in Worden’s death was surely intense. His own dread of expiring alone in a strange land, often expressed in his Florida papers, must have compounded his feelings. This fear and its realization may well have terminated Stebbins’s winter cruises on Indian River. Stebbins never returned to Florida following the ill-fated 1888 expedition. He had no more to say to the public about Indian River. No further travel articles of any sort from his pen were published in the Adrian Daily Times and Expositor. Without a stated reason for discontinuing his customary excursions, Stebbins’s latter-day reader is left with two likely explanations: a deterrent in Florida and restraint at home. Certainly a situation arose in Florida following Stebbins’s return that severely depressed general tourist travel to all parts of the state the next season. In the warm summer months of 1888, yellow fever, an irregular and dreaded af®iction in port cities, especially Southern ports, moved rapidly north out of south Florida. It had entered Florida the previous year from Key West and reached Tampa by the fall, where it subsided during the cooler months. It was on the march again when temperatures rose in the spring of 1888. By the end of the summer, even inland towns such as Gainesville were in its grip. All the eastern Florida resort towns came under its pall. Despite its efforts to avoid the coming plague, Jacksonville, the state’s economic capital and premier tourist destination, knew it had not escaped when the ¤rst cases appeared there in early August. The disease spread rapidly among the city’s population, and it became clear that the yellow fever outbreak of 1888 would be a disaster to health and prosperity. As the disease progressed and quarantines were inaugurated in more and more towns and cities, commerce ceased, and supplying not only Jacksonville but the rest of the peninsula with necessities became dif¤cult . Jacksonville’s city government ran through its resources and was forced to issue a national appeal for assistance.2 Epilogue If the epidemic alone were not suf¤ciently devastating, Florida’s woes became front-page news around the country. The major northeastern newspapers followed the story throughout the disease’s course, relaying statistics on how many people were infected and daily death counts along with accounts of hardships in the cities and outlying quarantine camps. Principal regional newspapers followed the northeastern papers’ lead and gave the Florida news the same prominent coverage. The Detroit Free Press, then as now the leading Michigan journal, reported the unfolding events each day, as did the Adrian Daily Times and Expositor. During the height of the epidemic in September and October, it treated the dispatches as a continuing story, placed ¤rst on the front page but later relegated to the back pages. The editor picked lurid titles for the updates. Readers were confronted with headlines such as: “Florida Depopulated ,” “Death’s Harvest,” “Yellow Jack’s Victims,” and “The Fearful Fever .”3 When signs the epidemic was ¤nally abating in Jacksonville emerged the end of September, they were duly welcomed, but the numerous setbacks and outbreaks elsewhere in the South were all recorded. The ¤rst of November , election coverage dislodged the yellow fever story from the headlines, but the paper’s last word on the subject, “The Yellow Fever: It Still Has Its Grip on Florida Towns,” hardly encouraged prospective travelers.4 Such detailed coverage signi¤ed the importance Florida and its gateway city had achieved. Had thousands of Northern and midwestern tourists not already experienced the sunshine state’s gentle winter climate and thousands more read about it and wished to go there in coming winters, Florida’s misfortune would not have been so glaringly spotlighted. But by 1888, Florida was the nation’s winter resort. Those wishing to elude the cold season’s miseries in the far South scanned the reports intently, wondering if they should hazard the 1888–89 Florida season. Despite newspaper proclamations late in the fall that yellow fever was over in Jacksonville and the rest of...