by Black Death at the Golden Gate- The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague (retail) (epub)
Within two weeks of the disaster, the ruined city had turned into a magnet for scavengers and tourists unable to resist the lure of destruction. Sightseeing wagons clopped through the devastation, gawking at families trying to recover what they could from their demolished homes. “I request you to let no morbid curiosity take you to the burnt districts, but be content to do your share toward bringing about conditions in which the past may be forgotten and the future made bright for the upbuilding of our city,” wrote Mayor Schmitz in an open letter. Magazines published articles detailing how visitors could help the city and what they should avoid lest they become a hindrance. “It’s all right to go to San Francisco if you can do some good there. Take with you a bottle of milk that you know is pure and sweet and fresh, or a package of condensed milk, or a suit of little baby clothes, if you have one that the baby has outgrown . . . Don’t go to stand and gaze,” noted an article in Organized Labor, the official magazine of the state’s building trades council.
The city worried that investors on the East Coast, spooked by their unfamiliarity with earthquakes, would refuse to purchase the municipal bonds necessary to fund San Francisco’s reconstruction and searched for ways to demonstrate that progress was already underway. City officials worked out of the partially destroyed City Hall, directing inspectors to evaluate every building still standing and flag those that required demolition. All available lumber, brick and glass in the state was put on trains heading toward San Francisco, along with men and women seeking work. The chief counsel of the Western Pacific Railroad wrote a letter to the mayor suggesting that “immediate steps should be taken to procure all unemployed carpenters, brickmasons and builders that can be obtained from the various cities in the United States.” Railroads offered reduced rates for skilled workers from the Midwest and East Coast to travel west, where they were guaranteed a job.
Even at this low point, San Francisco could not shed its bigotry. The Pacific Trades Council and other construction unions in the city refused to work on buildings or sites cleared by Asians, requiring the mayor to intervene to prevent a riot. The mayor assured construction companies that “he could not countenance importation or use of Coolie labor in San Francisco nor would he favor competition of cheap foreign labor against American white labor,” wrote William Howard Taft, then the Secretary of War, in a telegram to President Roosevelt three months after the earthquake.
Progress remained slow. More than forty thousand people were still living in refugee camps, and on the first anniversary of the quake two-thirds of residents lacked functional sewers. Empty lots throughout the city were littered with the remnants of destroyed roofs, broken-down ceilings, and scattered debris. Souvenir hunters and scavengers had picked over the ruins for everything of value. All that was left were mounds of trash and dust, the residue of a city in a hurry to right itself.
On May 27, 1907, thirteen months after the earthquake, a horse-drawn buggy pulled up outside the U.S. Marine Hospital in the Presidio. Inside lay the slumped body of a sailor named Oscar Tomei, burning with a high fever. Tomei had fallen into a coma before he could describe his pain, leaving doctors to strip off his clothes. They discovered a swollen bubo on his groin, which tested positive for plague. Faced with the first new case of the disease in three years, federal health officers raced to the waterfront, hoping to piece together how the man had contracted the disease.
He had worked aboard a tugboat named the Wizard, but beyond that everything about his life—where he lived in the city, his acquaintances and his recent whereabouts—remained a mystery. Nor could his former shipmates provide any clues. The Wizard had shipped out to sea shortly after discharging the sick man two days before, and sank off the coast of Mendocino with everyone aboard. Tomei died the afternoon he arrived at the hospital without regaining consciousness. With all information about the sudden reemergence of the disease lost, doctors could do nothing but wait and pray that it claimed no additional victims.
For ten weeks, they heard nothing. Then, on August 12, a twenty-one-year-old Russian sailor from the steamer Samoa named Alexander Ruvak died at the same hospital, from what appeared to be pneumonia. As medical staff prepared the death certificate, a doctor noticed suspicious dark lumps on the dead man’s neck and called for an autopsy. Tests revealed that they were buboes, laden with plague bacteria. Federal doctors hurried to the Samoa, where they found dozens of dead rats, fleas and bedbugs but no other apparent human victims. The ship and its crew were ordered into quarantine at Angel Island.
