Black Death at the Golden Gate

by Black Death at the Golden Gate- The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague (retail) (epub)

  The first major aftershock struck at 8:14, causing a second wave of panic. After the ground stopped shaking, hundreds of small fires erupted throughout the city. Water lines that had rumpled and split during the earthquake ran dry, leaving firefighters with nothing to counter the flames. Embers leapt from one building to the next, racing through entire neighborhoods and up the heights of downtown’s greatest buildings. The magnitude of the fires created fierce winds, making downtown feel like it was in the middle of a hurricane. Great clouds of black smoke could be seen for miles, rising against the early morning sky. “The smoke began to curl up, and it curled up high and strong, for there had never been such a rich city in the history of the world—rich in rye and bourbon from Kentucky—rich in all brands in wine. Never before had there been a fire so richly fed,” wrote Joaquin Miller, an aging poet and frontiersman, who watched the city burn from his home high in the Oakland hills.

  Downtown the heat grew so intense that steel twisted and turned, popping the rails of the city’s streetcar lines out of their beds and curling them up like elephants’ trunks. Flames poured out of the highest windows of the Call Building, its grand dome towering over the city like a beacon of death. A few blocks away, workers at the U.S. Mint rushed to save the building and the more than $300 million in gold bullion held inside. As soldiers surrounded it to prevent looting, fifty employees of the Mint attacked the flames, armed with water pumped from an artesian well that had once been dug beneath it. Men more accustomed to counting money than to rough labor stood on the roof holding hoses to spray water on the flames, while those on the second and third floors passed buckets of water down long lines, and poured them onto the blaze. A sudden shift in the wind engulfed them all in black smoke, temporarily making it as dark as night, before a second breeze allowed them to resume their fight. Red-hot cinders the size of hailstones battered the roof, toppling its chimneys and piling up in drifts more than two feet deep.

  Firefighters turned to dynamite, praying that the rubble would create a break in the flames. Trumpets sounded outside condemned buildings, a signal that everyone inside had to leave or would be shot. Panicked residents, some in their pajamas and others still wearing formal attire from the night before, fled barefoot into the streets, not knowing whether another aftershock would come. Only later did they realize that the heat from the fire made the ground feel like a stovetop, leaving them scrambling for anything to put on their feet.

  Merchants raced to their stores, trying to save what they could from the fire and looters. The owner of Bacigalupi and Sons, then the city’s premier seller of phonographs, later recalled running to his store at the corner of 4th and Mission as the fire bore down on the block. The heat was so intense that he scorched his hand while trying to unlock the shop door. After thirty seconds of trying to pry his way in, he realized that the plate glass window lay shattered on the sidewalk and he climbed through the empty space. Soldiers shot a man attempting to rob Shreve & Co., then known as the most famous diamond jeweler on the West Coast, and left his body to burn in the street as a warning to others.

  Crowds of dazed refugees, many still dusted by the white plaster that fell from their bedroom ceilings, trudged up the city’s steep hills carrying whatever they had managed to save from their homes. One woman carried an empty birdcage with the bottom missing; another, only an umbrella. Overcome with shock, strangers sat down next to one another in the street and wordlessly watched the city burn below them. “Everywhere were trunks with across them lying their exhausted owners, men and women,” Jack London later wrote in an article describing the city’s devastation. “Often, after surmounting a heart-breaking hill, they would find another wall of flame advancing upon them at right angles and be compelled to change anew the line of their retreat . . . Here and there through the smoke, creeping warily under the shadows of tottering walls, emerged occasional men and women. It was like the meeting of the handful of survivors after the day of the end of the world.”

  Shortly after noon, Mayor Schmitz held an emergency meeting of staffers and prominent businessmen, if only to assert that the city was in fact still there. City Hall had collapsed, leaving only its ruined copula, so officials met in the nearby Hall of Records. Schmitz yelled as loud as he could, straining to make his voice heard over the sound of booming dynamite and debris crashing down outside. “Let it be given out that three men have already been shot down without mercy for looting,” the mayor began. “Let it also be understood that the order has been given to all soldiers and policemen to do likewise without hesitation in the cases of any and all miscreants who may seek to take advantage of the city’s awful misfortune.” The building trembled from the force of an explosion nearby, and the police chief begged the mayor to leave before the structure collapsed. The meeting resumed in the middle of Portsmouth Square. Within hours, the Hall of Records would fall to the fire.

  As the fires continued to burn, refugees overwhelmed the Ferry Building, where the clock on its gleaming white tower was stuck at the moment when the earthquake hit. Ferries, warships, and in some places rowboats clustered along the city’s waterfront, picking up as many people fleeing the flames as they could. Patients from St. Mary’s Hospital were loaded onto ferryboats after the building caught fire, with doctors and nurses carrying those too weak to walk. “If you picture the scenes described and imagine the horror a thousand times greater you will still know less than I have personally witnessed,” George Bernard Musson, the captain of a British steamer that was at port in San Francisco and became a makeshift refugee camp, wrote in a letter home. “Motherless children and childless women are here, the old and aged and young are all here, high born and low are all one class.” The city of Oakland sent fire engines, hoses and dynamite by ferry, taking thousands of scared men, women and children on the return voyage. Governor Pardee, when he learned of the devastation in the city, sent a telegraph to Los Angeles, begging “For God’s sake, send food.”

