While the story of the defeat of Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) would not be complete without Dr. Ralph R. Parker, Parker’s story encompasses many more diseases and research accomplishments. Parker was born in Malden, Massachusetts, and went to the Massachusetts Agriculture College. In 1914, Robert Cooley, who was the State Entomologist of Montana but who had also been born in Massachusetts and gone to Massachusetts Agricultural College, invited Parker to come to Montana to study flies and the transmission of typhoid fever. The next summer, Cooley invited Parker to Montana again, this time to study RMSF. Parker did this work on the Powder River in eastern Montana.

Montana must have fascinated Parker. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1915 and getting married, he and his new wife moved to Montana, living in the same log cabin where he did work for the Montana State Entomological Board. He hunted game so that he and his wife could collect ticks from them for his research. Their living and working conditions were upgraded just a little in 1918 when they moved to the Bitterroot valley to work in a woodshed in the town of Victor. It was known that ticks transmitted RMSF through their bites, so Parker looked for a way prevent transmission by controlling ticks as well as doing more in-depth studies into the transmission of the disease.   

In 1921, the incidence of the often-fatal RMSF in the Bitterroot valley was rising, so Montana asked the U.S. Public Health Service to resume working with them on the problem. The laboratory was moved from the woodsheds in Victor to much more spacious and substantial quarters in the empty Canyon Creek Schoolhouse near Hamilton in September 1921. And Parker and his wife bought a real house and ten acres of land for their home the next month.

Dr. Ralph Parker reads correspondence at his desk at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory, circa 1948. Notice the labeled binders on his desk and in the bookcases behind him which indicate just a few of his research interests: tularemia, bullis fever, mud and water sampling, drugs (for treatment). In addition are examples of his role as first director of the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in binders containing monthly reports and construction project documents. On Parker’s desk is an assortment of reports and correspondence and even a box or two of reagents waiting to go on the shelf behind him.

In many ways, Dr. Roscoe R. Spencer’s career in the Public Health Service spanned two distinct periods in the Service: in the earlier period, most officers deployed several times across the U.S. to investigate outbreaks of known and unknown causes; and in the later period, they often stayed at the National Institutes of Health for most of their career. Spencer’s involvement in creating a vaccine for Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) shares elements of both of these periods. 

Unlike Robert Cooley and Ralph Parker, with whom he would work on RMSF, Spencer was a physician, not an entomologist. Born in West Point, Virginia, Spencer joined the Public Health Service after getting his A.B. degree from Richmond University in 1909 and his M.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1913.  Then his life as a Public Health officer moving from assignment to assignment began. He was in Victor, Montana, in 1915 (just before Parker) working on programs to control ticks, hoping that would limit spread of RMSF. During World War I, he was detailed to the U.S. Navy as a Sanitary Advisor—proper sanitation was the only way to prevent many diseases at the time. In that role, he went to Pensacola, Florida, to head up bubonic plague control efforts. After the war ended, he spent three years in New Orleans, Louisiana, also leading plague-suppression efforts. 

Dr. Roscoe Roy Spencer in his U.S. Public Health Service uniform.

William

William Gittinger graduated from high school around 1918Gittinger graduated from high school around 1918. He then attended the Montana State College, graduating from Dr. Robert Cooley’s entomology program. He hoped to go to medical school but took a job as a junior laboratory assistant in the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory. He had only worked there a short while when he was infected by Rocky Mountain spotted fever and died on June 30, 1922. He was almost 23 years old and left his mother, two sisters, and a brother.  According to Lucy Salamanca, after Gittinger died, Dr. Roscoe Spencer posted a sign on the laboratory door: ‘‘Persons entering these premises do so at their own risk!”

George

Cowan

George Cowan was born in Victor, Montana. His parents were among the original White settlers of the area. A field station for studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) was located in Victor before moving to the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory in Hamilton, Montana.

Cowan joined the RMSF investigation in 1913 and was the longest-serving field worker at the time of his death. The Montana State Board of Entomology made him deputy chief of tick control work in 1921, and he continued that work with the U.S. Public Health Service in the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory. Cowan helped to collect ticks and when he shot a certain mountain goat, more than a thousand already engorged ticks were picked off of it. Dr. Roscoe Spencer tested to see if the ticks caused RMSF, discovered that ticks had to be fed before they became infectious, and got the idea to grind the ticks into an RMSF vaccine. Unfortunately, the vaccine was not completed before Cowan became ill with RMSF and died in October 1924.

Arthur Kerlee was born and educated in Darby, Montana—a local boy studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) at the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory.  He graduated from Montana State College in 1927 with a B.S. in Botany and Bacteriology. Robert Cooley was one of his professors. After graduating, Kerlee became an assistant bacteriologist in the U.S. Public Health Service at the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory. He co-authored a paper with Dr. Roscoe Spencer on the Weil-Felix reaction as a diagnostic test for RMSF.

Kerlee died during production of the RMSF vaccine. Because he had already received the vaccine, his death caused some consternation in the Bitterroot Valley until it was found that he had only received the first shot and had become ill either right before the shot or right after the shot, meaning that his immunity had not had a chance to develop.

A large number of Bitterroot Valley citizens attended his funeral, which included a quartet and a military tribute from the American Legion because he had been made a 2^nd lieutenant in the reserve officer’s training corps. He left a father, four brothers, and two sisters. One of his brothers, James, joined the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory in tribute to his sacrifice.