by Black Death at the Golden Gate- The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague (retail) (epub)
But finding dead rodents proved impossible. Blue learned that coyotes snagged most of them quickly, and those that did not die in the open perished underground in their nests. After struggling to find trappers willing to catch squirrels for him, he returned to San Francisco. As he sat in the saddle on his way back to the city, Blue could not help but feel increasingly uneasy, unable to shake the sense that his failures were compounding.
Over the following weeks, no new victims emerged in Contra Costa County. Blue resumed his focus on Chinatown, where, though the district was noticeably cleaner, the plague continued to linger. Four victims of plague were discovered in October of 1904, each one brought to the attention of federal doctors through the work of the interpreter Wong Chung. The following month, federal doctors identified three more cases. Among them were Slick Hat and Chew Soo, two seven-year-old girls who lived in buildings one block apart on Washington Street and were most likely friends. Federal doctors first examined Slick Hat after her mother alerted them to the girl’s high fever and dark marks on her body, yet the disease was so far advanced that there was nothing they could do. After the girl’s death on November 4, bacteriological tests confirmed plague. Three days after her death, her friend Chew Soo died in her family’s apartment, another victim of the disease.
Blue could not make sense of the pattern of the epidemic, which seemed to strike several patients at once and then disappear. Doctors found no additional victims in December, only to discover three cases in January after a nearly two-month lapse. The victims all died within four days, frustrating Blue’s ability to understand the disease or his own progress. “The appearance at this time of three suspicious cases was a surprise and a matter of regret,” Blue wrote in a letter to Wyman. “I presume they are the result of the dry weather we have had since December 21st.” He dutifully added red crosses to mark the addresses of the most recent victims on the map that hung above his desk. Fellow health officers would often catch him staring at the map as he tried to will himself into sensing a pattern that could point to the next victim before it was too late.
He always felt one step behind. Irene Rossi, an eighteen-year-old Italian immigrant, stopped showing up at her job at the Woods Clothing Factory, located at 27 Geary Street, during the first week of February. Her absence would have likely gone unnoticed had not another young woman by the name of Katie Cuka fainted on the factory floor and developed a suspicious swelling in her groin, prompting federal health officials to investigate. A federal inspector arrived and requested the attendance log for the week. When the foreman on duty checked his weekly sick list, he spotted Rossi’s prolonged absence. He gave them the girl’s address, and inspectors quickly covered the mile to the Rossi household at 6 Varennes Street.
They arrived to find the girl’s parents, Luisa and Giuseppe Rossi, clad in black and planning their daughter’s funeral. Over the last week, they learned, the young woman had developed a high fever and incapacitating headaches that kept her from leaving her bed. In her final hours, she coughed up a mixture of blood and foam that stained her teeth a deep red. With her parents unable to help, she died from what they believed was a severe case of pneumonia.
The doctors suspected plague. With as much tact as they could manage, they requested permission to examine the young woman’s body and conduct an autopsy to determine the cause of death. Her father immediately refused. The doctors persisted, telling the grieving man that the procedure was required for all suspicious cases and could help prevent the same tragedy from falling upon another family’s daughter. Rossi relented, but insisted on two conditions. First, the procedure must be done that night so that the funeral could take place the next day as planned. And second, he demanded to be present so that he could ensure that no undue harm would come to Irene’s body. That night, he sat with tears in his eyes as he watched federal doctors at the Chinatown laboratory make incisions in his daughter’s body and remove tissue from the lungs and spleen. Lab results revealed that she had contracted pneumonic plague, the most virulent form of the disease, which is spread by coughing. Had she left the house, she could have easily infected anyone who came too near.
Her family was not spared. Giuseppe died two days later at home and an autopsy revealed extensive plague in his lungs. The man’s grief had masked his illness, even to himself. Doctors then conducted a frantic search for his wife, Luisa, who had vanished from the Rossi home after her husband’s death. Two days later, a doctor in the Richmond District informed them that a patient was exhibiting signs of plague. Federal officials discovered Luisa hiding in her brother’s home, burning with fever. She was immediately given doses of the Haffkine serum and admitted to the isolation ward at City and County Hospital. She died there from plague on February 19, 1904, making her the 118th victim of the outbreak.