  Those who could not reach the water fled to the parks. In the Presidio, more than thirty-five thousand men and women crowded onto the golf course. Soldiers at the nearby U.S. Army base began issuing tents, blankets and tins of crackers as rations, along with cans of condensed milk to women carrying babies. Residents of Chinatown, hearing rumors that no provisions would be given to Asians, trudged to a windswept section of Golden Gate Park, where they ate whatever they had been able to salvage from their homes. Only after the poor treatment of the Chinese threatened the country’s relationship with China did President Roosevelt direct the army to provide rations and shelter to all refugees, regardless of race. “President directs you furnish same shelter and camping facilities to Chinese as to others . . . use your own discretion as to whether special camps shall be established for them,” wrote Robert Shaw Oliver, the acting Secretary of War, in a telegram to General Frederick Funston, who was in command of the Presidio.

  The following day, engineers jerry-rigged systems that connected firehoses to intact sewage lines, finally giving firefighters something to use to beat back the flames. Sailors on Navy vessels that responded to the city’s distress calls unfurled a mile-long hose from Fisherman’s Wharf, providing a constant supply of seawater. Firefighters in Jackson Square used it to save the A. P. Hotaling warehouse, which at the time was the largest liquor repository on the West Coast. The accomplishment would later spur Charles Kellogg Field, a writer for Sunset magazine, to quip, “If, as they say, God spanked the town / For being over-frisky / Why did He burn His churches down / and spare Hotaling’s whiskey?”

  It took three days for the fires to burn themselves out. In neighborhoods where grand theaters and restaurants once stood lay only blackened ruins. After the flames subsided, the heat emanating from the toppled buildings remained so intense that men and women trying to return home fainted in the streets. Refugees crowded around any source of water, as if a desert oasis. A broken water main at the corner of Powell and Market gushing out cold seawater attracted a crowd of hundreds, who sat on the
curb and bathed their singed feet in the stream flowing through the wreckage.

  By the end of the week, more than 80 percent of San Francisco’s buildings were destroyed, and more than 250,000 people were living in the city’s parks. The Army oversaw twenty-one of the eventual twenty-six official refugee camps, with an isolated camp built for residents of Chinatown. In the Presidio, thousands of white tents were arranged in an enormous grid, where the paths between them were given street names. “The demands upon the medical department have been enormous,” George Torney, the chief sanitary officer at the U.S. Army Hospital in the Presidio, wrote in a telegram to the Surgeon General of the Army in Washington. “The fire is evidently under control and the urgent problem is now one of sanitation.”

  On the other side of the country, Rupert Blue was occupied by the mundane task of conducting routine inspections of federal buildings in the nation’s capital. When word of the earthquake and devastation reached Washington, he packed his belongings at once, knowing it was only a matter of time until he was called back into service in California. He received orders from Wyman on April 21 to proceed immediately to San Francisco and reached Oakland four days later. He rode a ferry into the devastated city the next morning, seeing nothing but ruins where a week earlier its skyline had stood. As he passed through the charred streets near the waterfront, he looked up and saw the shell of the Call Building standing like a monument in a graveyard. He soon reached Golden Gate Park, the home of the city’s makeshift sanitation headquarters, and joined a meeting already in progress between state and city health officials, who were discussing how to save San Francisco from further ruin.

  The danger from the earthquake and fires had passed; the chief concern now was disease. Rats were already overrunning the refugee camps, where discarded food lay rotting in plain sight. The stench of untreated human waste sitting in shallow, hand-dug holes wafted throughout the city on winds whipping off the bay. Without proper sanitation and clean drinking water, deadly diseases like cholera and typhoid were sure to spread, if they had not done so already. Already, twenty cases of smallpox had been identified in Oakland, where neighborhoods had been overrun by refugees from San Francisco. Governor Pardee asked Blue to take a ferry back across the bay and make an inspection of the camps holding some of the 150,000 estimated evacuees, a total which had doubled Oakland’s population in less than a week,

  Blue made his rounds the following day and was shocked at what he saw. “For the most part they consist of wooden shacks, hastily constructed in vacant lots, parks and in the suburbs of the city, and are supplied with shallow latrines, and open kitchens which offer no obstruction to the ingress and egress of flies,” he wrote in a report to Washington. At Lake Merritt, near the city’s downtown, he found two large camps and a smaller hospital camp for sick refugees nestled between them. Human waste saturated the ground, while rats darted in and out of tents. Fearing the spread of cholera from the open sewage, Blue disbanded the sick camp and sent its residents elsewhere. Over the course of the day, he toured camps holding an estimated 30,000 refugees, including four thousand Chinese whose numbers overwhelmed the city’s small Chinatown. His instructions at each step were the same: latrines must be dug deeper, screens installed to protect food from flies, and systems set up to collect trash and cart it away as quickly as possible—a protocol more often used to maintain sanitation in a war zone than in the heart of a major American city.

