Kathryn Jenkins Gordon - In-Laws, Outlaws, and Everyone in Between

Heres a news flash: medical knowledge has changed dramatically since 1869. So dramatically, in fact, that lots of people alive today have never even seen someone afflicted by the measles.

If youre one of them, here are the facts. There are two kinds of measles. The first, rubeola (sometimes called red measles or hard measles), is the most serious. It starts with fun-filled symptoms like fever, fatigue, cough, a runny nose, red eyes, and a loss of appetite. After a few days, here comes the rash: it starts on the face, spreads to the chest and back, and eventually the arms and legs. While it starts out as little red bumps, these eventually blend in with each other. Before long, you look red all over. Sort of like a bad sunburn. In fact, as it heals, the skin peels like it does with sunburn.

The measles themselves usually arent what get you. Its the complicationsmost especially pneumonia. Its particularly dangerous in kids.

The other variety of measles is called rubella (or German measles), and is the less serious kind. It starts out the same as red measles, with the addition of swollen glands, but its less likely to turn deadly. When the spots show up, theyre usually more pink than red. In lots of cases, people dont even notice (or realize) theyre infected. In some cases, though, swollen glands and aching joints might linger for as long as two weeks. The worst complication is when the measles are passed through the mothers blood to an unborn baby; the deleterious effects can include heart defects, hearing impairment, cataracts, learning disabilities, miscarriage, or stillbirth.

You might want to pay attention to those ads for vaccination.

Back in the day, of course, there was no vaccination against measles. You dont even have to go that far back: the vaccination wasnt introduced in the United States until 1963. The next year, the number of measles cases in the country fell from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousandsa number that dropped to mere thousands within twenty years.

As is obvious, our pioneer ancestors didnt have the vaccination against measles (or against anything else, for that matter). In their day, they got the bug and rode it out, hopefully to a satisfactory conclusion. Sadly, lots of them died in the epidemics that swept through every couple of years. One who was particularly affected by the measles epidemic of 1869 was Isaac Perry Decker, a fellow considered by some to be a bit of a rascal.

Isaac Perry Deckerknown most of his life as Perrywas born as the caboose of his family on August 7, 1840, in Winchester, Illinois, to Isaac Decker and Harriet Page Wheeler. As it turns out, he became famous at a relatively young ageand youll see why if you visit the bronze monument at the This Is the Place state park in Salt Lake City.

You see, Isaac Decker was one of the original pioneers in the vanguard company led across the plains in 1847 by his uncle, Brigham Young; he came to Utah with his mother and his stepfather, Lorenzo D. Young, who was one of the first to move out of their initial camp. (That stepfather was also the first to build a house outside the Old Fort when the pioneers arrived in Utah.) Isaac was one of three children from his family in that original band of pioneers; the others included his sister, Clarissa, and his slightly younger stepbrother, Lorenzo Sobieski Young. On July 24, 1847, Brigham Young hoisted himself up on one elbow from his sickbed in his wagon, proclaimed that the pioneer company was at the right place, and directed the wagons to drive on.