The Canyon Creek Schoolhouse was located in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, an up-and-coming agricultural and business area in the early 1900s. In May 1910, the Western News printed a 27-page supplement called the “Bitter Root Valley Illustrated” describing the valley’s businesses, orchards and farmland, industry, and civic and religious life. What the supplement didn’t mention was that a highly fatal disease killed some residents every spring—and there was no prevention or treatment for it. The disease was Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF).
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-8
Image Modified
Span
id
credit
class
credit
Object: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 18.10.1
...
Div
class
grid-row grid-gap
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-4
Encased in these pendants are Dermacentor andersoni ticks, the first tick species identified as transmitting RMSF. Making jewelry might strike us as an odd thing to do with ticks, but these trinkets symbolize the victory over RMSF that the researchers at the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory enabled with their tireless and extremely dangerous work developing a vaccine. The pendants also reference other diseases carried by insects that the scientists would go on to research, including typhus, tularemia, mosquito-borne encephalitis, and plague.
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-8
This keychain and pendant belonged to Dr. Ralph R. Parker, who played a major role in Rocky Mountain spotted fever research, and who was director of the Rocky Mountain Laboratories Laboratory (then singular) in Hamilton, Montana, from 1927 to 1949.
Span
id
credit
class
credit
Object: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 98.2.1-2
