CONFUSION AND DENIAL
Many people in both the Caucasian and Chinese communities had reason to deny the plague outbreak. San Franciscans were vested in the rise of their city. The railroads brought tourists to the jewel of the Pacific. Imports arrived and exports shipped from thriving ports. News of a plague outbreak would have brought the business of San Francisco to a grinding halt.
The Chinese feared scapegoating with good reason. The quarantine had been patently unfair. Any Caucasian person was allowed out of the quarantine area, whereas the Chinese were not. (Many San Franciscans believed only persons of Chinese descent could be infected by the plague, which was, of course, untrue.) Then, too, the Chinese feared that Chinatown would be torched, as had happened when the plague struck Honolulu.19 “By Friday, it is hoped that we will know that this was not the plague. Otherwise what happened in Honolulu might happen to us.”20 Even before the plague crisis, there were people who actively campaigned to burn Chinatown.
Perhaps the only businesses to be glad for a plague crisis were the undertakers and the Hearst newspaper enterprise. Hearst realized a plague scare would be good for circulation, and he made the most of it. All of the other newspapers conspired to keep any real news of the plague out of their pages. “In a stunning admission on March 25, the Call’s editors admitted that they and the Chronicle’s editors had made a mutual pact of silence on the plague.”21
It is impossible to know how many people died of the plague. Doctors routinely misdiagnosed it. “Most physicians’ attempts to understand plague amounted to little more than wild fumbling, their theories born of prejudice.” 22
People hid their plague victims—either by shipping them out of the city hidden in barrels and boxes or via paperwork ruses whereby the cause of death was attributed to other diseases. Official plague death toll accounts vary from 250 to 280 people, but “to arrive at a better sense of the real numbers of deaths would require a careful biostatistical analysis of the unusual rise in deaths between 1900 and 1901 recorded as acute syphilis or pneumonia….”23
“Chinese residents, concerned that their homes would be burned down, hid their sick relatives and then shuttled them out of the city in small boats at night. Sometimes when an inspector arrived before a body could be removed, a dead man would be propped up next to a table in an underground room, his hands arranged carefully over dominoes.” 24
ERADICATING THE PLAGUE
By 1905 the first plague crisis had subsided. Chinatown and surrounding areas had been scoured from top to bottom, which made them less attractive to the rat population. When the second San Francisco plague epidemic hit after the 1906 earthquake, there were few if any plague deaths in Chinatown. “Between the first [plague] epidemic in 1900 and the second in 1907, the role of the flea and the rat in transmitting plague to human populations was elucidated.”25 And the new surgeon general, Rupert Blue, was able to stop the plague through an extensive rattery operation, which aimed to trap and kill 1,200 rats per day.
* * *
*Pneumonic plague is a type of bubonic plague contracted by about 3 percent of cases. It is far more contagious than regular bubonic plague.
Notes
1. Crichton, Judy, America 1900 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998) 28.
2. Barker, Malcolm E., More San Francisco Memoirs, 1852–1899: The Ripening Years (San Francisco: Londonborn Publications, 1996) 27.
3. Crichton, America 1900, 15.
4. Library of Congress http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/progress/jb_progress_autorace_1.html (accessed November 26, 2014).
5. Craddock, Susan, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 55.
6. Chase, Marilyn, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco (New York: Random House, 2003) 9.
7. “The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco,” sfmuseum.net/hist9/cook.html.
8. Chase, The Barbary Plague, 46.
9. Hawkins, Cora Frear, Buggies, Blizzards and Babies (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1971) 72.
10. Hertzler, Arthur E., M.D., The Horse and Buggy Doctor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1938) 126.
11. Barnett, S. Anthony, The Story of Rats: Their Impact on Us, and Our Impact on Them (Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2001) 32.
12. Marriott, Edward, Plague: A Story of Science, Rivalry and the Scourge That Won’t Go Away (New York: Henry Holt, 2004) 230.
13. Marion, Jay, A History of the California Academy of Medicine, 1870–1930 (San Francisco: Grabhorn Press for the California Academy of Medicine 1930) 85.
14. Chase, The Barbary Plague, 47.
15. San Francisco Call, 3.11.1900, http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SFC19000311.2.80
16. Todd, Frank Morton, Eradicating Plague from San Francisco: Report of the Citizens’ Health Committee (San Francisco: Press of C. A. Murdock, 1909) 21.
17. Chase, The Barbary Plague, 48–49.
18. Chase, The Barbary Plague, 50.
19. Chase, The Barbary Plague, 19.
20. Chung Sai Yat Po, March 7, 1900 p. 1. (in Chase, The Barbary Plague, 19.)
21. Chase, The Barbary Plague, 54.
22. Marriott, Plague: A Story of Science, Rivalry and the Scourge That Won’t Go Away 13.
23. Echenberg, Myron, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague Between 1894 and 1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2007) 231.
24. Sullivan, Robert, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004) 157.
25. Craddock, City of Plagues, 18.
Chronology
1900
January 2. San Francisco dock. The steamer Australia arrives from Honolulu, where the plague has struck. Rats from the ship are believed to run up the sewers to Chinatown.
January–February. Chinatown. Chinese observe an inordinate number of rats dying.
March 6. Chinatown. A man dies from the plague in San Francisco. First known case here.
March 7. Angel Island. Dr. Kinyoun, the wolf doctor, injects plague from the dead man into a rat, two guinea pigs, and a monkey.
March 7–10. First Chinatown quarantine.
March 12. Angel Island. The rat and the guinea pigs die.
March 13. Angel Island. The monkey dies.
March–May. More deaths from the plague.
May 29–June 15. Second Chinatown quarantine.
June 14. The governor of California (Governor Gage) and the deans of three medical schools sign a manifesto that states there is no plague in San Francisco.
1902–1908
November 1902. The city begins to try to get its rat population under control.
February 1905. San Francisco’s first plague outbreak is declared over.
April 18, 1906. The San Francisco Earthquake and fire rip the city apart. In the ensuing days, rats gain a foothold again and the plague returns with a vengeance.
November 1908. The plague is finally vanquished in San Francisco.
About the Author
Gennifer Choldenko is the New York Times bestselling and Newbery Honor–winning author of many popular children’s books, including Notes from a Liar and Her Dog, If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period, Al Capone Does My Shirts, Al Capone Shines My Shoes, Al Capone Does My Homework, and No Passengers Beyond This Point. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she hopes never to see a rat. Dead or otherwise. Visit her online at choldenko.com.
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