ALASKA PANDEMIC

Peter “Big Pete” Bugaras, the cutter Unalga's master-at-arms, volunteered to care for the Spanish Flu orphans of Unalaska in 1919. This is believed to be a photo of Bugaras and his charges. 

Surfman Ashton

By Vinny Del Giudice

The U.S. Coast Guard responded by dog sled and aboard cutters when the Spanish Flu hit Alaska in the early 20th Century - highlighting the service's humanitarian mission through our nation's history.

Levi Edward Ashton, a Coast Guard surfman from Station No. 305, Nome, Alaska, was dispatched with a team of dogs on Dec. 6, 1918 on a 160-mile sled-trek to deliver medical supplies, according to Coast Guard archives. A driver, Anders Peter Brandt, was assigned to accompany him.

Days later, the snow-riding surfman arrived at remote Cape Prince of Wales and found 122 sick and 157 deceased. Ashton converted the school into a hospital and the post office into a dispensary and buried the dead.

"At the end of about three months Surfman Ashton found the people able to take care of themselves, and the epidemic abated, so he set out upon his return trip, reported upon a certain night just what he had done and was at his post next morning for his regular work," according to the Dec. 28, 1919 edition of the Montgomery Advertiser of Montgomery, Alabama.

"There are such characters all over the world, just such men as Surfman Ashton, and they are performing such heroic tasks, although perhaps not upon such large scale," the newspaper said. "But they are unknown and unsung, just as was Surfman Ashton until the government recorded his name and his deeds in the back pages of a report."

On May 26, 1919, the cutter Unalga (WPG-53) was on patrol in Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain and responded to a call from the naval radio station at nearby Unalaska. The settlement was the midst of a severe outbreak.

The 80-man cutter crew provided medical assistance, meals, child care and housekeeping for the settlement. They also built a temporary hospital, an orphan home and buried the dead (about 45) in a church cemetery.

Further help arrived June 3 when the crew from the cutter Bear joined the effort.

Unalga's enlisted master-at-arms, Peter “Big Pete” Bugaras, volunteered to care for orphans. Bugaras had a reputation as “the strongest man in the Coast Guard Service.” He was described as “Greek by birth, a born fighter of men, and protector of all things helpless and small,” according to Coast Guard archives.

Bugaras "gathered up twenty-six of the babies and little ones and tended them as carefully as any loving mother could have" with the help of the cutter's crew, according to the September 1919 edition of Red Cross Magazine. Bugaras served as a chief commissary steward in World War I. He lived from 1881 to 1960 and rests at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

The Spanish Flu infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide - that's one-third of the planet's population - with deaths totaling at least 50 million worldwide and 675,000 in the U.S., according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Young people were especially vulnerable.