by Black Death at the Golden Gate- The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague (retail) (epub)
Only after a few years in the Service did he finally get an opportunity for adventure. In 1900, Rupert received an order to report to Rome, where he would be in charge of an investigation into rumors that plague was spreading through rural Italy. He jumped at the chance, undaunted by an assignment that could put him on the front lines of an epidemic. Juliette, meanwhile, could barely suppress her excitement at finally traveling to Europe, describing it in such alluring detail that her mother announced that she would be coming too.
After searching the Italian countryside for evidence of the disease, without result, Rupert spent his days strolling through Rome, drinking in its history. He paced along cobblestones that were older than any building he had seen back home and watched the sunset dance along the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. Through her family connections, Juliette secured a private audience with Pope Leo XIII. Rupert was not quite sure what to do with himself while in the man’s presence, being neither Catholic nor understanding the French and Italian words the Pope spoke. Yet he felt calmed by the Pope’s touch, a reminder of the fatherly affection that he was too proud to admit he missed. “I tease Juliette by saying that he liked me best as he took my head and face in his hands twice (blessing first, benediction last) and only conferred this favor upon her once,” he wrote in a letter home. “I believe he has blessed mother in her far away home, and for that he has quite won me.”
The couple spent weeks touring Europe, giving Rupert his first taste of life outside of the United States. They visited London and Scotland and then arrived in Paris, where they were among the fifty million visitors to the World’s Fair, delighting in a demonstration of the first-ever talking film. Just as he began to feel comfortable abroad, Rupert was ordered to Milwaukee, where he would be put in charge of monitoring illness among the shipping fleet on the Great Lakes. The return to the demanding reality of the Marine Hospital Service made the summer seem a dream. Money was still too tight, the Milwaukee winter too dreary. By the time Rupert and Juliette boarded a train to San Francisco the following year for his new assignment combating plague, their marriage was showing deep cracks. As the couple sped toward California, Rupert looked forward to the chance to start again.
White put him to work as soon as he reached the city, giving him day-to-day charge of the sanitation campaign in Chinatown, which allowed White more time to devise ways to pressure the Chinese Six Companies into revealing the plague victims he was certain were hiding in the district, rendering the cleanup effort useless. Unable to find allies on the state Board of Health, White turned to the police department, asking officers to alert him if they came across any Chinese who appeared ill during their periodic raids of Chinatown’s gambling halls. When that proved unsuccessful, White asked Secret Service agents to trail Chinese residents in hopes that one would lead them to infected family members. He then posted agents at the Ferry Building, aiming to stop the flow of infected Chinese that he believed were being ferried across the bay to Oakland. “You cannot form any idea in Washington of the difficulties,” White complained in a letter to Wyman.
With White’s attention elsewhere, Blue was free to explore Chinatown at his own pace. He was impossible to miss as he roamed through the district, with his black hair, blue eyes and brawny build, towering over nearly everyone he passed. While he kept one eye out for areas that cleanup crews needed to address, he spent the majority of his time making idle conversation with Chinese residents, the first time that an officer in the Marine Hospital Service had attempted to forge a personal connection. His genial nature seemed to broadcast the sense that he was trustworthy, and he soon opened doors that had long been closed to other white doctors. In his first week, he discovered cellars filled with years of accumulated sewage and the decaying bodies of rats. While investigating an alley behind an upscale store on Dupont Street, he came upon more than 150 pounds of rotting meat lying in the open, overrun by the squirming bodies of rats and swarmed by insects.
White soon found himself drawn to a man who was so easy to like. Blue’s “work to date has been most excellent,” he wrote in a letter to Wyman, apologizing for his previous harsh assessment of the man. “The impression [that] he was not a man of pronounced personality and executive ability, although a very nice gentleman, is utterly erroneous. He has untangled a good many rather difficult snarls; has an immense amount of self-possession and good temper, and is altogether fully capable of acting as executive officer.” White quickly realized that in Blue he had found a man who could deflect Governor Gage from undermining the Marine Hospital Service’s mission. When the governor once again threatened to end the sanitation effort in Chinatown, White sent Blue to meet with him. After one lunch the governor came away mollified, as Blue had promised that Gage could send a doctor of his choosing to attend the autopsy of any suspected plague victim conducted by federal agents.
In San Francisco, Blue finally had found work that gave him a sense of purpose beyond a diversion from his crumbling marriage. Juliette, too, found reason to like the city outside of her husband’s company. While Rupert waded through Chinatown’s filth, she attended formal teas given in her honor at the mansions of San Francisco’s high society, her father’s wealth and prominence as a railroad executive her ticket into the city’s social elite. “Mrs. Rupert Blue, what a beauty she is,” noted the gossip column of the San Francisco Call after she was feted by more than fifty attendees at the Pacific Heights home of Mrs. Linda Bryan, then known as the grand matron of San Francisco society.
By June, Blue was promoted. Freeing the city from plague had become a futile task, in White’s view, and he simply did not have the patience to preside over a long, slow defeat. He sent Wyman a telegram requesting a transfer and suggested that the Surgeon General appoint Blue in his place. Blue took over without ceremony, shouldering the twin responsibilities of sanitizing Chinatown and searching for additional victims of plague.
