The Barbary Plague

flattered. A nice intimacy sprang up between us.”¹⁴

When the two doctors met again at medical society meetings, Rucker confided that he had fallen in love with a honey-haired schoolteacher and needed to launch his medical career to provide for her. Blue recommended applying for the public health service, and Rucker eagerly enlisted. He married his schoolteacher, Annette, and had a son named Colby. In 1905, Blue and Rucker were reunited when both were assigned to the Norfolk station.

Norfolk was placid after San Francisco. But farther south, the Gulf coast was under assault by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. By midsummer came word that the citizens of New Orleans were falling ill with temperatures and jaundice: yellow fever.

Blue and Rucker were among the two dozen officers dispatched by Washington to fight the epidemic. They were placed under the command of Blue’s old nemesis—Joseph White. The compact, lively Rucker was the perfect foil to the quiet giant Blue. Where Blue was cautious and laconic, Rucker was warm and extroverted.

In Louisiana, Blue faced down a “shotgun quarantine”—a circle of farmers who fended off the public health service by brandishing firearms at the federal doctors.¹⁵

Rucker’s turf included New Orleans’s houses of worship and houses of ill fame. And both responded to his cocktail of charm and guile. When parishioners of one church came down with yellow fever, Rucker discovered mosquitoes breeding in the holy water. After an old priest refused to drain or salt the fonts, Rucker stealthily slipped disinfecting tablets into the vessel. When forced to fumigate the sanctuary, Rucker took the sting out of the treatment by anointing the church statues with a protective coat of petroleum jelly. The priest was happy, and his parishioners got well.

Rucker’s magic with the women inside an epidemic zone was honed by his encounter with a very tough crowd: the madams of Storeyville, the city’s famous red-light district. These hard-boiled businesswomen wanted no part of public health. The whores, whom Rucker found childlike and innocent, loved his visits. He issued a challenge to the madams: When your girls take sick, call me or I’ll shut you down. Reluctantly they accepted his rule, capping cisterns and screening porches to bar mosquitoes.

Soon Storeyville was a model of public health. But Rucker himself began to sweat, and saw in his oddly amber skin and eyeballs the unmistakable symptoms of the virus nicknamed “yellow jack.” While he languished in the infirmary, his senior officer and his patients felt his absence.

“Dr. Rucker… is one of our merriest officers, and those of us who are left miss him from our daily dinners and confabulations,” Blue wrote to his sister Kate.¹⁶ The Storeyville women missed him, too, bearing bouquets to his hospital bedside. On his return to rounds, the women in unison shouted a raucous “Welcome back!” from their wrought-iron balconies.¹⁷

Once Rucker was back at work, Rupert wrote Kate, “The suppression of the fever is simply a matter of time. We have a death grip on it and do not intend to ‘leave go’ until the question of supremacy is settled.”¹⁸ They got help from the weather. Yellow fever was over by the first frost of 1905. It wasn’t the last time Blue and Rucker would join forces against an epidemic. But their next chance followed a cataclysm neither one could have envisioned.

Earthquake

AT 5:12 A.M. ON WEDNESDAY, April 18, 1906, the ground beneath San Francisco convulsed. There was a groan of grinding mortar and a thunder of raining brick and stone. Twisting timber shrieked and snapped into splintered kindling. After forty-five seconds, the roiling paused a moment, and then a second shock wave hit, more violent than the first.¹

From a hundred thousand fractured rooms came cries of shock and pain. Sleepers, hurled from their beds, threw coats over night-clothes, grabbed children, and poured into the street. Some yanked frantically on bedroom doors, trapped in shifting frames that no longer fit. Buildings listed drunkenly off their foundations. Wooden cottages collapsed like houses of cards, rows of flats like dominoes. Brick facades peeled off and crashed into the street, exposing what looked like a doll’s house. Streetcar tracks buckled in serpentine snarls.

South of Market Street, where tracts sat precariously on landfill, the ground liquefied over ancient waterfront and wetlands. The four-story Valencia Hotel, a working-class lodging house, sank into its fluid foundation. With only its top story protruding above ground, lodgers on the lower floors were submerged and drowned.

