by Lee Sandlin
Then the fire jumped to the warehouses along the levee. The fire department had been attempting ineffectually to prevent the last of the steamboats from catching fire; now they had to watch helplessly as the flames fanned out into the riverfront. Over the next several hours the fires burned their way through the warehouse district and into some of the oldest residential neighborhoods before reaching the central commercial district. By dawn hundreds of downtown buildings were on fire, including three of the city’s largest banks and the central post office.
The fire department then made a move of desperation. They planted gunpowder charges and blew up a long row of commercial buildings to form a firebreak. One of the lead firefighters, Captain Thomas B. Targee, was throwing a powder keg through the window of a music store when it ignited; the fire department history says “he was blown to atoms.” (He was later honored as the first professional fireman in America to die in the line of duty.) But the plan worked: the firebreak held. To the incredulity of the whole city, the flames didn’t jump the gap. By midafternoon some of the worst fires were burning out. The area around the riverfront was a smoking ruin—the burned stumps of the buildings went on smoldering for weeks and the levee was devastated (though within days, its docks were rebuilt and steamboats were stacked three deep in the river waiting for their turn)—but the city had been saved by its firemen.
The St. Louis fire became famous around the world. It wouldn’t be displaced in the public consciousness till the great fire in Chicago two decades later. It led to the formation of professional fire departments in cities across America, and it inspired ordinances throughout the river valley requiring all new buildings to be constructed of brick or stone. St. Louis itself passed the first such ordinance, and the city began its transformation into the monstrous hulk of sooty red brick that it had become by the end of the century.
Even the most gracious and beautiful towns on the river, one writer observed, showed “to much the greatest advantage at a distance.” No traveler enjoyed the experience of a river town close up. They were notoriously squalid. They had no indoor plumbing; people simply emptied their night soil into the alleys and waited for a rainstorm or a flood to wash it away. In summer the stench and the swarms of flies were unendurable, and it was said that you couldn’t walk a few feet down any block without treading on the putrid corpse of a dog or a pig half buried in the mud of the unpaved streets.
The concept of public health was still in embryo. Most communities on the river had nothing more than a few ordinances concerning cleanliness, and these were usually about the selling of tainted food. But even these were useless, because the origin of food contamination was almost always unknown. In the 1810s and 1820s, a mysterious illness killed thousands of people in the central valley (one of those who died was Abraham Lincoln’s mother): it was known by a variety of vivid names, including the shakes, the slows, and puke fever. But it was most often called the milk sick, because it was believed to be caused by tainted cow’s milk. People blamed the taint on the bite of a (nonexistent) insect known as the milk-sick fly; another theory was that the cows were poisoning themselves by licking the dew off the meadow grasses (everybody knew that dew was poisonous). In fact, the cows were being poisoned by eating white snakeroot, which grew abundantly in the meadows of the central valley. Although this was discovered independently several times, decades passed before farmers learned to weed out white snakeroot from their pasturage—and in the meantime, they were still selling the milk to the river merchants, who were carrying it as far downriver from the areas of known infection as they could before putting it up for resale.
That was another source of resentment between the river and the towns: the river traffic scattered diseases everywhere just as casually as it dispersed counterfeit money. All the conditions of the valley—the squalor and overcrowding of the towns, the absence of basic sanitation, the ignorance of fundamental principles of medicine (particularly antisepsis), and, most of all, the free movement up and down the river of the steamboats—made the river the perfect environment for the rapid spread of disease. The Unitarian minister Theodore Clapp wrote in his memoirs that in his thirty-five years in the river valley, he lived through twenty major epidemics.
The outbreaks came in great recurring waves: smallpox, diphtheria, measles, mumps, influenza, malaria, typhus. Several other diseases showed up only once, killed thousands of people, and disappeared without a trace—some leaving names behind, but no real clue as to what they were. People were reported to have died of dew poisoning, ground itch, woods fever, dog fever, locked bowels, the summer complaint, and congestion of the brain.
These epidemics were the ceaseless subject of conversation everywhere on the river—particularly in the hot weather, when outbreaks tended to be at their worst. The talk was always of what towns were afflicted with something new and terrifying, and of where there were sudden quarantines, and of which were enforced by armed committees. Herman Melville wrote about the season’s current epidemics as though he were a gossip columnist passing on the latest about local affairs:
At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus, taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.
Calvin Edson was a kind of performance artist, a man with a mysterious wasting disease who toured the country as the Living Skeleton. That made him a natural associate for this sinister crew: fever and ague (usually seen together), typhus (“Don” because it was believed to have originated in Spain; “Saturninus” because infected people were known for their air of sluggish gloom), and, perhaps the most ominous figure of all, “Yellow Jack.”
