The city was now in its fifth year of a smoldering plague. Blue must have felt outraged that doctors were only now acknowledging the outbreak. But whatever his frustration, he had to master it. He couldn’t afford the indulgence of an outburst. He had to keep these doctors on his side. Besides, it was too late to backtrack or to count the innumerable dead. He could only move on.
Blue focused instead on uniting the factions of the city into a fragile coalition. He invited state and local health officials to meet with businessmen and federal doctors at the Merchant Street lab. He opened the floor to any issue—from how to fund the plague campaign to how to curb spitting on the sidewalk. Calling itself the Public Health Commission of California, the group even elected Rupert Blue as its president. After years of struggle, Blue was surprised to find he had actually become popular.
Blue’s extermination drive was now getting impressive results with the Danysz rat virus sold by the Pasteur Institute. In reality, it was simply
By late May, optimism surged again. Almost one hundred days had passed since the last plague cases. It was the longest intermission since the outbreak began in March 1900. Blue told Wyman he hoped the mayor would stay friendly and keep funding his plan to gird rat-proof foundations throughout all of Chinatown by the year’s end.
The city was looking better. The retreat of plague and the pristine state of Chinatown was now a potent lure for speculators. Property values surged. The district looked so good, merchants proposed to sell $10 million in bonds and turn Chinatown into parkland. To Blue’s disgust, a group of doctors formed an investment company to buy up Chinatown property. “The company was not formed for the purpose of obtaining better sanitary conditions for San Francisco,” he wrote indignantly to Washington, “but merely for money-making.”6 Uncharacteristically, the city rejected the scheme.
As word of the city’s progress spread, the plague pioneer Shibasaburo Kitasato, who had raced Alexandre Yersin to identify the bacterium, now sent his assistant from Japan to San Francisco to study Blue’s methods. The Japanese visitor mainly wanted to study Blue’s strategy of “building out the plague.” Blue gave him a tour, proudly noting that the visitor scribbled copious notes about “everything that was in sight.”7
Surprisingly, the cleanup seemed to be slashing rates of sickness overall. “There has been a remarkable decrease in the death rate for the past year, 388 as compared to 464 of the preceding year,” Blue rejoiced. He hoped to persuade the most hardened skeptics in Chinatown to join forces with him. “Even the Chinese should be able to reason out the cause,” he wrote Washington, “and join us in greater endeavors than before.”8
When six months elapsed following the Rossi deaths, city fathers started agitating for a clean bill of health for San Francisco. “The long interval that has occurred is considered by some of the people here to warrant the claim of extirpation of the disease,” said a wary Blue. But he added, “If by the beginning of the rainy season no case has occurred, then we may speak more confidently of eradication.”9
Furnishing ammunition for city exterminators, Blue’s laboratory on Merchant Street was now brewing up batches of Danysz rat poison in quantity. He needed enough to bait Chinatown, the Japanese district, and the Latin Quarter. That winter, however, the laboratory, with its lone heating grate, was so cold that the cultures of
Blue sent New Year’s wishes to Surgeon General Wyman and recommended continuing inspections well into 1905 as insurance that the eradication was complete. The city had other ideas. San Francisco was eager to wrap up the plague campaign. Chinatown was clean and more rat-free than most of the city. Despite his conservatism, Blue had to admit that the epidemic’s retreat had held firm for eleven months. It was probably safe to wind down the operation.
San Francisco didn’t evict Blue as unceremoniously as it had his predecessor Joseph Kinyoun. Indeed, just after the rainy Valentine’s Day of 1905, the city health department sent him a municipal valentine, expressing “our thanks… to Dr. Rupert Blue for his skillful and energetic co-operation in all that has pertained to the welfare of San Francisco’s high sanitary state and commercial prosperity.”11
After 121 cases of plague and 113 deaths, San Francisco’s plague seemed over. Blue dismantled his team of inspectors, wreckers, and disinfectors. Then he handed over the keys to the Merchant Street plague lab to Donald Currie, who would close the shop.
