The Tartan

By Haley Williams

When people think plague, they usually think medieval: chamber pots being dumped in the streets, no hand washing, one bath per year, and rats everywhere. However, in the unexpectedly recent year of 1900, there was a bubonic plague epidemic in the most unexpected of places: San Francisco. 

While the first confirmed case of the plague in San Francisco was in March of 1900, in San Francisco’s Chinatown, there are pretty good odds that it may have come into the city much earlier. In June of 1899, a ship called the Nippon Maru came into port at Angel Island, where all ships coming from Asia and Hawaii were screened before being allowed entrance to the contiguous United States. In Asia, there was a large outbreak of the bubonic plague running rampant, called the third pandemic. If the plague were to get into San Francisco, it would only be a matter of time before it spread to the rest of the U.S. via the transcontinental railroad. Therefore, authorities were exercising an abundance of caution — or at least, they were supposed to be. On the Nippon Maru, there had been at least two confirmed cases of the plague before landing on Angel Island. The ship had been quarantined and thoroughly disinfected in Honolulu, Hawaii after the first case, but at least one more had popped up afterward. After the ship’s arrival on Angel Island, authorities also found two corpses floating in the bay, wearing life jackets with the Nippon Maru’s name printed on them, thought to have been stowaways. While the official cause of death was deemed drowning, a 12-hour examination brought officials to the conclusion that both men had been infected with the bubonic plague when they died. In a shocking and baffling move, Joseph Kinyoun (head of the Marine Hospital Service for the port) said, “Nah,” and let the goods and passengers into San Francisco. 

Joseph Kinyoun should have been the country’s best possible defense against the plague. As the plague had been raging through India and East Asia for years, Kinyoun knew in 1895 that the plague would certainly make it to America at some point, and promptly began studying the disease in 1896. For a decade before that, Kinyoun had been the head of the U.S.’s first bacteriology laboratory, which specifically focused on studying the causes, effects, and treatments of diseases such as yellow fever, cholera, smallpox, and plague. He had even studied under Louis Pasteur for a time. Unfortunately, he was arrogant. After having worked in Washington, D.C. at the Hygienic Laboratory for so long, Kinyoun believed that the Angel Island post was beneath him, and that he knew better than the local doctors. 

That first time, Kinyoun probably got lucky — at least for a while. With so many ships coming in from plague-infected areas, it’s hard to pin blame on one specific ship, but the Nippon Maru is a likely suspect. Regardless of where it came from, the plague officially reared its head in San Francisco in 1900. On Feb. 7, Wong Chut King died in his bed after nearly a month of suffering. Despite being promptly taken to an undertaker, his body wasn’t examined for nearly a month after that, on March 6. Upon finding suspiciously plague-like lumps called buboes (the namesake of the bubonic plague), the police surgeon summoned a city health official, who promptly called upon the city’s chief bacteriologist. Working deep into the night, the three men together performed an autopsy and they believed they saw plague bacilli under their microscope, but couldn’t be sure working with their limited equipment. In the middle of the night, they sent their samples off to Kinyoun’s lab to have them examined under much better conditions and equipment.

Four days later, Wong Chut King was officially the first case of the plague in San Francisco. Kinyoun and other city health officials attempted to impose a quarantine on Chinatown, but residents felt that this was unfair, biased, and in violation of their 14th amendment rights. A district judge agreed, and the quarantine was officially blocked. Furthermore, this is when California Governor Henry Gage stepped in. He had close ties and big investments in the railroad business, and knew that word of the plague would spread like… well, like the plague. Any news of plague in California would lead to paranoia in other states, huge cuts in exports, and would be all around terrible for profits. Therefore, in the eyes of Henry Gage, there was no plague. 