Yellow jack is what the river people called yellow fever. It was consistently the most dreaded disease in the valley. It was endemic in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico—which is why Melville described it as “Creole”—and it tended to ebb and flow up the river valley according to how hot and wet the summers were and how far north the mosquitoes that carried it were hatching. People didn’t know that yellow jack was connected to the mosquitoes (that wouldn’t be established until the twentieth century), but they did somehow sense it. In many towns, there were pioneering public health campaigns to drain all stagnant ponds and pools during yellow fever outbreaks. Their reasoning was faulty, since they believed that night mist from the pools was the cause of the disease, but the impulse was right, because the mosquitoes were breeding in the standing water. There was also a widespread custom of warding off yellow jack by taking a big jolt of rye whiskey just before bedtime. This was sometimes called a mosquito dose because it was thought, or hoped, to prevent mosquito bites.
The other epidemics came and went, disappeared and then roared back after decades of quiescence out of some forgotten river pesthole; new diseases like cholera burst out of nowhere and panicked the entire river valley; yellow jack remained. People never failed to regard it with dread. Of all the plagues that visited them, Theodore Clapp wrote, “there is none more shocking and repulsive to the beholder.” He cataloged the signs of yellow jack at its peak: not only its unmistakable black vomit from blood in the lungs, but “profuse hemorrhages from the mouth, nose, ears, eyes, and even the toes; the eyes prominent, glistening, yellow, and staring; the face discolored with orange color and dusky red.” Then there was the sight of a yellow jack corpse, which Clapp grew to know intimately. The expression on the face was “sad, sullen, and perturbed”; the skin was “dark, mottled, livid, swollen, and stained with blood and black vomit”; and even after death “the veins of the face and whole body become distended, and look as if they were going to burst.”
The river people would fly flags to warn off other boats during epidemics: red was a general announcement of a quarantine, yellow meant yellow jack. Sometimes a steamboat would come around a bend and find that th
e town ahead was flying yellow flags from every church steeple and rooftop and sheets of yellow were fluttering from the warehouse windows along the now-deserted levee. In the boat cities, everyone was constantly scrutinizing strangers for the telltale early signs—the yellow skin and eyes, the hint of a nosebleed or a drop of red brimming from an eyelid. Every encounter was a tense standoff when Old Yellow Jack was abroad on the river.
Nobody had heard of cholera in North America before 1832, when there was an outbreak in Montreal. It was a terrifying plague even for a population used to plagues: extraordinarily contagious, it had a high fatality rate and progressed through the body with stunning rapidity. People in perfect health at noon could be torn apart by convulsive and violent diarrhea in the late afternoon and be dead by nightfall. There were many cases where the interval between first symptoms and death was three hours.
Cholera is transmitted by the fluids expelled by an infected person and can be contracted from clothes, sheets, raw foods, and drinking water. None of this was known until much later—but, as with yellow jack, people did obscurely sense the connections. It can be seen in this urgent public health warning posted at the height of the outbreak:
BE TEMPERATE IN EATING AND DRINKING! Avoid Raw Vegetables and Unripe Fruit! Abstain from COLD WATER, when heated, and above all from Ardent Spirits, and if habit have rendered them indispensable, take much less than usual. SLEEP AND CLOTHE WARM! DO NOT SIT OR SLEEP IN A DRAUGHT OF AIR! AVOID GETTING WET!
By late spring, the epidemic had spread down the East Coast and was beginning to show up in the American interior. There was a particularly bad outbreak among Irish immigrants crossing the Great Lakes on packet steamboats bound for Indiana and Ohio. A few weeks later, some of those same steamboats were requisitioned by the federal government for a military convoy: thirteen hundred troops were on their way to Illinois to put down a fierce resistance movement that had sprung up among the Native American nations along the Mississippi. (The fighting became known, after the resistance leader, as the Black Hawk War.) Conditions on board were suffocatingly close and casually filthy. The steamboats hadn’t been cleaned since the cholera outbreak—nobody had a clue that this mattered. By the time the convoy crossed into Lake Michigan, there was a full-blown epidemic.
The military commanders of the convoy understood the rudiments of quarantine. They ordered the pilots to keep the boats in the deep waters, and when they came into port, there were armed guards posted to make sure the soldiers remained belowdecks. But the boats also had to make frequent stops to refuel at the wood yards along the Lake Michigan shore. Every time the boats got anywhere near the beaches, the soldiers began jumping overboard. Once they were on land, it was only a few steps until they were hidden within the dense forests that grew down to the shoreline. Few of them were ever recaptured. Meanwhile, the death toll was rising on board, and the bodies weren’t being quarantined; they were simply thrown into the lake, and they were washing up onto the beaches all the rest of that summer.
By the time the convoy reached Fort Dearborn, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, the expeditionary force had been obliterated. Of the thirteen hundred troops, only two hundred were still fit for combat. The rest were sick or had died or jumped ship. The surviving force was kept in quarantine and never saw any action in the Black Hawk War. The commanders’ one consolation was that they had prevented the epidemic from reaching the river valley.
The rest of that summer, there were no reports of outbreaks anywhere in the western Great Lakes. In fact the cholera was simply out of sight; it had been carried inland by the deserters and by the infected corpses washed ashore. But the new cases were still confined to remote and isolated fishing communities deep in the wilderness country. Whole villages could be wiped out and it would be months before the outside world even noticed.
