Black Death at the Golden Gate
Page 23
A researcher on Blue’s staff by the name of Carroll Fox collected thousands of specimens and began examining each one under the microscope. He soon realized that the most common flea in the city was the Northern European species, Ceratophyllus fasciatus, rather than Pulex cheposis, which was the most prevalent in plague-infested ports such as Hong Kong and Bombay. The discovery suggested that most of the fleas in the city had arrived either overland or aboard ships from the Atlantic, rather than from rats hiding on ships from Hawaii and Asia.
Their point of origin was only one part of the Fox’s discovery. The main difference between the two species is in the layout of their guts: the Indian rat flea has a spiny ridge in its abdomen where blood from its most recent meal collects, eventually blocking material from reaching the stomach. That clot leads the famished insect to aggressively bite any living mammal that it encounters. Fresh blood helps to dislodge the clot, spurring the flea to essentially vomit some of the material stalled in its belly into the skin of its new victim. The host inevitably scratches the site of the bite, pushing the blood from the flea’s previous meals deeper into his or her own bloodstream.
A Pulex cheposis that feeds on a plague-infected victim retains the bacilli of the disease in the blood clot in its gut. Each bite thereafter brings new blood into its digestive tract and ejects some of the plague-infected material into the body of a new victim, introducing Yersinia pestis into another bloodstream where it can multiply and eventually take over. The European flea, by comparison, retains less blood in its stomach, leaving it less likely to develop a blockage that prompts it to attack as aggressively. When it does bite, the flea deposits only a fraction of its stomach material into the body of its new host, minimizing its ability to spread infection compared with its more ravenous Asian cousin.
Though Blue and his men did not realize it, they had finally answered the question of why the disease did not spread in San Francisco as rapidly as it had in Asia. Thanks to the gut structure of its most common flea, the carriers of the disease were biting less aggressively and when they did attack they did not inject as much of the plague bacilli into their new hosts. Only the year before, a study published in the Calcutta Journal of Medicine had hinted at the increased role that Pulex cheposis played in the spread of the disease compared with other varieties of the insect. “There is much in favour of Pulex cheposis playing an active part in the transfer of plague from the rat to man . . . There can be no doubt that Pulex cheposis, unlike Pulex fasciatus, another common rat flea, bites man.”
San Francisco had unwittingly served as a seven-year experiment, showing what would happen if the pandemic devouring Hong Kong and India came to a port where a different species of flea was more prevalent. The slow spread of the disease—a phenomenon that led the city to doubt Kinyoun’s warnings and call the epidemic a fake ploy by corrupt health officials—had hinged on the stomach of a flea, a lucky quirk that spared an untold number of lives.
In July, Blue celebrated the six-month mark since the discovery of the last human victim of the plague. There had been no outbreak in the spring and early summer as he had feared and—barring any sudden resurgence—he could see that his mission would soon be winding down. For the first time since his emergency posting to San Francisco the previous September, he realized that there were other aspects of life that he might be missing. “My work may be satisfactorily completed by late fall, and I may then return to the ‘Effete East’ in quest of other adventures,” he wrote to his sister Kate. “On the other hand, the disease may reappear and hold me in the ‘Golden West’ for six months longer . . . Tell Mother that I am still single but that the ‘fair heads’ out here are very hard to resist.”
Thousands of rats were still examined at the Rattery each week, and the rate of infection continued to fall. By the end of summer, it was common to go a week or two without observing a single diseased rat among the more than five thousand corpses spliced open each day by federal doctors in the Fillmore Street laboratory. In October, what proved to be the last infected rat in San Francisco was discovered in a fruit warehouse. After several more weeks of plague-free rat specimens confirmed it, the disease seemed to be finally eradicated from the city. Blue and Wyman officially declared San Francisco a healthy port that November, leading the Call to blare in a front-page headline, “Clean Bill of Health Given San Francisco; Surgeon General Wyman Reports Pacific Coast States Free from Plague.”
As Blue looked out over the city, there were few parts of San Francisco’s daily life in which he could not see his reflection. More than 250,000 square feet of wooden boardwalks had been replaced with rat-proof concrete sidewalks at his insistence; over six million square feet of buildings in the city were now supported by concrete floors; more than 11,000 houses had been disinfected and their backyards cleared of any material that could provide shelter to rodents. Just as important was what a visitor to San Francisco could no longer see: Blue’s rat eradication campaign had killed more than two million rats, a number five times the size of the city’s human population. More than 154,000 of those rats had passed across the long metal dissection tables of the Rattery. The city, once notorious for its filth and frontier mindset, was now one of the most modern and sanitary metropolises in the world.