Kinyoun was suffering under attacks from all sides. The U.S. surgeon general was ordering him to enforce a quarantine and mandatory vaccinations with an experimental vaccine, and Gage, along with all of the newspapers who were in support of him, was launching a full-on smear campaign against Kinyoun, including releasing many harmful rumors. A couple of these include one of Kinyoun releasing plague-infected monkeys into the streets, and another saying that the whole plague was a conspiracy made up by Kinyoun in order to scam his way into more funding for his department. It got so bad that Kinyoun was receiving death threats and had to travel with a bodyguard. Nevertheless, he persisted, and did his best to carry out his orders. 

Gage was not easily evaded, though. He engaged in some sneaky negotiations with the federal government, and finally they agreed upon these terms: Gage and the California government would cooperate with plague eradication efforts, on the condition that Kinyoun was fired, and no news of the epidemic in San Francisco would go public. The feds agreed, and Kinyoun was promptly ousted to Detroit. Gage had won this round. 

The plague containment efforts were not going well. Residents of Chinatown didn’t want there to be a quarantine, so they were hiding their sick and dead from the doctors coming around looking for signs of plague. White citizens of San Francisco didn’t want there to be a plague, and generally weren’t worried about it, because they believed that the plague was a Chinese disease, and that it didn’t affect Europeans. You know, the Black Plague? The one that killed a third of Europe? That’s the disease that doesn’t affect Europeans. Sure. 

Gage did not keep his promise to cooperate with health officials, and continued to deny the plague’s existence and block them at every turn.

Enter Rupert Blue. As Kinyoun’s replacement, Blue was meant to be a sort of figurehead. He was supposed to just go with the flow, and keep up the whole “no plague here” charade that the rest of the city officials were trying for. Blue was not having it — he launched a full-scale attack on the plague. Immediately upon arrival in 1903, Blue called a meeting between local, state, and federal officials to discuss the situation. Sanitation in Chinatown (where most of the cases were still centered) was extremely lacking, and there was a real problem with the main allies of the plague (the rats). That first meeting ended in an unprecedented event: all three levels of government came together, and agreed to prioritize funding for sanitation efforts until San Francisco was plague-free. 

With his funding secured, Blue launched an all-out war on the plague. He set up shop in Chinatown, and put out a bounty on rats. He had people working day and night to autopsy every rat brought in, logging how many of them were infected with the plague at their time of death, and then incinerating their bodies. He headed up efforts to get streets paved so that street cleaners could work, and advocated for the cementing of basement floors to close off another avenue of access between rats and humans. Notably, he also worked to actually understand the culture of Chinatown residents, so that he could better understand their concerns and reservations. He even had his own team take the Haffkine serum, despite reports of some pretty gnarly side effects, earning the trust of Chinatown. Under Blue’s regime, plague deaths were becoming increasingly rare, and in 1905, San Francisco was officially declared plague-free. Blue had succeeded and was free to go home!

Then, the earthquake hit. In 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit San Francisco, destroying 80 percent of the city and killing over 3,000 people. These huge losses of housing and infrastructure led to many living in a makeshift tent city in Golden Gate Park. This tent city was an absolute rat heaven– and an absolute Rupert Blue nightmare. Close quarters, poor hygiene, and waste in the streets made for a veritable cesspool of Yersinia pestis, and San Francisco promptly called Blue back in as fast as possible. Blue, in all of his glory, rose to the task with a swiftness and re-launched his rat assassination campaign, continuing to dissect hundreds of them in the office he had dubbed The Rattery. To combat apathy among the general public, Blue even threatened a city-wide quarantine that would prevent the prestigious Great White Fleet from docking. In 1908, Blue had done it again — San Francisco was plague-free once more, and would stay that way. 

This story unfortunately has some uncomfortable parallels to recent events. Do pandemic denial and large-scale resistance to containment efforts sound familiar to anyone? Despite our inability to learn from our mistakes, there is one positive that we can take from this account: even in the face of denial, resistance, and perfect conditions for a rapid spread, we CAN triumph over infectious diseases. All it takes is a little effort, and a whole lot of dead rats.