Then that autumn, cholera erupted down the length of the Mississippi. In the first few weeks of the outbreak, tens of thousands of people died—orders of magnitude greater than the casualties of the Black Hawk War. Quarantines were set up, and sometimes violently enforced, all the way to the delta. But they were useless. At the first signs of infection, people bolted. Thousands scattered from St. Louis when the epidemic reached it; many of them were already infected, and the ones who fled up the Missouri brought cholera into the Great Plains. (The following year, it spread beyond the Rockies and into the Pacific Northwest.) Those escaping downriver carried it to New Orleans. Within days, the city had turned into a ghost town. All the stores were shut, the commercial district and the levee were deserted, and everybody who could afford to leave the city was gone. “There were no means, no instruments for carrying on the ordinary affairs of business,” Theodore Clapp wrote in his memoirs, “for all the drays, carts, carriages, hand and common wheelbarrows, as well as hearses, were employed in the transportation of corpses.”
The epidemic rapidly overwhelmed New Orleans’s frail infrastructure of public health. Hospitals were packed; one hospital was found abandoned by its staff, with every bed occupied by a bloated and putrid corpse. (By order of the mayor, the bodies were carried out to a yard next to the hospital grounds and burned.) The scenes at the cemeteries were chaotic. People were simply bringing in their dead and leaving them without ceremony, uncoffined, to await disposal. “Words cannot describe my sensations,” Clapp wrote, “when I first beheld the awful sight of carts driven to the graveyard, and there upturned, and their contents discharged as so many loads of lumber or offal, without a single mark of mourning or respect.” At one cemetery he found that the bodies were being stacked up in layers, “like corded wood.” Periodically, whenever there were around a hundred bodies in the pile, a work crew would shovel them into a trench and cover them over with dirt, and start a new pile.
The city officials of New Orleans did have an emergency plan to halt the epidemic: it was to attempt to purify the atmosphere of its poisonous vapors. To accomplish this task, they positioned big barrels of tar and pitch on the street corners and set them ablaze. They also ordered the military to fire off cannon around the city at steady intervals—this would, they believed, disperse the worst of the river fog (which was thought to be particularly deadly). The sparks from the burning barrels set off major fires throughout the city; the noise of the cannon, Clapp observed, was so nerve-shattering that he suspected many people were dying of sheer fright.
Clapp himself wandered the streets nightly, visiting hospitals and sick houses. By then the epidemic had spread to every quarter of the city: the shanty districts were the hardest hit, as ever, but soon even the richest mansion districts were in mourning. “Many persons,” Clapp wrote, “of fortune and popularity, died in their beds without aid, unnoticed and unknown, and lay there for days unburied. In almost every house might be seen the sick, the dying, and the dead, in the same room.” Meanwhile, the city had taken on a hellish splendor at night. The skyline was silhouetted by the endless flickerings of the artillery fire, and from every direction came thunderings and rumblings as though from dozens of battlegrounds. The barrels of tar were burning at the intersections; along the levee, so many phalanxes of barrels were on fire that the river and the low-hanging clouds were lit up bright as day. The glare of the fires flooded the endless rows of windows along the streets. Within, Clapp wrote, “could be seen persons struggling in death, and rigid, blackened corpses, awaiting the arrival of some cart or hearse, as soon as dawn appeared, to transport them to their final resting place.”
It might have been the end of the world—except, of course, that it wasn’t. It was just another epidemic. As the bodies went on accumulating through the nightmarish days of that autumn and winter, the living had no choice but to resume their business. The river traffic kept arriving. The big ships came in daily from the Balize. Gradually, unobtrusively, the cemeteries caught up with the backlog of corpses. And then in the spring everyone was suddenly worried about outbreaks of measles along the Gulf Coast, and by the next summer Old Yellow Jack was on the move again.
10
The Coasts of Dark Destruction
NEW ORLEANS WAS A SQUALID CITY, even by the standards of the river valley. The sewer system was a network of open trenches perpetually backed up with dead animals, putrid water, and rotting refuse. Garbage built up into hills and festered in the alleys and in the middle of the streets. Trash was collected in some districts, but it was merely carted off to what were known as nuisance wharves and thrown into the river, and it immediately washed back onto the levee. (Eventually the city obtained “nuisance barges” to carry the garbage a hundred yards or so into the river before dumping it.) New Orleans, one British traveler wrote, “affects painfully the olfactory nerves of all who prefer the odors of the rose to those of the cesspool.”
It was also an extraordinarily violent city. Duels, rare elsewhere in the lower valley, were daily occurrences; manslaughter and murderous assaults were common. “A frightful deluge of human blood flows through our streets and our places of public resort,” said an editorial in The New Orleans Bee in 1836. “Whither will such contempt for the life of man lead us?” An anonymous pamphlet writer noted a few years later: “We have just been looking over a broken file of Louisiana papers, including the last six months of 1837 and the whole of 1838, and find ourselves obliged to abandon our design of publishing even an abstract of the scores and hundreds of affrays, murders, assassinations, lynchings, etc, which took place during that period.”