After so many years of struggle, Blue finally had a reason to celebrate. On March 31, 1909, four hundred men clad in tuxedos gathered in a grand banquet hall at the Fairmont Hotel for a dinner held in his honor. Women in formal gowns clustered at tables along the balcony railing, overlooking the floor below. Blue took his place at a long table at the front of the room, with Governor Gillett on one side of him and Mayor Taylor on the other. Homer King, the president of the Bank of California and the head of the Citizens Health Committee, presided as the evening’s master of ceremonies. Reporters from every newspaper in the city were on hand, as well as representatives from several Eastern publications whose respect San Francisco still longed for. A copy of the 313-page report partly written by Blue and Rucker that described how San Francisco had conquered plague was placed at every setting, bound in a brilliant red cover. “The people of San Francisco have the satisfaction of knowing that they protected not merely their city, but the whole country at large,” it began. “Had anti-plague measures failed here the spread of the disease would have been extremely difficult to control. Therefore, the cities and states of the union should, and we believe do, join with us in gratification at the happy outcome.”
The banquet proceeded through several courses, each one touching on one part of Blue’s cleanup campaign. The oysters were not blue points, the menu noted, because “He’s been giving them to us for two years.” The vegetables were “fresh from our produce district. We spread out tables in the street down there and call it ‘Spotless Town.’ ” Ice cream was served in the shape of a mousetrap with the head of a fake rat protruding below it, while drinks came in glasses the shape of miniature garbage cans.
Speakers lined up to toast Blue and the work of his men, highlighting how Blue had brought about change through tact and amiability, rather than through force of personality. He led the city by showing a willingness to speak directly to its citizens, rather than by insisting upon directives from an isolated laboratory on Angel Island, and the city returned the respect. “You are here to learn what Dr. Rupert Blue has done for your city; how his leadership asserted itself at the time when a leader was most needed,” King said. More praise followed, leaving Blue, a man unaccustomed to public spectacles, embarrassed by the attention. “We made no mistake when we chose him to clean up our city,” said Governor Gillett. “It is now up to you, citizens of San Francisco, never to let disease again enter your city.” Then Walter Macarthur, who would soon take on the position of U.S. Shipping Commissioner, rose to his feet and said, “We owe the success of our sanitation campaign to the fact that Dr. Blue carried no ‘big stick.’ Dr. Blue manifested in that campaign the very highest qualities of leadership. As soon as he realized that the people of San Francisco
were disposed to pay heed to the rules as laid down he found his course easy.”
As Blue finally approached the lectern, a cheer arose and continued for a full five minutes, only dying down once King implored the crowd to let the man speak. When calm was finally restored, Blue thanked the city for putting its trust in him. “I feel as if I were one of California’s adopted sons,” he began. “Need I say that I am profoundly grateful for this evidence of your appreciation? Need I say that the campaign would not have been successful had it not been for the cooperation of your citizens? . . . San Francisco has fought her battle and as one of you I am proud of the victory she has gained.”
When Blue finished speaking, Mayor Taylor presented him with a gold watch, an inscription on the back thanking him for his service to the city. Every member of Blue’s staff was given a medal, which the mayor pinned to their chests in front of the cheering crowd. Other banquets followed in the weeks ahead, with Blue and his men toasted in so many elegant restaurants, churches and meeting rooms that they began to lose count, happily allowing the feeling of victory to wash over them after so many lonely hours of worry.
For all the celebrations, Blue knew that the victory over plague was partial at best. Though the disease was no longer present in the city, it still remained lurking in the hills of the East Bay. In August of 1907, a seven-year-old boy named Joe Farias had died of what appeared to be plague on the family’s ranch near the town of Concord in Contra Costa County. Two more victims were discovered in the same area within the same week. Federal health agents learned from local ranchers that thick herds of sickly squirrels were appearing on farms throughout the county, moving so slowly that all it took to kill them was a stick.
Blue, at the time still focused on the danger facing San Francisco, had sent Rucker to investigate. He discovered a dead rat on a ranch a mile and a half from the home of the first victim and brought its body back to the Fillmore Street headquarters. Tests confirmed that it had died of the disease.
Rucker began making more forays into the East Bay, each time bringing additional men with him to fan out across the golden hills. It was on one of these expeditions that federal health officers came upon a wild ground squirrel, still alive, that appeared to be suffering from the disease. A tissue sample taken from its body proved that the animal was infected with plague. Researchers had long known that fleas in laboratories could spread the disease from rats to squirrels, yet it had never before been observed in the wild. Now, with proof before him, Blue realized that the perimeter of the outbreak had widened. “The discovery has caused considerable apprehension,” he wrote to Wyman in Washington.
The danger was twofold. Ground squirrels were abundant throughout the state, creating a deep reservoir of victims that the disease could infect. Capturing and killing them in large quantities was made close to impossible not only by their physical abilities—a squirrel can run at over 12 miles per hour, roughly double the speed of an average adult human, and jump over ten horizontal feet, making it small and quick enough to dodge a bullet—but by the fact that their colonies are often spread across a warren of underground tunnels more than thirty feet in length, neutralizing the effectiveness of poison. Squirrels that could be caught were widely consumed as food by rural families, putting humans in direct contact with flea-infested fur. In some rural parts of the state, impoverished families had no other source of meat.