Over the following weeks, he began putting his fingerprints on the Service, shaping it to fit not only his own personality but his conception of what a doctor should be. Unlike Kinyoun, who was most comfortable in a laboratory removed from the complexities of human interaction, Blue thrived in situations where trust and tact were essential. That was not the only difference between the two men. Kinyoun paid an almost fanatical attention to rules, a natural trait in a man whose genius lay in following the complex procedures required by the science of bacteriology. Blue, whose academic work had been average at best, proved more willing to look at problems from multiple angles, searching for anything that might work, however unorthodox it might be.
One of his first moves after assuming command was to lease a small office in an alley off Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square. There, in a two-room space that cost $75 a month, he set up a makeshift laboratory and morgue, finally providing the Marine Hospital Service with an outpost in Chinatown itself, rather than the distant Angel Island. Then, to solve the issue of bodies disappearing from the district before they could be examined, he convinced Wyman to allot him $35 a month to spend on establishing his own hearse service. He soon had a driver who could be sent with a horse and cart to any building in Chinatown as soon as a body was reported. The cadaver would be transported back to Blue’s new laboratory, where it could be examined before anyone had a chance to hide it.
When state health officials protested, Blue revealed that underneath his genial nature lay a defiant streak. Unafraid of the repercussions of going against his promise to the governor, he issued a blanket ban that excluded state health officials from autopsies conducted on Marine Hospital Service grounds and instated a rule that no one except for federal health officers could enter the facility without his approval. Blue dismissed complaints by state doctors, writing in a private letter to Wyman that “we can bear a great deal more for the good of the Service and the cause.”
His real first test came one evening in early July. As Blue and his fellow officers were concluding an autopsy in the small lab off Portsmouth Square, relieved by t
he absence of obvious plague bacilli in the body, they received a tip of a possible outbreak at the Yoshiwara House, a brothel at 845 Washington Street in Chinatown. Three of the seven prostitutes working at the establishment had developed large, painful buboes on their groins six days earlier and now lay nearly comatose with fever. The women had all lived in the city for about a year, making it impossible for them to have brought the disease with them. When Blue arrived, police officers were encircling the house, forming a quarantine line. Fearful of what the officers would do, a twenty-four-year-old prostitute by the name of Fuku Inaki, who had yet to develop any symptoms of disease, managed to slip away and flee to a house at 526 Pine Street, where she remained in hiding.
Blue and his officers pushed into the building and began evaluating the women, all of whom appeared near death. A bacteriologist drew blood samples from each woman and conducted a field test known as an agglutination reaction, which, though not as conclusive as Kinyoun’s preferred method of animal inoculation, had been used with some success in India as a rapid method of determining whether plague was likely. The result was “immediate and characteristic,” Blue wrote, noting that he was “absolutely certain that the three suffered from the same disease and this disease was bubonic plague.”
There was nothing the doctors could do to save the lives of its victims. T. Shina Takagi, age twenty-three, and Miyo Ikea, age twenty-six, both died around three in the morning on July 9. Their bodies were taken to the Marine Hospital Service morgue. Federal doctors clad in rubber aprons conducted autopsies and took tissue samples from the buboes swelling on their legs. Cultures soon confirmed the presence of plague. Blue wired the coded message “Bumpkin malleate” to Wyman in Washington, informing him that two more verified cases were at hand. He sent another coded message two days later after Fuku Inaki, the woman who had escaped the quarantine of the brothel, was found dead despite having received a dose of the Haffkine serum from a Western doctor who treated her while in hiding. An autopsy revealed plague and syphilis. Federal doctors continued to monitor the remaining women in the brothel, expecting that they, too, would develop signs of the disease and die. Instead, health officials watched in amazement as Ume Kawamura, a twenty-two-year-old who was among the three initial cases, slowly began to recover, becoming the first patient followed by Marine Hospital Service doctors to survive the disease. None of the other women in the building contracted the plague, their lives untouched as if the disease had been satiated and lost interest.
As evidence piled up that plague was still in Chinatown, Blue felt himself getting boxed in. He had no appetite for trying to institute another broad quarantine, and little reason to expect that Wyman would support him even if he wanted to. With the situation more dangerous than anything Kinyoun had experienced, Blue realized how little official power he had. Marine Hospital Service officers learned that the three prostitutes who had died from plague had collectively had sex with at least fifty men—including several who lived outside Chinatown—in the days before their buboes appeared, expanding the zone of potential victims beyond the bay. Local newspapers, meanwhile, refused to give any attention to the latest outbreak, preserving the false sense of security that blanketed the city and left it all the more at risk. Even if the disease spread to white neighborhoods, neither residents nor their doctors knew what signs to look for, prolonging the time before federal doctors could come in and prevent plague from finding its next victim.
