The Barbary Plague

nobody could frame us with the plague.”²¹

News of San Francisco’s misfortune became impossible to contain, and dispatches reached other states and countries both north and south of the border. Westbound trains traveled empty, abandoned by those afraid of contracting the deadly bacteria. Vacationers favored safer destinations where the greatest concern was sunburn or overeating.

Trading partners began to balk at receiving the city’s infected goods. The Canadian government ordered all steamers from San Francisco quarantined until further notice. And the outbound steamer Curacao was quarantined in Mazatlan by the government of Mexico. San Francisco businessmen remembered how quarantine had paralyzed Hawaiian sugar shipments after Honolulu’s plague struck. A sickening vision of California wheat stranded on the docks, and its fruit rotting, rose before their eyes.

Editorial pages of the city’s major dailies called it an outrage that the city was being branded a pestilential plague spot rather than the golden vision of health and pleasure they wanted to promote.

Down at the intersection of Market and Kearny—the Times Square of the West—publishers displayed their edifice complex. The de Young family erected the West’s first steel-frame skyscraper for the Chronicle’s headquarters, rising a majestic ten stories. Then William Randolph Hearst hired the same architects to design a loftier tower for the Examiner just across the street. He was topped by Claus Spreckels, the sugar king, who built his newspaper, the Call, a nineteen-story monument.²²

Although rivals in every other respect, de Young’s Chronicle and Spreckels’s Call found themselves on the same side of an issue. Both papers relentlessly ridiculed the plague campaign of Kinyoun as a fraud. Ironically, the only newspaper of the big three dailies to engage in serious coverage of the outbreak was that font of yellow journalism, Hearst’s Examiner. To be sure, the so-called saffron sheet pursued the plague story less for its public health import than for its sensational ingredients of death and intrigue. But in the city, its coverage stood alone. Now, however, other city papers charged the Examiner with journalistic treason against San Francisco. Hearst’s New York Journal spread news of the city’s shame, declaring: BLACK PLAGUE CREEPS INTO AMERICA.²³

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. They blasted the Examiner for its heresy. “It will be remembered that the Call and the Chronicle agreed to omit publication of the sensational doings of the Board of Health and the Chief of Police… but the Examiner not only refused to join this proper policy, but wired the lying report to the New York Journal and thence spread it broadcast.”

As the rhetoric mounted, furious merchants converged on City Hall. They vowed the yellow flag of plague would never fly over San Francisco and demanded that the mayor repair the damage to the city’s image.

Mayor Phelan had no choice. He dispatched telegrams to forty American cities, insisting—falsely—that there had been just one isolated case, adding that Chinatown was purged and purified. “There is no future danger,” he promised.

Over the page one story, the Call unfurled a banner headline: CITY PLAGUE SCARE A CONFESSED SHAM.²⁴

As City Hall capitulated to the merchants and newspapers, Kinyoun confirmed three new plague deaths. Word by word, the public health service expanded its codebook. In it, San Francisco’s beleaguered health board acquired a code name that captured the style of the whole town—“Burlesque.”

A New Quarantine

YELLOW SULFUR FUMES CAST an amber pall over Chinatown. The Chinese choked and cursed the caustic fog. But the health department insisted the haze was a sign of progress against the plague.

Lim Fa Muey, a teenage cigar maker, was one of those who hurried to work through the veil of chemicals one morning in early May 1900. Once she was inside the cigar factory, the familiar tang of cured tobacco leaves would have been welcome after the stench of fumigation—if it weren’t that she began to feel so ill. The same symptoms that hit her neighbors now assailed the girl. They were the symptoms of a disease that officially didn’t exist: the leaden ache that dragged at her back and limbs. The lurching stomach. The giddy head. The eyes that burned fever bright.

Back at her apartment at 739 Clay Street that evening, her body ached like an old woman’s. Inside, the bacteria overflowed from her lymph glands into her bloodstream, invading tissues of her heart, liver, and spleen. The germ’s poison dissolved vessel walls, so that the blood seeped out in small hemorrhages that bloomed like ink stains beneath the skin. As her cells lost the battle against the invader, the rising fever burned her senseless. From delirium, she lapsed into coma. Her pulse sped, then sank to an imperceptible flutter. One by one, her organs failed. Her heart stopped. On May 11, Lim Fa Muey became the city’s first female plague victim, but not the last.¹

On the same day, Minnie Worley, a white physician working in Chinatown, made a house call at 730? Commercial Street. A family had called her to examine their teenage maid, Chin Moon. While cleaning house, Chin Moon felt a sudden wave of dizziness. She tried to continue her chores, but the vertigo forced her to lie down. Now her head throbbed. She ached from her skull to the pit of her stomach. She vomited and felt better, but only briefly. The pain was relentless. Her lower right abdomen was tender, and she winced at the doctor’s touch. Her temperature was 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Her pulse raced at 120 beats per minute.²

Dr. Worley diagnosed typhoid fever. It was a safe guess, in a day when the typhoid germ lived in tainted milk and water, but Worley was wrong. By morning, Chin Moon was delirious. Sinking into a coma, the unresponsive girl was taken by carriage to Pacific Hospital, but the doctors there were helpless to save her. In the predawn dark of Sunday morning, May 13, she died.

Drs. Kinyoun and Kellogg brought the body of Chin Moon back to the Chinese hospital for an autopsy. There, they discovered the one crucial symptom that Dr. Worley had overlooked: a lump on the inside of the girl’s right thigh. They lanced the lump and exposed a skein of inflamed lymph glands. After drawing fluid into a syringe, they squirted it onto a glass slide and looked at it through the microscope. They saw short, rounded, rod-shaped bacteria. When stained by Gram’s method, the germs glowed with the pink hue of plague.

Unmoved by these findings, Dr. Worley stood by her diagnosis of typhoid. Chin Moon’s killer couldn’t have been plague, she argued. Nobody in her employer’s household—including four women, four children, and several men—had caught the disease from her.³ She didn’t understand that though typhoid races from person to person, via unclean hands, food, and water, plague usually needs a middleman to spread it. The city had no idea that plague most often is spread not by people, but by the capricious appetite of a rat flea.

By mid-May, nine people had officially died from the plague. As he wired Washington about each new case of “bumpkin,” Kinyoun was worried. The local health board, while calling for antiplague measures to stop the outbreak, had limited funds and no experience in epidemic control. Worse, it seemed impossible to extract a medical history from the Chinese.

Terrified of having their homes or shops invaded, the Chinese volunteered little. When asked about a sick or dead relative or neighbor, people often said the deceased had been ill for a month. A long-drawn-out death was at odds with the short, violent course of the plague. Kinyoun suspected that those interviewed were coached to conceal the plague. He felt like a fool, intentionally misled, but he was helpless to stop it.

Surgeon General Wyman resorted to diplomatic maneuvers. He sent a strongly worded letter to Wu Ting- Fang, China’s envoy in Washington, D.C.: “I would respectfully suggest that you send a dispatch to your Consul- General in San Francisco… to use his influence to have the Chinese comply cheerfully with necessary measures of the health officials, and to confer with Surgeon Kinyoun, Angel Island….”⁴

In a May 15 telegram to Kinyoun, Surgeon General Wyman outlined a master plan for plague control: “Cordon [off] suspected area; guard ferries and R.R. stations with reference to Chinese only; house to house inspection with