The Barbary Plague

was interrupted. A white woman on Stockton tried to pass garments to a Chinese tailor, but a police officer blocked the exchange. A Chinese man tried to mail a letter outside the zone, but guards spun him around and hustled him back to his quarter. A laundryman staggered up to the rope line under a heap of clean clothes for delivery outside the zone. An officer halted the shipment.¹⁷

The first time, it was a penetrable quarantine made of flimsy ropes, but this time, the barricades were hardened with wooden fence posts and barbed wire. A persistent buzz in the neighborhood said the quarantine was a mere prelude to imprisonment. Wyman and Kinyoun were exchanging telegrams discussing a proposal for the mass relocation of the Chinese to plague detention camps on Angel Island near the quarantine station, or on Mission Rock, a tiny, desolate speck of land in the bay near the waterfront warehouses. The news shot a new bolt of fear through the Chinese. Detention camps were a throwback to the medieval lazarettos, isolation hospitals or pest-houses.

Back East, wire service stories about San Francisco’s plague cases were now seeping into the press. With a major news event brewing out West, the dean of New York medical reporters decided to investigate. Dr. George F. Shrady, the burly, bearded medical correspondent for the New York Herald, boarded a train west to determine once and for all whether bubonic plague really existed in San Francisco.

The surgeon general got wind of the reporting trip. Fretting about bad publicity, he commanded Kinyoun to call upon the influential journalist at his hotel and brief him on the plague situation.

Kinyoun fumed. It was like bringing the mountain to Mohammed. Choking back his resentment, he boarded a ferry to the city. From the Ferry Building, he rode west on Market Street to the Palace Hotel on New Montgomery. He walked through the cobblestoned coaches’ entrance, under seven stories of balconies and a glass atrium roof. Once past the 150-foot dining room ablaze with chandeliers, he caught an elevator to Dr. Shrady’s room. The Palace’s rooms had fifteen-foot ceilings, bay windows, coffee served on Haviland china from France, and beds of imported Irish linen. It was the hostelry he could not afford, the scene of his first humiliation by this city, and now the scene of his second.

“I called upon the Doctor and after much struggling I was admitted to the presence,” Kinyoun told a friend. “I found him stowed away up in the Palace, surrounded by stenographers, typewriters, confidential clerks, bell boys, and porters, running as it were, the whole editorial business of the Herald.”¹⁸

Shrady assured Kinyoun that he had the editorial freedom to print the truth in his paper, adding that the Call would syndicate his series. Kinyoun suspected that Shrady’s real agenda was to deny plague had existed before his arrival and then to “discover” it during his stay and plant the Herald’s flag on the story. It was an old reporter’s trick, that of reinventing the news. But Kinyoun duly briefed Shrady on the plague cases diagnosed so far and invited him to view an autopsy. As it happened, the plague inconveniently went into hiding that week, so there was little to show.

Shrady toured the plague zone and reported what he saw, but he had to acknowledge that he had yet to see a single living case of plague. However, he reported that Kinyoun showed him all the clinical charts, autopsy notes, and lab tests amassed so far. All this, Shrady said, convinced him that the bubonic plague was real.

“Microscopic preparations… [and] infected organs said to have been removed from the nine dead bodies… now leave such mute but valuable testimony for accurate scientific investigation,” wrote Shrady. “I personally examined every one of them and the existence of bubonic plague bacillus in all of them admits of no shadow of doubt.”¹⁹

With a police escort kicking down doors, Shrady returned to tour Chinatown alcoves by candlelight, hoping to see a live plague patient as evidence of the epidemic. It eluded him.

Still, Shrady planned to write an incendiary finale. “He was going to advocate the total destruction of Chinatown by fire, by destruction by dynamite, drive these people out from their abodes,” Kinyoun said. At a time when the vaccine campaign was provoking the Chinese to open revolt, Kinyoun said, “I begged him by everything holy never to advocate such a thing as that at the present time unless he had ten thousand troops at his back.”²⁰

May 30 was Memorial Day, and the streets were draped in bunting, lined with patriotic crowds waving flags and brass bands blaring martial tunes. Amid the festivities, Kinyoun and Kellogg learned of a new suspicious death in Chinatown. They invited Shrady to attend the postmortem.