Blue continued to work in the shadows, hoping that luck would finally turn his way. He and his men injected themselves regularly with doses of the Haffkine serum, leaving them swaying between bouts of feverish delirium as they tried to solve a puzzle that could save countless lives. When no new cases were discovered in the following weeks, Blue began to question whether the Chinese were becoming increasingly skilled at hiding bodies or if there was another force at work preventing plague from exploding into the general population. The city’s newspapers had lost interest in the Marine Hospital Service’s efforts to fight the disease following Kinyoun’s transfer, giving Blue the room to work out a solution away from the spotlight. Still, he could not help but worry that once again he would fail to measure up to standard and spent longer and longer hours in his small office in Chinatown while his relationship with Juliette withered.
His childhood insecurities rushed back that August when Victor arrived in San Francisco on a transport ship from the Philippines. “Of all the heroes with the late war with Spain, there is none that made a better record than Blue and none that wears his hard-won honors more modestly,” wrote the San Francisco Call, a paper that had yet to mention Rupert’s work in the city. When Rupert met Victor at the docks, his brother seemed to forget who he was, sending Rupert into deeper chasms of self-doubt. Victor later blamed his memory failure on an affliction that he called Phillippinitis. “When my brother met me this afternoon it was only when I heard somebody say, ‘That’s Rupert Blue, he used to be quarantine officer’ that I remembered his name,” Victor said to a reporter, adding that “about a dozen” soldiers on the ship home suffered from similar bouts of memory loss. Rupert entertained Victor and his wife for several days before they continued on to the East Coast, his damaged pride never recovering until Victor’s train had receded from view.
The plague’s apparent summer lull was broken just before Labor Day. The body of Lee Mon Chou, a forty-year-old man, was discovered one morning in the Oso Cigar Factory at 618 Dupont Street. The corpse was carted to Blue’s morgue, where an autopsy revealed plague festering in the man’s groin and right armpit. The roughly dozen men who worked alongside him vanished out of fear that they would be placed under quarantine or jailed, leaving Blue with no information about where the man lived, whether he had family, or where he might have traveled recently—anything, in short, that could help him save another person’s life.
He had little time to investigate. Days after Lee’s death, Juliette’s father, P. L. Downs, was riding in a special first-class car when his train derailed and burst into flames in Montana, killing him and thirty-three others on board. Blue was granted an immediate leave from his post and took Juliette’s hand as they boarded the next train north. Over the course of the three-day journey, Blue could only look back over the last months of his life with regret. His affable nature had helped smooth tensions between the Marine Hospital Service and the enemies that Kinyoun had made, but he could not point to any real progress. People were still dying, plague was still spreading and he was no closer to a solution. He knew that this was the greatest test he had yet faced, and his best and perhaps only chance to accomplish something that could rival the achievements of a brother whose fame had only grown.
As he looked out upon the Pacific, he vowed to himself that he would not fail.
CHAPTER 10
A MOST PECULIAR TEAM
Blue returned to San Francisco two weeks later without Juliette at his side. After nine separate postings in a span of seven years, their marriage could not weather any more upheaval. She remained in Washington with her mother, where she began the slow work of reassembling her life. Rupert, once more adrift, rode the train back down the coast alone, finally emerging in the San Francisco Ferry Building out of a late summer fog.
He had no place to go other than the tiny, two-room Chinatown laboratory, where a single radiator offered no match against the pervasive cold. Inside, vats of carbolic acid for use in autopsies inundated the office with a putrid smell that would seep into his clothes and cling to his mustache, reminding him wherever he went of his failures. Not that he was ready yet to experience life without Juliette by his side. The job was his only refuge and he immersed himself in the task of saving the city as a way to heal his own pain. He cleared all photos of Juliette from his desk, banishing anything that could trigger her memory, and posted a map on the wall above him, drawing a red cross at every address where a plague victim had been found. The grid of street lines became his sole focus. “Work of any kind, after such an experience, woul
d [be] a blessing,” he wrote in a letter to Wyman.
With his laboratory and morgue on the edge of Chinatown, Blue had established a closer physical connection to the district than any of his predecessors. Now he decided to take the next step and foster social relationships, too. He hired Wong Chung, a former secretary at the Chinese Six Companies, as an interpreter. Wong had worked for the plague commission earlier that year and was instrumental in helping the doctors uncover the first living patients to be officially observed. Yet after the plague commission doctors left his services had not been retained by Kinyoun or White, neither of whom could bring himself to believe that a Chinese person could be trustworthy. Blue offered Wong a rate of five dollars a week—equivalent to nearly $1,000 in today’s dollars—and began treating him as a full member of his staff.
The sight of the two men standing next to each other—Blue a tall, muscular Southerner with a handlebar mustache and intense eyes, and Wong short, slight and bald except for the tightly braided queue of black hair dangling between his shoulders—seemed composed, as if arranged in an artist’s study of contrasts. Yet the two soon developed a close bond, driven by their mutual mission. Blue chased plague as a way of finally winning the respect he had long sought and starting a new page in life; Wong, in turn, saw in the disease a chance to work with white officials as equals, united in the aim of saving the city they all loved. As he grew more comfortable with Wong, Blue began asking him to answer the questions that confused him about Chinese culture and its aversion toward medical procedures that could help combat an epidemic killing its own. Wong returned Blue’s trust by bringing more cases of plague to his attention, certain that the federal doctor would not betray him or his people with another quarantine.