The government wrote its own report about the deaths.¹⁸ The report said that the family of mother and father and six children were not on relief. The father was asked to make a statement to the police. He said:

My family were fairly well fed during the winter and had a fair amount of clothes. I was working in the woods the first part of the winter and came home about the last of February. Since then I have been working on times around Howley.

The father did not seem to think that his family would become so ill.

In 1935, medical help was not easy to come by. The family was already very ill when the doctor, Dr. Parsons, was called to see them. On May 9, he asked that the mother and a son be taken to hospital. On May 10, when they went to hospital, a daughter went with them. She, too, had become very sick. But it was too late to save them. The mother and her two children died on May 15. On that day, the family's one-year-old child was brought to the hospital; she died the next day.

There had been other deaths earlier in May. When Dr. Parsons was called to the home on May 2, he found that the mother and all the children were suffering from influenza, what we call "the flu." The doctor said they also had mild "enteritis"—meaning that the intestines were inflamed. The enteritis got worse very quickly. On May 6, the mother gave birth to a premature girl who died within a day. The eight-year-old girl the newspaper article talked about also died on that day. A boy of six died the following night.

The doctor wanted to know what had happened. It was found that all of the family members who died were suffering from pneumonia. But why had the enteritis gotten so bad? Dr. Parsons found out that the family had been taking a mixture of sulphur and molasses every day for the whole week before medical help arrived. This mixture is an old home remedy used to "clean out the system." Here, it clearly did not work. It may have made the family weaker and sicker than they were already.

This story is indeed tragic. Today, with public health care, most people see a doctor as soon as an illness seems serious. People take their children to doctors when they get ill. Pregnant women have regular check-ups. Few people die from a flu that just gets worse and worse. And few people today would turn to sulphur and molasses as a cure.

The reporter who sent the story to the Daily Herald in London might be seen as trying to tell—and sell—a "sensational" story. He may have done this to hurt the government. But he was right about some things. In the 1930s, poverty, hunger and lack of medical care left many people helpless against disease. They were, as he said, "weakened." Unemployment and low wages left many people without enough good food. Perhaps the people in this family were not strong enough to fight an illness. There were few doctors, and usually you had to pay them. It was common at that time to try to cure illness at home. Often people would not call a doctor unless home cures had failed. This meant that medical care often came too late.