  The next day, he returned to San Francisco, which health officials had divided into sections in order to make sense of the devastation. He was given the responsibility of salvaging a district bounded by Bay, Market, Valencia and Mission Streets, the most heavily damaged part of the city. “A rapid tour of inspection revealed a deplorable state of affairs with regard to sanitary measures for the protection of these people against disease,” he wrote. More than 30,000 people were living in shacks and tents, while those whose homes remained standing were forced to cook in makeshift ovens in the street. No water or sewage connections remained intact, leaving a dwindling water supply and growing mounds of untreated sewage festering in uncovered pits swarming with flies. Public kitchens stood nearby, their food set out in the open as they prepared to serve meals to hundreds who lined up in city squares, a layout that seemed designed for contamination.

  Already disease was spreading, especially in the informal camps that pocketed the ruins. “On Gavin Street there are two children with sore throats which appear suspicious of diphtheria,” an Army medical officer reported. “There are about 100 families here with no shelter and no bedding whatsoever.” Another forty-five people had congregated at the foot of Hyde Street, while the intersection of Stewart and Folsom was home to about sixty people, all without any shelter, bedding or ways to maintain hygiene in a place that had lost all of the sanitary infrastructure underlying the modern world.

  Blue ordered the construction of large public toilets and had them connected to the few functioning sewer pipes that remained. Waste that could not be taken out of open-air pits was smothered with chloride of lime and carbolic acid before being buried. Realizing that refugees were hoarding food in their tents and attracting rats, he demanded that all cooking be done in communal kitchens, and installed screens to prevent flies from spoiling food left uncovered. Residents were ordered to collect their garbage into huge piles, which were burned hourly and carted away.

  Slowly, the contours of a functioning city began to reemerge from the rubble. The U.S. Mint opened its doors and became San Francisco’s only functioning financial institution, handling all relief funds that came into the city from the East Coast. Over the next several weeks, more than $40 million flowed through the Mint’s doors, allowing homeowners to cash insurance checks and purchase the supplies needed to rebuild. Those whose homes were beyond repair were placed in temporary wooden cottages, which at their peak would house nearly seventeen thousand refugees who paid two dollars a month for their accommodations. “San Francisco is beginning to rise again out of its ashes,” wrote Samuel Fortier, a professor at Berkeley, in a letter dated April 25. “There is no lack of confidence. The courage of the people is simply remarkable . . . the people of San Francisco seem determined to begin at once to build a new San Francisco, which will far surpass the old in every essential feature.”

  Despite Blue’s fears, no major illnesses swept through San Francisco in the aftermath of the earthquake and fires, dispelled in part by the sanitary measures that he and Army medical officers implemented. Residents fortunate enough to return to their homes began moving out of the refugee camps in early May, allowing the choreography of daily life to begin anew. Confident that the danger of cholera and other diseases spread by sewage had passed, Blue turned his attention to plague, which he feared was still spreading in Contra Costa County.

  He soon received word of a patient exhibiting strange symptoms in Oakland, and travelled across the bay to the home of Louis Scazzafava, an Italian teenager who had come down with a sudden high fever and dark, swollen glands on his thighs. Scazzafava told him that he had gone hiking with a friend in the hills just behind the University of California, Berkeley campus a few days before, where he had come into close contact with squirrels that seemed to be acting strangely. Tests revealed that the boy had contracted plague, the first confirmed case of the disease since Blue had left the city the year before. Scazzafava was placed in isolation and given an injection of the Haffkine anti-plague serum. Perhaps owing to the early treatment, he slowly began to recover.

  Blue canvassed the Oakland and Berkeley hills, seeking information on anyone else who might have come down with the plague’s telltale collection of symptoms. He found no one. The only conclusion he could reach was that the boy had the unfortunate luck to have encountered an infected squirrel, just as the plague victims in Contra Costa County had the year before. Plague-infected fleas were still lurking in the rolling green hills, and it would only take something as innocent as a teenager going for a hike for the disease to cross over into
the human population.

  Before he could investigate further, Blue received a telegram from Wyman directing him to return to Virginia and resume his duties at the Jamestown Exposition. He collected his small suitcase and boarded a train, but not before writing to Wyman to warn him that the plague appeared to be slipping out of San Francisco and into the East Bay. “There seems nothing more for me to do here,” he cautioned, noting that the sanitation plan for the refugee camps of San Francisco was now in place. “Yet I am loath to leave in view of the possibility of plague among campers and picnic crowds in the Berkeley Hills.”

  As his train chugged out of Oakland and over the foothills of Contra Costa County toward the East Coast, Blue prayed that his fears were nothing more than worry, and that he would not have to return to San Francisco on another frightful mission.

  CHAPTER 14

  TWO PERCENT

  No one in San Francisco had time to rest. There was too much work to be done.

  An estimated six billion bricks lay strewn throughout the city in the aftermath of the earthquake, leaving piles of rubble in some cases nearly as high as the buildings they had once been. In the first weeks of the cleanup, soldiers forced able-bodied men into teams and put them to work clearing streets and dumping bricks into the bay. Yet it was evident that San Francisco needed more help if it was ever going to become anything more than a remnant.