After pressing through the cheering parade throngs, the trio of doctors got passes to cross the quarantine line and made their way toward their grim errand. Once they reached the morgue, they had to run a gauntlet of angry and mistrustful Chinese before entering. There, they unwrapped a shroud covering the corpse of a forty- year-old laborer, Dang Hong, dressed in his funeral robes.

“All the pathologic phenomena observed were those usually associated with plague,” Shrady wrote. “… On the left side under the jaw, there were evidences of suppuration, due to previous inflammation of the glands…. The glands in the groin were slightly enlarged…. Numerous specimens were removed from the body for future microscopical observation by Drs. Kellogg and Kinyoun.” Later, Kellogg came to Shrady’s hotel with a specimen for Shrady to examine. Both men agreed: The samples contained the bacteria of bubonic plague.²¹

Indignantly, the Chung Sai Yat Po attacked the diagnosis. The paper deemed the autopsy suspicious because the Chinese Six Companies’ own observers were barred from attending it. “The Chinese knew very well that he did not die of plague,” the Chinese reporter wrote. “They wanted to find out what those wicked doctors were doing.” He compared the Caucasian doctors to greedy vultures attacking carrion. “Perhaps there is a ghost of plague haunting Chinatown,” he wrote. “To quarantine Chinatown is to eat the meat of the ghost of the plague. Do you think there is enough meat for them?”²² After his story on the autopsy of Dang Hong, Shrady became something of a celebrity in San Francisco. The Call reprinted his series. Even the Chinese daily ran his story.²³ Kinyoun nursed hopes that this reporter, for all his arrogance, might yet help the plague campaign by writing truthful dispatches. It looked as if that might come to pass. Then, suddenly, Shrady turned from alarmist to apologist.

Shrady’s conversion followed a banquet thrown in his honor by Mayor Phelan at the posh Pacific Union Club. Surrounded by city politicians, Shrady tucked into an elaborate procession of courses at a table garlanded with flowers and cornucopias of California fruits. The visiting journalist rode through Golden Gate Park to the Cliff House, to breathe the sea air while overlooking the Pacific surf. Before retiring for the night at the Palace, Shrady told the press he was charmed by the city’s pleasures. Later that night, who should drop by Shrady’s hotel for a chat but California’s governor, Henry T. Gage.²⁴

“The dinner had the desired effect,” Kinyoun later wrote to his family in the East. “The Doctor [Shrady] had evidently been doctored.”²⁵

After being entertained, Shrady published a finale to his plague series, in which he withdrew any concern he’d earlier expressed:

“After having visited every section of Chinatown under the escort of the police and of the health authorities, both Federal and local, I have come to the conclusion that this plague scare in San Francisco is absolutely unwarranted,” Shrady wrote. “I am thoroughly convinced that there really was no danger of the plague and that virtually it did not exist in this city.”

“The rumor that plague threatens San Francisco is ridiculous and unfounded,” he concluded. “One swallow does not make a summer, and one case of plague does not make an epidemic.”²⁶

Kinyoun was crushed. Now, he feared, the East Coast would never learn the truth from Shrady. “The Philistines,” he said, “had shorn him of his locks.”²⁷

On the same day that the newspaperman recanted, Chew Kuey Kem, a forty-nine-year-old cigar maker, died in Chinatown—one more case of “bumpkin” for the books.

With the city’s trade and prestige at stake, the Call pleaded “in the name of humanity” for Chinatown to be burned. “So long as it stands, so long will there be the menace of the appearence in San Francisco of every form of disease, plague and pestilence which Asian filth and vice generate,” the paper said in its May 31 editorial. “Clear the foul spot from San Francisco and give its debris to the flames.”

The Wolf Doctor