While in Lakeview last month I went to the Lake County Courthouse to look through the county records from the early 1900s when Bernard Daly was county judge. There’s a lot to look at. It was time when counties had considerable power, Oregon’s state government was still relatively new and weak, roads and communication were poor, and Lake County was far from Salem.

In those days, the county judge, Bernard Daly, acted like a governor and the commissioners like a legislature for a county that was larger than several states. Among other things, the judge and commissioners established tax rates; built and maintained roads and bridges, appointed county officials, managed elections, and even granted U.S. citizenship.

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Bernard Daly was missing… but now he can be found in the Oregon Encyclopedia, an authoritative and free resource on all things Oregon. Some time ago, my friend, OSU Archivist Larry Landis, suggested that I write an entry on Bernard Daly. Larry knew that I had been researching Daly and noticed that there wasn’t an entry for him. Seemed like quite an omission given the remarkable breadth of the encyclopedia and the extent of Daly’s impact. 

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All the news of the coronavirus reminded me of correspondence between Bernard Daly and the State Health Officer and Daly’s order for a county-wide quarantine in May of 1903.

Daly was a doctor long before he became a judge. As a doctor, he knew about germ theory and that disease could be spread from person to person by microorganisms that couldn’t be seen. The last major U.S. smallpox epidemic was from 1901 to 1903.  Smallpox was a particularly deadly virus. Between 300 and 500 million people died of smallpox in the 20^th Century alone.

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As we begin the new year and new century, there will be a number of hundred-year anniversaries, beginning with Bernard Daly’s death. It was early in the morning on January 5, 1920, after having been ill since before Christmas, when Bernard Daly died while on the train to San Francisco where he was to be treated by specialists. On the train, he was accompanied by his Lakeview physician, Dr. Charles Liethead; long-time business partner, Fred Reynolds; and the love of his life, Pearl Hall. He died on route, near Livermore California. On the following Sunday, a crowd of about 700, almost everyone who lived in or near Lakeview attended his memorial service – that was most of Lakeview as the total population in 1920 was just over a thousand.

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