Word: cantons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Patois & Progress. The town had its beginning when the elders of Canton Glarus, Switzerland, decided their alpine valleys were too crowded, decreed that some of their people should found a colony in the U.S. The 27 selected families went to Wisconsin. They tried wheat farming, failed and turned to dairying. By 1861, when they sent their sons off to war, most people of New Glarus spoke English, were prosperous, voted in national elections. At this point the young folk should have started heading West, and New Glarus, having survived, should have forgotten all about Switzerland...
Swiss farmers, far up in the isolated glens of Valais Canton, had deplored World War II because it suspended Valais' own brand of warfare. Each year until 1939, Valaisan farmers, notorious throughout phlegmatic Switzerland for their hot tempers, had driven 200 stocky, combative cows up to the high pastures just beneath Alpine peaks. There the select 200 plunged into wild battle. They proved their cunning by dodging heavier opponents and victors of previous years. They showed their sportsmanship by stepping back to wait if the opposing cow slipped on the wet grass. The victor, having pushed or frightened away...
...Navy had given up altogether on six other islands: Johnston, Wake, Marcus, Iwo, Palmyra and Canton. Iwo, with its 9,800-ft. B-29 strip, would be taken over by the Army; Marcus would have a tiny weather station detachment...
...Canton, a city of nearly 1,000,000, there was only one foreign doctor to fight the epidemic: Frank H. Herrington, who resigned from the U.S. Navy last fall to join UNRRA. He diagnosed 162 cases of cholera, watched the fatality rate climb to 50%. Canton lacked cholera vaccine, the distilled water and apparatus to give intravenous saline solutions as part of the prescribed treatment for cholera patients...
Faced with this crisis, Herrington flew to Shanghai, wangled 200,000 doses of cholera vaccine from UNRRA supplies and local labs. Additional vaccine for 1,000,000 persons was promised, planes chartered to speed chlorine for Canton's polluted water system. Unless the anti-epidemic supplies arrived promptly, Herrington estimated that more than 1,000 Cantonese would die of cholera in the next few weeks. It was not his first bout with cholera. Last summer, while surgeon for the U.S. Embassy in Chungking, he had helped to stop a cholera epidemic in China's temporary capital...