The death of a white family outside Chinatown from the most virulent form of the disease forced Blue to question whether his focus on rats had simply made the situation worse. There were now noticeably fewer rodents in Chinatown, but Blue feared that his strategy of building out plague had prodded infected rats to migrate outside the district, bringing death with them. Blue wired Wyman to demand a rush shipment of two hundred additional bottles of anti-plague serum, though he hoped they would not be needed. Federal inspectors went door to door throughout the Latin Quarter, trying to identify anyone who had come into contact with the Rossis in the days leading up to their deaths. Health officials carried all clothing and furniture out of the Rossi home at 6 Varennes Street into the street and lit a massive bonfire, then fumigated the building with sulfur and lime to kill any bacteria that remained.
Haunted by the idea that the Latin Quarter could become as infected as Chinatown, Blue ordered additional inspections of every building in the neighborhood, with a focus on rats. After a demolition crew discovered the bodies of eighty-two dead rats lodged in the walls of a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood, Blue directed his officers to place bait laced with the Danysz virus in warehouses, stables and restaurants throughout the district to remove easy sources of food. Dead rats soon began piling up in the basements of apartment buildings and along the sewer lines. The bodies were gathered up by either health officials or scavengers who brought them to the Chinatown laboratory to collect their bounty. Marine Health Service agents resumed the grim process of slicing open each one and looking for signs of plague, desperate for any information about a disease that they could not rein in.
After a week passed without new victims, Blue’s fears of an outbreak of pneumonic plague subsided and he allowed himself once again to have faith that he was making progress. “I believe we have seen last of the pneumonic cases to be expected from the infection at No. 6 Varennes Street in the Rossi family,” he wrote to Wyman. In the wake of the Rossis’ deaths, Blue began receiving unexpected calls from white doctors alerting him to suspicious cases among their patients. “I am unable to decide whether these recent cases among the whites represent an increase, or whether they are the result of a desire on the part of physicians to openly diagnose plague,” Blue confided to Wyman. “It would appear from conversations we have had with some of them, that they had had such cases before, but were not willing to make the diagnosis.”
The sudden willingness of white physicians to admit that they, too, had treated cases of plague confirmed Blue’s fear that the disease had been spreading secretly throughout the city. Yet he welcomed the help. He expanded the rat-proofing campaign further by ordering landlords in the Latin Quarter to demolish old wooden structures and replace them with buildings made of brick and steel. One week passed without any new victims, and then another, and another. Soon, Blue could point to the first three-month break between confirmed victims in more than a year. As the number of plague-free months climbed, Blue discovered that the city’s overall death rate had fallen by 15 percent from the year before, a drop that he believed was in large part due to the work of his men in eliminating hundreds of thousands of rats from the streets and sewers. The effect w
as so pronounced that visitors who returned to the city after a long absence could talk about little other than its new, modern, sanitary appearance.
Four months after Irene Rossi’s death, federal doctors had still not come upon any new victims, the longest lag between cases since the epidemic began. At six months, city officials began voicing the opinion that the presence of federal doctors and their expensive rat-trapping program were no longer needed. “The long interval that has occurred is considered by some of the people here to warrant the claim of extirpation of the disease,” Blue wrote to Wyman. But he remained wary. “If by the beginning of the rainy season no case has occurred, then we may speak more confidently of eradication.”
His worry was not just San Francisco. Two weeks after Irene Rossi’s death, a thirty-nine-year-old Hispanic woman whose name was recorded only as Mrs. Frank Soto had died near Concord, a farming town in Contra Costa County not far from the homes of the two plague victims the year before. A local doctor alerted federal officials to the case. With the help of the coroner’s office, Blue’s agents secured samples of tissue from the dead woman’s armpit despite protests of family members who resented the implication that she had contracted plague, which was still widely seen as a disease carried by filthy foreigners.
