In the summer of 1909 while working for Mr. Somervell I became very ill. He sent me to his own doctor who found a fever and gave me a prescription, which turned out to be epsom salts. I soon felt worse and decided I must get home to Mother. I walked to the dock and caught the three o'clock boat which reached Chico about 7. It was all I could do to walk the 2½ miles home. Mother got me to bed right away and she and Dad started dosing me with homeopathic medicine. I did not improve very rapidly and Mother and Dad after carefully studying the big medicine book, decided I had scarlet fever. Dad quarantined the house and sent the four older boys out under some trees to live in a tent. They never came into the house. Caroline caught it and was very sick. Dad studied his medicine book and dosed us all faithfully. He saw that we were bathed in water having some carbolic acid in it. Our little new baby, Euphanel, about 6 months old, got sick that we despaired of her life. A large abscess formed on her throat. Dad wrote a letter to Dr. Littlefield, our homeopathic friend in Seattle, describing all the symptoms and his course of treatment. The Doctor wrote back saying Dad was doing everything possible and that he could not do better. One day the great abscess on the baby's throat burst and a mass of pus poured out. From then on she improved. As happens in scarlet fever, all our skin peeled off in flakes. Strangely enough, the boys who stayed outdoors and had no symptoms whatever of the disease also peeled very lightly. None of us had any bad after effects, which is often the case with scarlet fever. The baby still bears a scar on her throat after more than 60 years. Our neighbor a mile away had a daughter about 12 years old who contracted the disease and died of it. We were all thankful to survive this terrible epidemic.
While on the subject of our baby and her miraculous recovery, I should mention the circumstances of her birth. Our family, totaling eleven, lived in the small house Dad had built. Five of us boys slept in the full sized attic. It was December and a wet, rainy season. Some time in the early morning I woke up to hear Dad say to Carew, "get up, hitch the horses and go to Bremerton for the doctor. Your mother is going to have a baby." Soon afterwards I heard the pouring rain on the roof and the creaking of the wagon as the horses plodded through the mud. I fell asleep again, but was awakened by my father, who said "get on your bicycle and ride down the road towards Bremerton to catch the doctor and send him back home. Tell him we have a new baby and don't need him any more." I remember that our neighbor, Mrs. Grandstrom, was there. I don't know how she was alerted. She was the mother of 5. Having long realized the value of a dollar and how few of them we had, I wanted to stop the doctor as soon as possible. I had no fender on my rear wheel and the mud sprayed up my back and over my head. It was still raining and quite dark. Putting all my energy into it, I reached and went on through the town of Charleston, and going up the muddy hill to Bremerton, I saw the team plodding through the mud with Carew and Dr. Holmes huddled against the rain. I put my bicycle into the wagon, and after taking the Doctor back home, we returned to the farm to admire our dear little new sister. A week later my father called me and said "I want you to catch a nice young chicken, kill and pick and clean it and take it to Dr. Holmes for his trouble." This was duly done, to everyone's satisfaction.