The Barbary Plague

Plague traveled in stealth. No one yet knew how it spread. Nineteenth-century theories of its transmission focused on dirt, tainted food, and a “miasma,” or cloud of infectious vapors. In the boomtown of San Francisco, the business and political elite believed plague to be an alien scourge that would tarnish their trade and tourism. So from City Hall to the dome of the state capitol, officials dismissed the threat. The little people would die of it while the powerful debated its existence.

In 1900, the city played an active role in courting catastrophe. Like most Victorian cities, San Francisco neglected its aging sewer system, fouled its bay with garbage, and tolerated a burgeoning population of rats. Victorian cities were a petri dish for all manner of epidemics—like diphtheria, tuberculosis, and smallpox—and none more so than San Francisco. Whispers of “pesthouse” sent a stab of fear through families who never knew when their neighbors would be bundled into an ambulance buggy and carted off to an isolation ward of the county hospital. Mysterious germs, which no one but scientists could see, ran rampant until they closed throats with a white membrane, eroded lungs with coughing, or embossed faces with scars.¹⁷

With almost a tenth of the city terraced into its twelve tiny blocks, Chinatown was especially vulnerable to disease. But sickness on Dupont Street, unlike sickness elsewhere, was viewed by city officials as a symptom of alien squalor. Whites held their noses at Chinatown’s smoky stew of scents, as if the very air were a cloud of contagion. Even in medical circles, some doctors cleaved to old notions that the poor and sick could infect others through their exhalations. Another local myth held that Chinatown’s haze—mingling temple incense, pork smokehouses, and opium vapors—was noxious to white nostrils but rendered the denizens immune to the diseases they bred. The Chinese were blamed for the crowding and dilapidation of Chinatown, even though bias barred them from living elsewhere.

For the record, City Hall had published its view of Chinatown’s health a generation earlier, in an 1885 report to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:

The Chinese brought here with them and successfully maintained and perpetuated the grossest habits of bestiality practiced by the human race [gambling, opium, and prostitution]….[They] have innoculated our youth not only with the virus of immorality in its most hideous form, but have through the same sources physically poisoned the blood of thousands by the innoculation with diseases the most frightful that the flesh is heir to, and furnishing posterity with a line of scrofulous and leprous victims that might better never have been born than to curse themselves and mankind at large with their contagious presence.¹⁸

Against this backdrop of blame, the new threat arrived. At first, it was only dimly perceived. Dispatches from Hong Kong told of a violent outbreak, harrowing people living a continent away. But by 1899, steamers and sailing ships were carrying the infection across the Pacific to Hawaii. Cases of fever and swollen glands, followed by a swift death, occurred in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Recognizing that plague had arrived, the city’s health department ordered that the plague houses be burned. But a freak twist of trade winds whipped the flames out of control, igniting a church steeple and throwing a fountain of sparks beyond the reach of fire hoses. Soon Chinatown was engulfed, the flames touching off explosions in fireworks sheds and reducing shops to ashes. When the smoke cleared, six thousand Chinese were homeless in Honolulu.¹⁹

Learning the fate of their countrymen in the islands, San Francisco’s Chinese were terror-stricken. It seemed a double curse: epidemic followed by fire. But white San Franciscans felt tropical pestilence could never trouble their hometown, with its cool and misty climate. Capturing this naive optimism, the San Francisco Examiner ran a story headlined WHY SAN FRANCISCO IS PLAGUE-PROOF.²⁰

Safe inside their red velvet drawing rooms with brocaded curtains and satin-covered spittoons, powerful San Franciscans were certain that this Asian plague could never gain a foothold in a city that had bel canto and porcelain bathtubs. The specter of plague was like a wraith in the fog, impossible to grasp.

But plague scares had seized the city before. A year earlier, the Japanese vessel Nippon Maru reached the city after a Pacific crossing marred by two plague deaths. On entering San Francisco Bay, two Asian stowaways jumped overboard. Their bodies were fished from the cold gray swells, still wearing Nippon Maru life preservers. Doctors who performed an autopsy found suspicious-looking germs.²¹

But isolating the cause of death is difficult in a decomposing corpse, where all manner of bacteria run wild. Experts disputed the stowaways’ cause of death. And the fate of the Nippon Maru—with two dead at sea and two dead in port—was soon forgotten.

On the eve of 1900, another ship appeared on the horizon: the four-masted steamship Australia, making her regular run from Hawaii to the Golden Gate. Around Christmas 1899, when San Franciscans were trimming their trees, the ship had lain at anchor in the infected port of Honolulu. Then the Australia took on cargo, weighed anchor, and made way for San Francisco.

On New Year’s Day 1900, the San Francisco newspapers noted the imminent arrival of the Australia. Stiff southwesterly winds chased the rain and scoured the skies. On January 2 she appeared, as long as a football field, knifing through the steel blue water and into the Golden Gate. She anchored at the quarantine station off Angel Island, while officers searched her from stateroom to steerage. They failed to find any traces of infection, and under constant pressure from impatient shippers, the quarantine officers had no choice but to grant her permission to land.

So the Australia’s bladelike hull turned away from Angel Island toward the port of San Francisco. With a touch of unease, the quarantine officers watched as the V-shaped spume widened in her wake. Easing into the dock, the Australia delivered the sanitized bags of her sixty-eight passengers and a shipment of fumigated mail, along with some four-legged stowaways that, somehow, escaped detection.²²

The Year of the Rat

THE NEW YEAR OF 1900 ushered in dangerous times. In San Francisco, it was, as always, a holiday with two faces. Downtown, white celebrants raised their usual end-of-year ruckus. In the streets of Chinatown, a shadow fell over the Lunar New Year, in an ominous prologue to the year ahead.

Rain spattered the boardwalks on New Year’s Eve. When the skies cleared, the merrymakers came out. A band of maskers gathered on the corner of Market and Kearny streets, just below Union Square and Chinatown. Blowing horns and clanging cowbells, they hurled confetti and thrashed passersby with evergreen boughs left over from Christmas. Then the celebration turned ugly. Charging north up Kearny for five blocks, the carousers reached Chinatown and started grabbing Chinese musical instruments from the shops, banging the gongs, and blasting away on the winds. The din was so loud, it pierced the paneled recesses of the nearby men’s clubs. Bystanders cringed to hear the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” mingling with what sounded like the minor wails of a Chinese funeral band.¹

But funereal sentiments were very much in order in the year 1900. For death was the uninvited guest at this New Year’s feast although, like the maskers, it came in disguise.

In Chinatown, the approach of the Chinese New Year—the turning over of the lunar calendar in February— usually was heralded by the hiss and bang of firecrackers, warding off demons and trailing smoke that pricked the nostrils with excitement. Sidewalk stands traditionally sold stacks of juicy sugarcane and mounds of crackling melon seeds. To perfume the spring banquet tables, people would buy pots of narcissus bulbs, crowned with stiff green shoots and buds that burst into white trumpets with a center of gold that symbolized good fortune. People wearing silk tunics in peacock hues would call on family and friends with gifts and cakes. Children in embroidered skullcaps and jeweled headdresses would parade hand in hand.

All this would happen in a festive Lunar New Year. But not in this year of 1900. Instead of fireworks, gunfire rang through the streets, and the alleys ran with blood. Gang warfare had struck again. As punishment, the San Francisco Police Department cracked down on the whole district, canceling all holiday celebrations. Sidewalks were barren of flowers, parties were banned, and the streets were still.

So the Chinese New Year crept in, as gray and drab as its namesake on the great wheel of the astrological