Frank Gardner Patterson's life ended in Quantico, Virginia, on September 26, 1918.1 He was the first reported Idaho victim of the Spanish influenza pandemic that swept the world during World War I. He was just twenty-two years old. Sixteen months earlier, Frank had joined the first of three waves of men in the United States to register for the draft. America was going to war: the Great War to end all wars.
More than a year after registering for the draft, Patterson traveled to the bustling Navy Yard at Mare Island, California, a crowded and regimented place worlds apart from Idaho. There he became a part of the enormous mélange of four million American soldiers, sailors, and marines traveling to and from training camps and permanent posts, to Europe and back again on ships holding thousands of men, and sharing battlefields with French and British soldiers. It was a...
