Since I have permission from Suzzanne Kelly to reprint information from her thesis Augusta Metcalfe: “Prairie Painter” of Memory Art, I will use her words as she went through our journals dated in late 1918. “Although Augusta could not have been aware of the statistics, by 21 October 1918 there were more than 70,000 reports of the “Spanish Flu” in Oklahoma. In mid October the Elk City News-Democrat printed twenty obituary notices. On the edge of a storm of illness that struck Oklahoma, the rest of the nation and the world, Augusta’s caution may have saved her own family from…
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