Frank Soto told doctors that his wife had not left the area around their home in months. An inspection of the ranch revealed no obvious sources of infection, though Blue did learn that a number of dead rats had been found in the stable, a sign that they could have been diseased. Still, the question remained of how an infected flea could have made its way from San Francisco to a remote valley in the East Bay. Blue could point only to the fact that the Soto home was located less than ten miles away from Port Costa, the main destination for sugar shipments from Hawaii. Though he had no way of proving it, it was possible that plague-infested rats had come ashore and spread their fleas to the local squirrel population, which carried it deeper into the countryside, bypassing San Francisco entirely.
Blue sent more agents to catch and examine wild rodents in Contra Costa County, with little success. A month after Mrs. Soto’s death, federal officials learned that a young boy had died from what appeared to be plague. He and his brother had been hunting squirrels in the canyons near the town of Moraga and then cooked and ate their kill. A few days later, he developed a high fever and died in the family home. There was no way to determine the cause of the boy’s death, however, as his body had already been embalmed and buried without an autopsy.
Blue wrote to Wyman to warn that plague-stricken rodents could soon infect the entire state, with their “burrows forming a continuous chain from one end to the other.” Wyman agreed that the threat was serious and dispatched an officer to conduct a “complete and quiet investigation” of the state, armed with steel traps and a microscope to examine the bodies of any squirrels he could find. Blue, however, would not be a part of the operation.
The long break between plague cases in San Francisco convinced Wyman that the city was safe. In early 1905, he sent a short telegram informing Blue that he was being transferred to Norfolk, Virginia, where he would become the chief medical officer for the Jamestown Exposition, which was scheduled to open on April 26, 1907, marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the landing of the first permanent English colony in the Americas. The event was expected to draw visitors from across the globe, making any outbreak of illness at the event a national embarrassment to the Marine Health Service, to which Congress had given the responsibility of ensuring its safety. Wyman did not trust anyone other than Blue to handle such a high-profile assignment. Until construction began on the exposition, Blue would treat sick and injured sailors in Norfolk, a return to the more routine life of a Marine Hospital surgeon.
With Blue’s transfer, most of the anti-plague measures in San Francisco wound down. The chief concerns of the city had shifted to quality-of-life issues—a sign of Blue’s success. In Chinatown, the most persistent problem seemed to be residents’ refusal to comply with rules against drying fish on ropes strung across the street. To mark Blue’s departure, the city health department drew up a proclamation offering its thanks “to Dr. Rupert Blue for his skillful and energetic cooperation in all pertaining to the welfare of San Francisco’s high sanitary state and commercial prosperity.” Since the first known case of the outbreak in 1900, plague had infected 121 confirmed victims in San Francisco and the surrounding area and caused 113 deaths. As the spring of 1905 unfolded, San Francisco could look at itself and see a cleaner, modern city barreling into the new century. Blue, too, welcomed what the future would bring. Shortly after he arrived in Norfolk, he attended a large wedding, where he marinated in the accents and food of his native South. As he looked around the guests, he felt something that he had not felt in a long time: joy.
“The girls are very pretty and stylish withal,” he wrote in a letter to his sister Kate. “Perhaps I shall meet my fate among them. You see, I have forgotten the unpleasant past.”
CHAPTER 13
FOR GOD’S SAKE, SEND FOOD
At the age of thirty-three, Enrico Caruso was already considered one of the greatest operatic tenors in history. He had been born into a poor family in Naples, Italy, and received no musical training beyond singing in his parish choir until the age of eighteen. Within the first ten years of his career, he appeared on stages before packed audiences in Monte Carlo and London, and soon made his way to New York, where he became the chief draw of the Metropolitan Opera Company. His arrival in San Francisco in April of 1906 as part of the company’s national tour was heralded by its newspapers as a coup for the city, providing yet another sign that it had outgrown its rough Gold Rush past and was truly becoming the refined “Paris of the West” that it claimed to be.
