A woman and another man

I just finished Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of the World, about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and all the geology underneath it. In the main - overwhelmingly so - it's his usual wonderful job, masterfully written and engaging. There were, however, two moments that gave me pause.

The first is just that Winchester thinks "data" is a count plural, while I don't. I've gotten used to "the data are", but this sentence just sounds bizarre to me:

However questionable some of the data might have been, Bolt had a very great deal of them

Part of it is also that "very great deal", too...

But it's this that really made me stop reading and go back. He's describing the Tejon Pass earthquake of 1857, an 8.25 magnitude earthquake that took place in such an empty part of California that its destruction was minimal for its size (p. 193):

Witnesses speak of huge wavelike shakings of the earth; and though some speak of up to three full minutes of shaking, an unprecedented duration, most agree that it was just some forty or fifty seconds' worth of nightmarish movement that wrecked all the army huts, tore most of the trees from the earth, and killed a woman at the nearby Reed's Ranch. The local Kern River ran backward; fish were thrown hundreds of yards from where they swam in Tulare Lake; long zigzag cracks appeared in the ground at San Bernardino; massive ridges, five feet high and fifteen feet across, rose and started to snake through fields; the Los Angeles River was hurled out of its bed and began, if only briefly, to flow along another channel; and up on the Carrizo Plain the fault jerked so dramatically that many of the rivers coursing down from the Temblors were thrown off course by as much as thirty feet in a matter of microseconds.

The event was felt across all Southern California. It was not felt at all north of Parkfield, because of the more lubricated nature of the ever-moving fault up there. Had it struck in modern times, it would have caused dreadful damage forty miles away in Los Angeles. But, as it was, only two people (the rancher and one other man in a village plaza) were killed; and the 4,000 people who lived in the sprawling village that was Los Angeles got little more than a jostling.

Did you catch it? As I said, I stopped at went back to see if I'd misread the first time. It "killed a woman" at the ranch, but "only two people (the rancher and one other man...)" were killed.

That's just weird. Surely "and one other person" would have been more usual?