This vaccine worked, and for some years after it was used by people in that region to convert the illness from one with high fatality rate (albeit low incidence) to one that could be either prevented entirely (for many of them) or modified to a non-deadly form (for the rest). Today there is no commercially available vaccine for RMSF because, unlike in the 1920s when Spencer and colleagues developed one, antibiotics are now available to treat the disease, so prevention by vaccination is no longer the sole defense against likely death. Much of the early research was conducted at Rocky Mountain Laboratories a part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The schoolhouse laboratory of 1922–1924, filled with ticks in various phases of the life cycle, is identifiable in retrospect as a biohazard, although the team did not fully appreciate it at first. The deaths of Gettinger and Cowan, and the near death of the janitors son, were the results of inadequate biocontainment, but in the 1920s, the elaborate biocontainment systems of today had not been invented. Society
Research into this disease in Montana is a sub-plot of the 1937 film Green Light, starring Errol Flynn. Some of the researchers who perished are mentioned by name and their photographs are shown. Rocky Mountain spotted fever is a big part of the 1947 Republic Pictures movie Driftwood, starring Walter Brennan, James Bell, Dean Jagger, Natalie Wood, and Hobart Cavanaugh.
Prior to 1922, Doctors McCray and McClintic both died while doing research on Rocky Mountain spotted fever, as did an aide of Noguchi Hideyo at the Rockefeller Institute. Research began in 1922 in western Montana, in the Bitterroot Valley around Hamilton, Montana, after the Governors daughter and his son-in-law died of the fever. However, prior to that, in 1917, Dr. Lumford Fricks introduced herds of sheep into the Bitterroot Valley. His hypothesis was that the sheep would eat the tall grasses where ticks lived and bred. Past Assistant Surgeon R.R. Spencer of the Hygienic Laboratory of the U.S. Public Health Service was ordered to the region, and he led a research team at an abandoned schoolhouse through about 1924. Spencer was assisted by R. R. Parker, Bill Gettinger, Henry Cowan, Henry Greenup, Elmer Greenup, Gene Hughes, Salsbury, Kerlee, and others, of whom Gettinger, Cowan and Kerlee died of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Through a series of discoveries, the team found that a previous blood meal was necessary to make the tick deadly to its hosts, as well as other facets of the disease. On May 19, 1924, Spencer put a large dose of mashed wood ticks, from lot 2351B, and some weak carbolic acid into his arm by injection.