Dozens of small fires burst from toppled chimneys and cracked stove flues. Fire alarms stayed strangely silent. The alarm center on Brenham Place had been destroyed. At one station, fire horses bolted in fear, so firefighters had to tow their engines by hand. When they hooked up their hoses, only droplets trickled out, so the firefighters siphoned leaky sewage to spray on the flames.

Steers being herded to the Potrero stockyards were spooked by the shaking and stampeded along Mission Street. To avoid being trampled, bystanders shot the crazed cattle between the eyes.

On Merchant Street, near the federal morgue and laboratory, fish dealer Alex Paladini was unloading the morning’s catch when the earthquake disintegrated buildings around him, burying horses, drivers, wagons, and fish under tons of bricks and mortar. The steeds’ necks protruded from the debris, their manes caked with dust, tongues lolling. The neighborhood around the morgue was now one giant street of the dead.

The ground shock savaged City Hall. Its regal dome teetered on empty ribs. All around it stretched acres of rubble. Before the day was over, flames devoured municipal records, incinerating all city history before 1906.

Mayor Eugene Schmitz, who had been reelected despite an ongoing graft probe, now played his role with cool command. He closed the saloons. He imposed a curfew from dark until dawn. When rioters raided liquor and cigar shops, he issued an executive order for federal troops and police to shoot looters on sight. From the ruins of City Hall, he moved the seat of government to the Hall of Justice on Kearny Street, then to the Fairmont Hotel, then to a hall in the Western Addition, keeping one step ahead of the flames.

Schmitz wired the mayor of Oakland, demanding hoses and dynamite. From the capital in Sacramento, Governor George Pardee boarded a train toward the stricken city, setting up his base of operations in Oakland, where phone and wire service remained intact. He telegraphed Los Angeles, imploring: “For God’s sake send food.”²

Central Emergency Hospital collapsed, killing doctors and nurses. Its patients were moved to the Mechanics’ Pavilion. The night before, the pavilion had been awhirl with roller skaters competing in a tourmanent. Now it was a war zone, littered with broken bodies and doctors racing about in desperate triage.

As the Palace Hotel writhed and shuddered, beds bucking and chandeliers crashing, the tenor Enrico Caruso, fresh from singing the role of Don Jose in Carmen, was wrenched from his dreams into a nightmare. After throwing on his fur coat, the portly star ran into the street and headed north toward the St. Francis Hotel, where his opera colleagues had been staying. Some say he wept. “Hell of a place!” Caruso cried. “I never come back here.” Upon his return to Italy, he kept his promise and never sang in the city again.³

In Hayes Valley, a woman tried to cook breakfast on a broken stove and succeeded in igniting the walls of her frame house. The resulting blaze, called the “ham and eggs fire,” ate quickly through the wooden Victorian neighborhood, growing into a major conflagration. Crossing Van Ness Avenue, it torched church steeples in its path, burning on to the Civic Center, where blowing cinders lit the roof of the Mechanics’ Pavilion. As smoke seeped into the makeshift hospital, doctors again evacuated patients. As afternoon turned to evening, the “ham and eggs fire” roared south and merged with a fire in the Mission district.

Two other fires coalesced into a second giant inferno. At Delmonico’s restaurant, a cooking fire burned north and merged with a big blaze in the wholesale district that joined the waterfront and Chinatown. From these two infernos blossomed the Great Fire, which would rage for three days.

Fiction writers plundered their imaginations for words to describe the sight. The novelist Mary Austin wrote that the fire gave off a “lurid glow like the unearthly flush on the face of a dying man.”⁴ Another eyewitness to the disaster, the novelist Jack London, trod the smoking city with his wife, Charmian.

“A sickly light was creeping over the face of things,” London wrote. “Once only the sun broke through the smoke-pall, blood red, and showing a quarter its usual size. The smoke-pall itself, viewed from beneath, was a rose color that pulsed and fluttered with lavender shades. Then it turned mauve and yellow and dun. There was no sun.