Mohave County Miner

FRIGHTFUL DISEASE.

Louisville, Ky., Nov. 26. The Courier-Journal sent a staff correspondent to investigate the reported ravages of the dread disease in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, and the correspondent telegraphs from Williamsburg, Kentucky that W. C. Lester, a prominent attorney of that place, had just arrived from Mount Pleasant, the county seat of Harlan county and has information of the prevailing plague, principally from Harlan, Letcher, Perry, Leslie and Bell counties, and says that in Harlan it appeared to be worst and most fatal, and it prevails to a great extent in the mountains about twenty-five miles from Mount Pleasant. A large territory is being terribly afflicted, and the people are dying fast. In one neighborhood twelve persons died in a single day, and there were scarcely well people enough to bury them. On Brown’s creek, in Bell county, the disease is raging with frightful fatality and there is no way to keep a record of the deaths. On all the banks of the streams the people are sick and physicians and medicines, except herbs and roots, are unobtainable. The epidemic is rapidly spreading. In a portion of Letcher county, the whole of Leslie and the northeast portion of Bell, the plague has obtained a foothold, but reports as to its violence are very conflicting. Mr. Lester thinks the deaths have run up into hundreds, while the numbers of those attacked cannot be estimated. No one seems to know the exact cause of the pestilence. Most people call it flux and it is probably a very aggravating form of that disease.