The Michigan fires brought to Miss Barton’s assistance Dr. Julian B. Hubbell. She had known him in Dansville as an instructor in the Seminary which was located there. She knew him as a man to be relied upon. When the forest fires occurred, Dr. Hubbell was a medical student in the University of Michigan. She wired him at once to proceed to the scene of the fire and give her accurate information. Dr. Hubbell reported that hundreds of people had been suffocated and burned to death in the rapid sweep of the flames, and that many thousands were homeless and in need of shelter, food, clothing, and medical care. Miss Barton at once commissioned Dr. Hubbell as field agent of the Red Cross. This was the beginning of a relationship which was never broken until the death of Clara Barton. Dr. Hubbell completed his medical course, and was commissioned as general field officer of the American National Red Cross. This position he occupied from 1881 until her resignation in 1904. He was with her in every one of the American fields of service; accompanied her to Turkey at the time of the Armenian massacres; went with her to Cuba at the time of the Spanish War; and was as indispensable to her as her own right hand. After the termination of her presidency of the American Red Cross, he remained near her, was with her in her last illness, and stood beside her when she died. With her nephew Stephen, he accompanied her body to the old home in Oxford and wept beside her grave. He was among the friends, and their number was not small, who were faithful to her to the very end of life.
It is not the purpose of the present author to relate in detail the story of the work of the Red Cross during the next twenty-three years. Clara Barton herself has done that in a large octavo volume of nearly seven hundred pages. To that book reference must be had for any adequate idea of her service for almost a quarter of a century. Almost every year beheld a calamity of sufficient magnitude to call for the official activity of the American Red Cross. The mere list of the fields of its service is notable:
1881, the Michigan forest fires.
1882, the Mississippi River floods.
1883, the Mississippi River floods.
1883, the tornado in Louisiana and Alabama.
1883, the Balkan War.
1884, the Ohio and Mississippi River floods.
1885, the Texas famine.
1886, the Charleston earthquake.
1888, the tornado at Mt. Vernon, Illinois.
1888, the Florida yellow-fever epidemic.
1889, the Johnstown flood.
1892, the Russian famine.
1893, the tornado at Pomeroy, Iowa.
1893 and 94, the hurricane and tidal wave in the South Carolina islands.
1896, the Armenian massacres in Turkey in Asia Minor.
1898 to 1900, the Cuban Reconcentrado relief.
1898, the Spanish-American War.
1900, the Galveston storm and tidal wave.
1904, the typhoid fever epidemic at Butler, Pennsylvania.
In almost every instance Clara Barton went in person to the field. Where she went was order, efficiency, sympathy, and comfort. In the days of the Civil War the official sign of a hospital was the yellow banner, still used in the quarantine service to designate a hospital for the treatment of contagious diseases. It was and is a respectable and worthy emblem, but there was nothing very inspiring about it. Where Clara Barton went on her missions of mercy, two flags floated, the Stars and Stripes and the beautiful white flag with its cross of blazing red.
Clara Barton loved the color red. The red rose was the flower of her family. A dash of red she almost invariably had about her clothing somewhere. It was altogether in keeping with her personal tastes that the emblem which came to symbolize her life-work was of the color which never failed to gladden her eye. In 1881 she set out, as she herself related in her first article for the Associated Press, to make the name and emblem of the Red Cross as familiar in America, as for many years it had been in almost every other civilized nation. She succeeded in doing this, not simply by a campaign of publicity, but by the practical agency of applied mercy. When fire or famine or flood devastated a region, and its victims were homeless and despairing, and local agencies for relief were overworked and working aimlessly or at cross-purposes, the unfurling of the flag of the Red Cross was the sign of hope. It meant not only human kindness and sympathy, but confidence and efficiency and success.
From every one of these twenty fields Clara Barton came back laden down with the grateful testimonials of the communities to which she had brought comfort and help.
A very brief outline of her work in these several fields may be summarized from her own reports. The work for the Michigan forest fires has already been referred to, and reference has been made to the first expedition of the Red Cross for the relief of the sufferers from the Mississippi floods. A further word should be said concerning the service of the Red Cross during the floods, and then a brief summary of the work in each of the other fields.
Mississippi and Ohio River Floods—1882-83
The spring rise of the waters of the Mississippi brought great devastation, and a cry went over the country in regard to the sufferings of the inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley. For hundreds of miles the great river was out of its bed and raging madly over the country, sweeping in its course not only the homes, but often the people, the animals, and many times the land itself. This constituted a work of the relief clearly within the bounds of the civil part of our treaty, and again we prepared for work. Again our infant organization sent its field agent, Dr. Hubbell, to the scene of disaster, where millions of acres of the richest valley, cotton and sugar lands of America, and thousands upon thousands of homes under the waters of the mightiest of rivers—where the swift-rising floods overtook alike man and beast in their flight of terror, sweeping them ruthlessly to the Gulf beyond, or leaving them clinging in famishing despair to some trembling roof or swaying tree-top till relief could reach and rescue them.
The National Association, with no general fund, sent of its personal resources what it was able to do, and so acceptable did these prove and so convincing were the beneficences of the work that the cities of Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans desired to be permitted to form associate societies and work under the National Association. This was permitted, and those societies have remained until the present time, New Orleans organizing for the entire State of Louisiana. The city of Rochester, proud and grateful of its success in the disaster a few months before, again came to the front and again rendered excellent service.