While the Samoa was being towed to the island, a physician named Guido Cagliari called the city Board of Health to report suspicious symptoms in two of his patients who were now near death in their home at 20 Midway Avenue in the Latin Quarter. Doctors found Francisco Conti, an Italian immigrant who had worked the past nine months at the Musto Marble Works, lying semi-conscious with a fever. At his side was his wife, Ida Conti, who had arrived two months before from Italy, her temperature spiking at 104 degrees. Dark bulges protruded from their thighs. Health officials carted Francesco to the isolation ward at City and County Hospital, where he recovered over the following weeks. Ida died at home before doctors could move her. An examination of her body confirmed plague.
The following morning, Guadalupe Mendoza and Jose Hyman, two Spanish laborers who shared a shack on Pacific Street near the waterfront, were admitted to City and County Hospital, burning with fever. Both died that same afternoon. As their bodies were prepared for autopsy, a sixty-three-year-old orderly named Jeremiah O’Leary disposed of the dead men’s clothing. O’Leary had an open wound on his hand, yet thought nothing of it as he went about his duties. Mendoza and Hyman both tested positive for plague. Not long after, O’Leary was admitted as a patient, with frighteningly similar symptoms. Terrified that he too would contract plague, an intern named Arthur Reinstein refused to treat O’Leary, who died two days later. Reinstein was dismissed for moral cowardice and dereliction of duty, but not before submitting a letter of resignation for what he called “obvious reasons.”
With six victims in the span of less than a week, the plague had reappeared in the city, baffling health officials who could find no pattern among the dead. Chinatown, the center of the last outbreak, seemed to be the only neighborhood spared. Unable to focus their attention on a single neighborhood, health officials felt pulled in every direction, not knowing where the next victim might emerge. Even if they wanted to, there was no neighborhood to quarantine, no community to target, in hopes of walling off the disease. For the first time since plague appeared in the city seven years before, it felt like all of San Francisco was at risk.
Meanwhile, a forty-year-old Irish laborer named John Casey seemed to be getting sicker as he lay in his bed at City and County Hospital while recovering from a routine procedure. Doctors discovered plague-infested buboes swelling throughout his armpits and groin. Within days, a nurse and an intern at the hospital also fell ill and displayed the telltale mark of the disease. Inspectors looking for a cause of the outbreak canvassed the dilapidated hospital building, then widely considered among the city’s worst. They found rodents everywhere, in numbers too staggering to count. “The rats have so many runways deep through the hospital and have burrowed so deep even under the soil; into the sills of the building,” one health board member wrote after touring the facility. “The sewers are filled and the foundation is full of them. Sulphur does not penetrate sufficiently to destroy all the rats.”
The hospital was placed under quarantine on August 27, less than two weeks after its first plague victims arrived. Patients who were free of the disease were taken to Laguna Honda, a small hospital which had opened in 1866 to treat Gold Rush prospectors and now survived as the city’s largest almshouse. After that institution quickly filled up, patients were dispersed to hospitals throughout the city, filling so many beds that officials had no choice but to put some up in horse stables at the Ingleside racetrack. City health officers ordered an iron fence built around City and County H
ospital to seal rats within the building while crews cleansed it with sulphur and carbolic acid. Construction crews refused to take the job, fearing that they too would come down with the deadly disease. Doctors on staff began working double shifts, first tending to their patients and then going outside to erect a wall they prayed would save the hospital and pin the plague inside.
Unlike during the previous outbreak, there was no denying the danger the city faced. Nearly all of the most recent victims were white, proving that the plague was not restricted along racial lines. Its return came at a time when San Francisco, still struggling to restore the confidence of investors and tourists from back East, could least afford it, and spread with a ferocity never before seen in the city. Mayor Edward Taylor, a poet and lawyer then in his first weeks of office following a municipal corruption scandal that had ended with the arrest of Mayor Schmitz, telegraphed President Theodore Roosevelt at his summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, begging for help. Roosevelt assured the panicked mayor that the federal government would send its best men.