But Blue couldn’t forget the unsolved cases. Despite his success in Chinatown, he was nagged by a sense of unfinished business. There was the case of Charles Bock, a twenty-nine-year-old blacksmith from the East Bay village of Pacheco. Troubled by fever and a leaden ache in his chest, Bock was ferried to San Francisco by his brother. During the arduous day-long trip, the blacksmith’s condition deteriorated. One hour after being admitted to German Hospital, he was dead. His spleen, glands, and chest muscles were riddled with plague.
Bock hadn’t visited the city for a month prior to his death. That meant he must have become infected near his home, but how? Although just a few miles away from foggy San Francisco, the East Bay was a different world: a sun-baked terrain of tawny hills studded with oak. If you believed the conventional medical wisdom, it was a most unlikely spot for plague. Plague was a tropical disease that thrived in steamy settings. If San Francisco had once seemed too cold for plague, the East Bay seemed in turn too dry. San Francisco had abundant rats; the East Bay had few. All it had were feathery-tailed ground squirrels, and no one had any proof that squirrels played a role in the plague. But the possibility haunted Blue. Squirrels, he realized, infested the whole state.
There was no time to brood about it. For Surgeon General Wyman dispatched a terse telegram bearing new orders for Blue to transfer to Norfolk, Virginia. There, he would treat sick and injured sailors in the port city famed for its oysters. He was also in line for a job as the chief medical officer at the nearby Jamestown Exposition, marking the three hundredth anniversary of the country’s first English-speaking colony. He packed up his blue dress uniform and his workaday khakis and left on April 4, 1905.
A celebration of American military might, the Jamestown Exposition was an odd mix of military hardware and western myth, naval flotillas and Wild West shows featuring mock cowboy and Indian battles. As chief of health and hygiene, Blue would be responsible for preventing disease outbreaks that might mar the event. For an epidemic fighter, it was hardly a blood-stirring challenge.
But Blue was content to be back in the South, to hear lambent southern accents, soak up the sun, and feast on the melons his brother Bill would plant that year. He felt he needed to steam the Pacific fog out of his bones in the heat of a southern summer and that he hadn’t seen the sunshine since leaving Galveston in 1894. He wrote Kate: “Many times I have changed stations since then and have served in Italy, but the summer failed in all of them.”12
A tentative thaw was beginning. For in the same letter, Blue divulged that he had ventured back into social life for the first time since his divorce. Invited to a big society wedding in Norfolk, he felt his blood stir. “The girls are very pretty and stylish withal,” he confided to Kate. “Perhaps I shall meet my fate among them. You see, I have forgotten the unpleasant past.” The cream of Norfolk society, he assured her, were big enough to overlook a gentleman’s past—be he a divorced doctor or traveling sanitarian.
In the South, Blue could look after his family. He sent money home regularly. When Annie Maria had a bout of rheumatism, he dispensed medical advice. He searched the city for opera music to send to Henriette. “I would so delight,” he wrote them, “in an evening of grand opera at home.”13 When he got wind of a spat, he counseled Kate and Henriette on how to keep peace at home. “Life at best is a burden,” he lectured them, “made up largely of concessions, of denials and of the elimination of ego as much as possible in the home circle.”
The year 1905 also saw Blue confirm the most enduring comradeship of his life. It had all started four years earlier when a sailor had gotten drunk, slipped on the ice, and broken his leg.
It was a frigid winter day in Milwaukee in January 1901 when the injured sailor consulted William Colby Rucker, a young doctor struggling to establish a private practice. The sailor, short on funds to pay for treatment, asked Rucker to send him to see a Dr. Rupert Blue, who worked for the federal government treating injured seamen for free. Rucker sought out Blue’s boardinghouse to arrange it. He remembered being struck by the power of Blue’s physical presence:
“As he came down the broad stairs to greet me, I thought I had never seen a finer looking man in all my life,” Rucker recalled, “a big handsome man… charmingly courteous to me, and as I was a youngster of 25, I was much