Lines formed outside the Grand Opera House on Mission Street when season tickets went on sale, with the cheapest package going for the equivalent of nearly $900 in today’s dollars. Those who saw Caruso perform were quick to offer praise, and the avalanche of compliments began to leave the impression that San Francisco was keen to recognize not only Caruso’s innate abilities, but itself for being able to attract such a talent. After his performance as Don José in a production of Carmen on April 17, Blanche Partington, the prominent music critic of the San Francisco Call, wrote that “Carmen rechristened itself for San Francisco last night . . . Caruso is the magician.”
Caruso fell asleep that night in a suite in the Palace Hotel, the applause no doubt still echoing in his head. He woke shortly after 5:12 the next morning to the strange sensation that his room was swaying, as if on a ship in rough seas. Believing it at first to be a dream that he was on a steamer heading back to his home country, he lay still for several moments, waiting for the sensation to pass. Finally, as plaster started falling from the ceiling, he made his way to the window and opened the shade, wondering what it could be.
“What I see makes me tremble with fear. I see the buildings toppling over, big pieces of masonry falling, and from the street below I hear the cries and screams of men and women and children,” he later wrote. “I remain speechless, thinking that I am in some dreadful nightmare, and for something like forty seconds I stand while the buildings fall . . . and during that forty seconds I think of forty thousand different things. All that I have ever done in my life passes before me.”
From his window, Caruso watched as the greatest earthquake to hit San Francisco since its founding leveled the city. Men and women scrambled for safety as the ground porpoised and shook for forty-two seconds, each tick of the clock feeling like an eternity. Brick and glass showered down from buildings as power lines snapped and fell, writhing and hissing like angry snakes. By the time the ground stopped moving, more than thirty thousand buildings were gone. Clouds of dust hung low over the streets, blackening the air.
Those who were awake before the first jolt hit later claimed to have heard it coming, like the low rumble of a distant freight train in the dead of night. Thomas Jefferson Clark, a tick
et clerk then on his way to his job at the Ferry Building, was walking along First Street when the earthquake struck. He was thrown flat on the ground, where the cobblestones around him “danced like corn in a popper,” he would later say. He got up and ran down the middle of the street, fearing that he would be hit by falling debris. When he turned the corner of Market Street, he stopped short just before he fell into a hole more than five feet deep, where the pavement had simply disappeared.
Others died instantly when walls fell on them. On Howard Street, a firefighter by the name of James O’Neill was drawing water for horses when the American Hotel collapsed on top of him; on Mason Street, a police officer named Max Fenner died when bricks from an office building rained down onto his body. A few blocks away, the dome of the California Theater tumbled and crashed through the roof of a fire station next door, where Fire Chief Dennis T. Sullivan lived in a third-floor apartment with his wife, Margaret. Firefighters began frantically digging to free the Sullivans, assisted by reporters from the San Francisco Bulletin, whose office was across the street. By the time he was uncovered, the fire chief had a fractured skull, several broken ribs, a punctured lung, and lacerations on his right hip. His body was covered in burns from a radiator which he had been pinned against by the debris, leaving him near death. He and his wife were taken to different hospitals, and would never again see each other alive.
In the first minutes after the quake, deep fissures sliced through the cobblestone streets. The facades of buildings cleaved off and tumbled to the ground, revealing orderly rooms filled with furniture and bright wallpaper, as if the street were lined with enormous dollhouses. Homes that did not crumble buckled and slumped, leaving buildings leaning against one another like drunken friends. In other places, apartment buildings sank into the earth, trapping their occupants behind doors that would no longer open as water rushed in from cracked pipes. Straight sidewalks ran jagged; flat streets sported six-foot-high humps, as if a wave was frozen in stone. The force of the quake was so great that an engineer later exploring the fault line some thirty miles away discovered that the earth had jumped in some places by as much as seventeen feet and that the nearby mountains now stood four feet farther away. “If San Francisco had been at or near the fault line then there would not have been anything left of it,” he later wrote.