Rupert Blue, the only person in the country with a track record of successfully subduing plague, was unaware of the outbreak. After returning from San Francisco the year before, he had resumed his position as head of sanitation at the Jamestown Exposition, where his chief problem was a group of workers who had caught typhoid fever after drinking from wells that Blue had repeatedly warned them were tainted. Wyman telegraphed Blue to leave at once for San Francisco and take with him anyone he thought would be of assistance. Orders in hand, Blue gathered a team of doctors in Washington whom he considered among the service’s finest, experienced in combating diseases including smallpox and yellow fever. Together, the men boarded a train on September 6, bound for the West Coast and the wide epidemic that Blue had long feared.
There was no time to lose. Plague was racing through the city, killing its victims with alarming speed. By the time that Blue and his men arrived in San Francisco on September 12, health officials had identified twenty-five cases since the start of August, with thirteen of them fatal. There seemed to be no pattern, no clues as to where it would strike next. One day, a clerk at an elegant hotel in Nob Hill fell dead after working his shift; the next, a man living on Harrison Street in the gritty South of Market neighborhood succumbed to the disease in his squalid apartment. Chinatown remained largely spared. The lone death in the district came when Chin Mon Way, the sixty-three-year-old president of the Chinese Six Companies, contracted the disease and died two days later, leaving his organization in disarray.
With many of the city’s hotels still-charred ruins, Blue checked into the Little St. Francis, a makeshift wooden hostel built in the middle of Union Square. Rumors of his return to the city put San Francisco on edge, terrified at the prospect that he would institute a quarantine that would choke off its recovery. Hoping to project calm, Blue penned an open message to the residents of San Francisco, which was published in its newspapers. “To the People of San Francisco,” he wrote. “Rumors of an alarming nature having reached the board of health in regard to bubonic plague, the president of the board, by its authority, hereby declares that there exists at present in San Francisco nothing that need cause any alarm, much less the quarantining of the city, and there is at present no intention to make such a quarantine . . . Every precaution is being taken by the federal authorities, in co-operation with the state and city boards of health to stamp out such of the disease as is here.” In private, he knew that the situation was far more grave. “The campaign is likely to be a long one, and the infestation will be fifty times more difficult of eradication than before,” he wrote in a letter to a colleague in Washington. “The foci are to be found all over the city, the greater number existing in the burned district where, on account of the protection afford by the ruins, the rats multiply in countless numbers.”
Blue had no headquarters, nor laboratory, nor medical equipment, forcing him to improvise. With office space in the city still sparse, he rented a two-story Victorian house at 401 Fillmore Street which became headquarters for his team of twelve doctors. The city allotted an additional thirty-six sanitary inspectors and provided him a private car and driver, allowing him to motor through destroyed neighborhoods where streetcars still could not go. On his drives through the city, Blue felt the full weight of his task. The geography of the place—a roughly fifty-square-mile peninsula made up of hills and valleys, forests and sand dunes, densely packed neighborhoods and crowded stables—offered countless obstacles. In order to save San Francisco he would have to tame the nightmare scenario the Service had long known was possible: multiple sections of the city affected at once, with a rapidly rising death toll and nearly all of its victims white. The only thing that gave him hope was Chinatown, which even in the devastation stood out for the fact that it was the lone part of the city not teeming with rats, a fact he attributed to the poison and other measures he had put in place roughly two years before.
With the zone of infection now stretching over the full city, Blue designed a plan built around the still-radical idea that plague was a disease of rats that periodically crossed over into humans, and not the result of filth or foreignness. The virus festered in areas that afforded food and shelter to rats and their fleas, he believed, and not because of any inherent flaws in a victim’s virtue or race. “Rat fleas bite men,” Blue would later write. “They usually prefer to bite rats, but when the sick rat is dead and his eighty or eighty-five boarders have left his cold cadaver and camped for a few days without food, in a crack in the floor, or under the mould-board, or in a little inch of dust in a corner that the broom failed to reach, they will bite anything. They will bite a white man just as quick as a Chinaman, or a Hindu, if they can reach him.”