Blue only had to look across the bay to the foothills of the East Bay framing the horizon to be reminded that plague was still out there, searching for its next victim. He gave his men a week to enjoy their success in eradicating it from San Francisco. Then he announced that Rucker would be in charge of chasing the disease before it spread deeper into the continent.
Just as Blue had done in his rat eradication campaign in San Francisco, Rucker improvised, searching for anything that could help him replicate their success in the city. He began experimenting with the best type and composition of poison gas to fumigate the animals’ burrows. When poison proved ineffective, he turned to explosives, hoping to blast the danger away. While the use of dynamite did help, the sound and vibrations often scared the squirrels that survived into fleeing, dispersing the disease even more. Only after discovering that squirrels can withstand a higher dose of strychnine in their cheeks than their stomachs did he begin to make headway. He placed traps of poisoned barley far away from squirrels’ nests, allowing the chemical to saturate the animal’s mouth while it carried the tainted food back to others in its nest, where it would become lethal once it was swallowed.
Rucker knew that what federal health officials had learned in combating plague in the dense urban environment of San Francisco would likely offer little or no help when facing acres of wild, untouched land. “It is in these regions that the hardest part of the fighting must occur,” Rucker wrote. “Such a campaign will be an enormous undertaking, but it must come, and not until it has reached a successful close can we hope for the answer to the piteous prayer which has gone up from mankind since the dawn of life—that no plague may come nigh our dwelling.”
CHAPTER 17
CAST ASIDE
For the first time since he was a child, Blue felt at home.
With the city no longer mired in an epidemic, he closed the makeshift laboratory and Rattery at Fillmore Street and opened a new headquarters in a rebuilt downtown skyscraper on New Montgomery. There, the miracle of San Francisco’s rebirth was impossible to ignore. Where two years before lay only rubble was now a thriving, modern commercial district, the economic heart of one of the most important cities on the Pacific. After years of working in cramped, unheated rooms while piloting the city’s revival, Blue treated himself to a wide wooden desk and a broad oriental rug from W. & J. Sloane, an upscale New York furniture dealer that counted John D. Rockefeller among its clients. The campaign to eradicate plague from the state’s ground squirrel population would take months, if not years, he reasoned, anchoring him in the city for the foreseeable future.
With Rucker at his side, he spent weeks driving across the broad farms and rolling hills of Northern California, tracking the eastward spread of the disease. Despite the acres of open land, its path was easy to trace. Ranchers would first notice that something was wrong when dozens of emaciated squirrels would emerge from a burrow and stagger about as if in a daze. The fur of the diseased animals would appear to have been brushed back against the grain, while their jaws looked swollen and dislodged. They would then die off in such great numbers that their holes would become jammed with dead bodies, with carcasses lying in heaps around the blocked entrance. Flocks of buzzards feasted upon the remains, widening the spectacle. Those not consumed by birds were eaten by coyotes and rattlesnakes, leaving nothing behind.
By the middle of 1909, infected squirrels could be found across 1,500 square miles of the state, an area more than thirty times larger than San Francisco. The only thing preventing a human epidemic in the region was its emptiness: four times as many people lived in San Francisco itself as in the quilt of counties stretching from Contra Costa south and eastward to the Nevada state line, with mountainous Alpine County serving as home to just 309 people. Sixteen patients developed plague in the region in the year following the disease’s retreat from San Francisco, eight of them dying from the disease. The methods that had saved the city—covering and removing trash quickly to cut back on the food supply, ample use of poison, and rebuilding cellars and chicken coops with concrete—would have no effect in a region made up mostly of farms and acres of untouched land.
Once again, Blue had to innovate. In order to reduce the amount of human contact with potential carriers of the disease, he convinced the state health board to ban the shipment of ground squirrels within California unless they were for scientific purposes, eliminating the widespread market for the animals as food. An inspector was stationed at the entrance to the tunnel connecting Oakland with Contra Costa County to warn trappers ferrying bags of dead squirrels to sell as meat of the danger they
were exposing themselves to by handling the animals. Blue then rehired dozens of his former ratcatchers. He gave each one a rifle and a canvas knapsack and told them to spend a week in the East Bay and send back as many dead squirrels as they could. One man killed 131 squirrels in eight hours, each of which was tagged with the location where it was shot and sealed in a tin can pumped with chloroform to kill its fleas. Crates full of tin cans containing dead squirrels began arriving at the San Francisco office each afternoon, along with an occasional milk jug stuffed with bodies when trappers ran out of supplies and improvised.
Federal doctors once again began the bloody work of slicing open the chest of each animal and searching its organs for signs of plague. By August of 1909, 178 infected squirrels had passed through the laboratory, leaving Blue to estimate that 1.2 percent of the squirrel population of the East Bay carried the disease. Though still below the 2 percent rate signaling that a human epidemic was near, it only confirmed his fears. All it would take was for the fleas of an infected squirrel to jump on to a passing hiker or a family dog for the disease to travel to Oakland or Berkeley, once again introducing plague into an urban environment where it could easily find new victims.