the celebration. Containing the plague was like trying to catch quicksilver. Stung by his legal setback and alarmed by the new cases, Kinyoun devised another scheme.
If he couldn’t quarantine Chinatown, he would broaden the surgeon general’s May 21 prohibition on Asian travel into a sweeping ban on people of any race leaving San Francisco for other places. Ships and trains were ordered to deny tickets to any person without a health certificate signed by Kinyoun. He dashed off urgent letters on June 15 to the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Pacific Coast Steamship Company.13 With a rising sense of panic, he urged the surgeon general to build detention camps to hold plague suspects at the state border, using War Department tents. “Rush answer,” he implored.14
Kinyoun also fired off warning letters to the health boards of Louisiana, Texas, Kansas, Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Washington, urging that they stay on the lookout for any infected passengers or freight from the Golden State.15
The explosion was predictable. California’s commercial and political powers erupted in fury: At stake was a bumper crop of California fruit worth $40 million and fortunes in transportation and tourism revenues—all paralyzed by Kinyoun’s sweeping new decree. Their wrath echoed in a banner headline in the
“The indignation of the people of California is beyond expression,” said the Republican State Central Committee.16 A delegation led by the
President McKinley didn’t take long to overrule Kinyoun’s travel ban. Vindicated San Franciscans rejoiced, viewing the president’s act as not just a green light for travel, but a clean bill of health for the city.
In the wake of the president’s order, Kinyoun was charged with contempt of court. But the governor had an even more nefarious, more effective plan to bury the quarrelsome quarantine officer for good. Gage unveiled a conspiracy theory that would discredit Kinyoun, while offering a convenient way to explain the existence of plague bacteria in his state.
Gage told the press that Kinyoun had imported cultures of bubonic plague bacteria for use in his laboratory on Angel Island, then suggested that, by spilling the bacteria, Kinyoun had created the catastrophe himself.17
Kinyoun, captain of a sinking ship, was summoned to court for a hearing before Judge Morrow on the contempt charge. By turns meek and belligerent, Kinyoun gave assurances that he hadn’t intended to violate any court order. The
Kinyoun got cold comfort from his government-appointed attorney, Frank Coombs, who told the quarantine officer he was going to have a hard time keeping him out of jail.19
Judge Morrow gave Kinyoun a week to show cause why he should not be held in contempt of court in violating the injunction handed down by the court in the Wong Wai lawsuit.
On Monday, June 25, the courtoom was packed with businessmen and members of the Chinese community. Kinyoun was called to the stand and sworn in. J. C. Campbell, an attorney for the Chinese Six Companies, interrogated him about the racial motives for his plague control.
Prickly and defensive, Kinyoun wrangled with Campbell from the witness box, insisting that he was innocent of discriminatory intent and that his earlier action and the new travel ban were “entirely separate and distinct.”20 Few in the crowd were moved by his argument.
Just as Kinyoun was trying to convince the court in San Francisco about the plague, Rupert Blue was trying to do much the same thing—convince Washington about the plague outbreak in the Mediterranean. On June 26, Blue had picked up a copy of the Italian paper
Kinyoun’s court grilling ended on July 2. Judge Morrow promised to render his decision on the contempt charge the next day. Kinyoun’s prospects looked dire. As the rest of San Francisco bought sparklers and rockets for a July 4th holiday, the Kinyouns despaired in their cottage on Angel Island. Kinyoun encouraged his children to think of his trial as a biblical battle between the forces of good and evil—science and commercialism. His son Conrad declared California to be a land of false prophets where people worshiped the dollar.
“Judge Morrow don’t seem to know who my papa is,” Conrad said. “Judge Morrow thinks he’s the biggest man in the world, but right there he’s mistaken, he don’t know my papa like I do.” With none left to champion him, Kinyoun clung to the boy’s defense like a life raft.22
On July 3, the quarantine officer, flanked by bail bondsmen, returned to court to learn his fate. His opponents were confident. But when Judge Morrow took his place on the bench, he delivered a surprise reprive: Kinyoun’s travel ban—because it was general and not racially focused—hadn’t violated the court’s ruling against unlawful imprisonment. In any event, the ban was rendered moot by President McKinley’s order. Now Kinyoun was cleared of contempt charges. Stunned, he walked out of court a free man. Free, but despised. On Independence Day, news of his freedom was buried in the newspapers’ back pages, among reports of shipwrecks.23
Kinyoun hoped to consult Judge Morrow on matters of public health but never managed to catch him at his office. He left his card. One night, he was startled to see the white-haired jurist join him in line for the Angel Island ferry.
Kinyoun and the judge sat down together in the cabin of the ferry as it churned north. Amid a crowd of bay commuters, the two men huddled from the San Francisco waterfront to the shores of Tiburon.
Judge Morrow lectured Kinyoun on the line between federal and state control of public health. Kinyoun, in turn, schooled the judge about the dangers of plague. The judge was impressed enough to ask Kinyoun to help him obtain a new kind of rat poison. As the ferry docked, Kinyoun exulted that he’d made the judge see the light.24
But Kinyoun’s detente with the judge failed to soften the city’s antipathy. Calls grew louder for Kinyoun to leave town. In City Hall, the board of supervisors considered a motion to fire the city board of health, his last scientific allies.
OUST THE FAKERS, demanded the
White Men’s Funerals
UNTIL AUGUST 1900, the plague had claimed only Chinese victims. A rough-hewn teamster named William Murphy would change all that.
By day Murphy drove a horse carriage, making deliveries in Chinatown. At night he put down his reins and picked up an opium pipe, escaping from his daily rut of mud and manure into a vaporous dreamscape.
One day, he felt a rush of fever. His head pounded and his body hurt as though he’d been beaten in a bar brawl. He sweated and shivered convulsively, his thirty-four-year-old drayman’s frame now weak as a babe’s.