In disease Blue recognized a shared human trait, and, for the first time since the plague epidemic began, he set about purging all of San Francisco of its rats without regard to human race or ethnicity. As in most cities, rodents were considered a natural part of the urban landscape and not a harbinger of disease. Rats were such an everyday part of city life that construction workers rebuilding office towers downtown would toss leftover food from their lunches into vacant lots, knowing that the rodents would clean up after them. “That was what rats were for,” Blue would later write, describing the city’s attitude. “Nobody had any objections. God made them scavengers, so let them scavenge.” The ruins of the city provided near-infinite nesting places, allowing the rat population to expand without constraint. On his return to the city, Blue was struck by the fact that fleas were “unusually prevalent,” while “on account of the great catastrophe sanitary conditions were unusually bad.”
Drawing from his experience in the aftermath of the earthquake, Blue divided the city into thirteen districts and unleashed teams of ratcatchers into each one. At his prodding, the Merchant Association sent letters to every address in town, urging residents to set out traps and poison, seal their garbage in rat-proof containers, and seal every rathole as soon as they saw it. Health inspectors would visit each property twice, looking for rats. Clad in heavy pants, tall boots and leather gloves, they clinched the cuffs of their pants around their legs with string before entering a suspected area, aiming to give fleas no exposed skin on which to bite. Inspectors would note the number of rats taken from each location, the gender of each animal, the date and whether the house had been visited before. Every afternoon, teams arrived back at the Fillmore Street headquarters with their hauls. Rats found alive were tossed into vats of boiling water, a tactic meant to quickly kill fleas clinging to their bodies. Each carcass was nailed to a wooden shingle and given a number along with a short description of where it had been caught.
As the bodies of thousands of rats piled up inside the house, federal doctors wearing rubber gloves stood before long dissection tables and sliced open the chest of each corpse, as if in a ghoulish disassembly line. They peeled back the skin of the animal, to inspect its glands and spleen, searching for inflammation and buboes th
at suggested plague. When a rat appeared to have the disease, a bacteriologist plucked it from the line with metal tongs and took additional tissue samples. After a culture was prepared, suspected plague cells were injected into guinea pigs to confirm the diagnosis.
Soon, doctors were filling ten steel garbage cans a day with splayed rat carcasses, which were then tossed into an incinerator. The sheer number of rodents that passed through the building led doctors to start referring to their headquarters as the Rattery. On some days health officials would stop in amazement, wondering how it was possible for there to be this many rats not only in San Francisco but in the entire world. To protect themselves from the bite of an infected flea, the men took frequent doses of anti-plague serum, which, when combined with the rank smell of blood and dizzying amounts of formaldehyde, often left them barely able to stand.
No matter how many rats passed through the Rattery, the disease kept spreading, picking off victims as if by whim. In Noe Valley, five out of six members of a German family living in a well-kept row house succumbed to the plague, sparing only an eighteen-month-old boy. Health inspectors searching for the source of the infection tore up the wooden floors and discovered the bodies of nineteen plague-infested rats. Across town in the Marina District, eighteen residents of one of the largest remaining refugee camps died after contracting the disease. Among the dead were a five-year-old named Thomas Herrera and a sixteen-month-old toddler named Mary Costello, both of whom had lost their parents among the estimated three thousand who perished in the earthquake.
Blue walked through the camp, where more than two thousand refugees lived in tiny wooden cottages laid out in a grid atop of the former Lobos Square. Rats swarmed over the dreary grounds, building nests under the wooden sidewalks and feasting on garbage. The dense collection of people in temporary shelters made the widespread application of poison unfeasible, lest a child get its hands on tainted food left in a trap. Unable to see a solution, he ordered his men to catch as many rats as possible by hand and returned to the Rattery to search for an answer.