The Barbary Plague

Light-headed and woozy, he dragged himself from his Dupont Street apartment to the City and County Hospital at 26th and Potrero Streets. The doctors made puzzled stabs at a diagnosis. On August 11, William Murphy died. An autopsy revealed him to be the city’s first white victim of bubonic plague.¹

Joseph Kinyoun studied the specimens with a grim vindication. “It is the most beautiful case of plague infection (if such things can be called beautiful) that I have encountered in this epidemic,” he said.² Murphy’s death expanded the outbreak beyond people of Asian blood, but it was Anne Roede’s that transcended the boundaries of Chinatown.

Anne Roede, a white nurse, was called to Pacific Avenue to tend a teenage boy suffering from stomach pains and respiratory distress. It was a presumed case of diphtheria. As Nurse Roede bent over his bedside, the boy was seized with nausea. Too quick for her to dodge, he heaved and spattered the nurse’s face. She cleaned her patient, then composed herself as best she could.

Forty-eight hours later, Nurse Roede felt her own face grow flushed, her throat thick and raw. Her strength swooned, and her breath became labored. Doctors admitted her to the contagious disease ward of Children’s Hospital on California Street, another suspected case of diphtheria. Her fever soared. After hovering three days on the fringes of consciousness, the twenty-eight-year-old nurse suffocated.

The doctors moved her body to the Children’s Hospital morgue for autopsy and began their postmortem. Only when they looked into her lungs did they realize that Nurse Roede had died of pneumonic plague.

Panic-stricken hospital administrators decided that their morgue was contaminated and that it must be burned. As the fire engines pulled up and prepared to torch the room, someone called for coal oil to drench the floor. The oil was stored in the next room, amid a huge powder keg of flammable fuels—enough to engulf the whole hospital and all of California Street in flames. At the last moment, the fire was canceled. “If it had been started after that manner,” Kinyoun reflected, “all the fire engines in San Francisco would not have saved the Children’s Hospital.”³

Nurse Roede’s teenage patient died and was buried without an autopsy. Kinyoun was convinced that his killer was pneumonic plague and that he had infected Nurse Roede. He was even more convinced that a chain of such misdiagnoses was concealing the true size of the outbreak. “There have been more cases of bubonic plague… in San Francisco than have seen the light,” he wrote. “Either deliberately or unintentionally cases of bubonic plague have been returned to the Health Office under another name.”⁴

But plague was only part of his job. Quarantine duties had kept him very busy. In just over a year as San Francisco’s quarantine officer, Kinyoun had overseen the inspection of more than one thousand ships, during which more than fourteen thousand passengers had been disinfected.⁵ Clad in oilskins, the quarantine officers were required to board ships in the bay until nine or ten o’clock at night, breasting the whitecaps, hauling fumigation equipment aboard, smoking and spraying the fetid compartments. They checked passengers and crew, taking temperatures, peering into throats, and palpating glands in the neck to search for any signs of illness aboard ship. Passengers were always restive in quarantine, bridling at the health and baggage checks. It was a wet, grueling, thankless job.

But no ship made waves like the Occidental and Oriental Steam Ship Co. vessel the Coptic. She regularly plied the sea lanes from San Francisco through Honolulu and Kobe, Japan, to China, returning with her hold full of China tea, Hawaiian sugarcane, crates of Asian-Pacific delicacies— water chestnuts, yams, green ginger, taro root, lily bulbs, dried fish, and oysters—and a menagerie of dogs, cats, and monkeys.

After leaving San Francisco on June 26, 1900, to return to Asia, the ship’s surgeon, James Moloney, documented one of the most contentious cases of an already contentious year. In his ship’s logs, the surgeon said the Coptic picked up passengers in Honolulu, then headed for Japan. When the ship reached the port of Kobe, a steerage passenger was found mortally ill with fever.⁶

Ah Sow, a twenty-seven-year-old rice farmer from a plantation outside Honolulu, had a temperature of 105 degrees and an egg-size lump erupting from his thigh. Carried ashore in the wee hours, the man died as “the first case of plague occurring in the history of the Pacific Ocean on an outward bound ship,” Moloney said.⁷

On the steerage deck near the dead man’s berth, inspectors found three dead rats in the scuppers. A frenzy of finger-pointing ensued. The ship’s surgeon blamed the passenger Ah Sow for bringing plague aboard the Coptic from Hawaii.⁸ Honolulu health officers insisted that plague rats already on the ship from San Francisco had infected Ah Sow.

While health officers of California, Hawaii, and the shipping company wrangled, the Coptic, now scrubbed and fumigated, raced waves and weather to cross the Pacific again. When she next reached San Francisco Bay, Kinyoun was away, up north inspecting quarantine stations in Canada. He left the San Francisco station in the hands of an experienced officer, who scrutinized the Coptic’s freight and passengers to howls of protest over the delay.

Kinyoun returned to San Francisco from Canada to find himself blamed for the Coptic’s delayed docking and for alleged rough treatment of the passengers. He wrote to the surgeon general, saying that the unfounded charges were part of a plot to oust him. “I cannot be bribed, coerced or cajoled into a suppression [of the facts] regarding the plague.”⁹

By now, Kinyoun’s own health was compromised. “I have not been well since I came to San Francisco,” he acknowledged to his friends. “I had four break-downs in the last year.”¹⁰ His gut, always in turmoil, was seized with pains he ascribed to “chronic appendicitis.” Modern doctors might have labeled his malady as ulcers or spastic colon. By any name, there was little relief. In the days before acid blockers and antispasmodic drugs, the public relied on patent medicines laced with alcohol, coca, or morphine. Kinyoun simply suffered and blamed his agony on overwork and political pressure that the Coptic affair promised only to exacerbate.

When the Coptic next docked in San Francisco on December 14, once again loaded with exotic foodstuffs and live animals Kinyoun suspected were possible carriers of infection, he ordered extraordinary vigilance. He granted limited pratique, meaning only routine cargo could be unloaded, but seafood and produce needed special certificates. Dogs, cats, and monkeys required inspection.¹¹

At the wharf, resentment flared as irate merchants sat idly awaiting their shipments. Around the customs house, it was whispered that California’s congressmen were lobbying for Kinyoun’s transfer “as far away from San Francisco as possible.”¹²

San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce president, Charles Nelson, called Kinyoun “a menace to our trade and commerce.”¹³ On December 21, the Chinese Six Companies sued for release of their goods, charging that Kinyoun had again overreached his authority as quarantine officer.¹⁴

Now, barely six months free of litigation, Kinyoun was under renewed legal fire. Christmas on Angel Island was somber. Kinyoun took solace in his children’s hopes for the holiday. Alice, a pianist, craved music. Perry was obsessed with hunting and fishing. Conrad tickled Kinyoun by having picked up his father’s taste for technology and requesting that almost all his presents be machines. “It was real amusing,” Kinyoun wrote his friends, “in looking over the list which he gave me for Santa Claus.” Otherwise, the holiday held little cheer.¹⁵

As 1900 drew to a close, the newspapers ran rosy prophecies for San Francisco, now ranked as the nation’s eighth largest city, with a population of 342,000. “In San Francisco, the century goes out brilliantly,” wrote the Call’s publisher, John D. Spreckels. “All kinds of trade report a good movement at profitable prices. The export trade of the port was never better… the Orient keeps the ships and the shippers busy… there is a general feeling of confidence in… 1901.”¹⁶

Kinyoun took a gloomier view. “It appears to me that commercial interests of San Francisco are more dear to the inhabitants than the preservation of human life,” he wrote. “No sentiment has been expressed against a possible danger arising to the people, to their wives and children. These people seem perfectly indifferent whether or not bubonic plague exists in San Francisco, so long as they can sell their products and make large percentages on their investments.”¹⁷

The San Francisco Chronicle, in its year-end editorial, demanded the quarantine officer’s expulsion. Headlined THE DOOM OF KINYOUN, the column declared: “Kinyoun is to go…. The official acts of Kinyoun have been outrageous, and have fully warranted the public indignation…. It is grossly improper for his Federal superiors to say that such a man must not be removed ‘under fire.’ ”¹⁸

Kinyoun wrote a friend, “I am at war with everybody out here.”¹⁹