Of all the stricken blocks in San Francisco, none was more infected than Lobos Square. A refugee camp in the Marina district, Lobos Square was a gridlike village of 750 wooden earthquake cottages built by the Red Cross to shelter two thousand homeless people. It was so vast that it had its own numbered streets and addresses. It also attracted its own resident rats.
The rats slipped into the wooden cottages, their pelts alive with fleas. The fleas alighted on sixteen-month- old Mary Costello, puncturing her tender skin. The toddler fussed and scratched the bite, working the germs deeper into the bite wound. Days later, fever and ominous swellings arose. She died on September 27. A neighbor child, five-year-old Thomasa Herrera, died two weeks later. Living as refugees, dying of epidemic, the girls had few to mourn them. According to city death certificates, their parents were unknown. They were among the camp’s eighteen plague victims.
The next week, on October 18, Blue sent an update in code: “
The rat eradication program was costing $30,000 to $50,000 a month for salaries for his dozen medical officers, wages for three hundred laborers, thousands of traps, tons of cheese bait and mountains of poison, plus the rent on the Victorian headquarters. But the city could ill afford to help; every coin in the municipal coffers was earmarked to mend the earthquake-ruined streets and sewers. Blue haggled with Washington for funds. After his long-lost lab set arrived, smashed in transit, Blue was denied the $250 to replace it. He was ordered to get competitive bids. Federal protocols ground slowly.
Back in Washington from a trip abroad, Surgeon General Walter Wyman leafed through the reports from San Francisco. He was furious—not about the plague, but about Blue’s bookkeeping. He dashed off a stinging critique, demanding that reports be sent in a carefully prescribed style and format.
Blue absorbed this rebuke. It was clear the surgeon general had no notion of the disaster Blue was just barely holding at bay: a city shattered, crawling with rats, deeply plague infested, tended by an unreliable labor force of strikers and political hacks. Blue tidied his reports, swore to unify his men, and drove them to boost their catch—first 1,000 rats a day, then 1,200 rats a day.5
As the rattery’s operations grew, and as Mayor Edward Taylor readied a delegation to plead for federal aid, Secretary of the Treasury George B. Cortelyou relented. The federal government agreed to bear plague expenses of $50,000 a month. Washington’s promised cash infusion came none too soon. The contagion of fear was spreading overseas. In late October, the kingdom of Norway declared a quarantine against San Francisco, Secretary of State Elihu Root told the cabinet. On October 29, Blue reported that San Francisco had counted seventy-eight positive cases of plague, thirty-five suspicious cases, and fifty deaths.
Blue escalated his war on rats. On November 8, he wrote to Surgeon General Wyman that his weekly catch reached a new high of thirteen thousand rats. Still more rats lay dead of plague or poison, hidden in labyrinths under city streets. The sewer men had never seen so many.
But thanks to the rats’ legendary procreative power, they were now breeding faster than they could be trapped. A female rat bears ten to fifteen pups every four months. The pups mature quickly and begin to breed at the age of four months. By the end of a year, one family can produce eight hundred rats. The quake ruins served as both honeymoon bower and nursery. The explosion in the rat population was echoed by a flea baby boom. In winter, Blue observed, his men could comb twenty rats and find only one flea among them. But in warm weather, everything changed: One healthy rat could harbor twenty-five fleas, while a sick one could carry eighty-five.
Amid all these multiplying vermin, everyone in town, rich and poor, was put in harm’s way. Not even the medical profession was immune. The family of a physician identified in records only as “Dr. C.” noticed a high, sweet, sickening odor wafting from the walls of their second-story flat. To root out the source of the stench, the doctor tore out the wainscoting around some plumbing lines. There inside a hollow wall lay two rats in an advanced state of putrefaction. Removing them from the wall took care of the smell, but it was a risky operation. Days later, one family member was dead of plague, and another was critically ill. After an investigation, Blue concluded that rat fleas, which had been trapped and starving on the dead rats in the wall, took advantage of the doctor’s remodeling to escape and prey on his family for their next warm-blooded meal.6
Playing with rats was even deadlier for a family in the Mission district. One day in November, two young Bowers brothers were playing in an unused cellar when they made a thrilling find: a furry rat corpse. After entombing the rat in a shoebox coffin, the brothers performed a funeral service and buried the animal. The macabre game was natural enough, given the profession of their father: Otis Howard Bowers was an undertaker.
Following their solemn service, the boys raced home for dinner at 2888 Mission Street, a strip of Victorian flats over shops along the clamorous commercial thoroughfare named for the white Spanish adobe church of Mission Dolores nearby.
The boys unwittingly brought home a souvenir of their secret game: fleas. The parasites leapt unseen from the rat cadaver onto the children’s legs and hitchhiked home, where the boys rejoined their parents, their grandmother, and their little sister.
Insidiously, the infection took hold. The first to feel its effects was the thirty-seven-year-old father of the family, who discovered a tender lump on his right thigh. Soon, a fever and crushing fatigue forced him to bed. As his wife and mother-in-law hovered around the sickroom, Mr. Bowers grew insensible of his surroundings.
With her husband febrile and unresponsive, a frightened Margaret Bowers called for a doctor. By this time, her husband’s illness was so advanced that the doctor could offer little to help. The infection overflowed from his lymph glands into his bloodstream, throwing him into irreversible shock and organ failure. An hour after the doctor’s visit, Bowers was dead.
By now, one of his boys, three-year-old Joseph, had sprouted a painful lump in his left thigh. The little boy was put in a carriage and taken to the isolation hospital.
Two nights after Howard Bowers died, his widow plunged into a profound malaise. Neighbors might have mistaken her misery for deep mourning. But it wasn’t grief alone that blanched her cheeks and reddened her eyes. Pain pounded her skull and raked her back and limbs. Despite the cool of late fall, fever cloaked her corset in clammy sweat.
When doctors arrived the next morning, they found Margaret Bowers very weak. Her bloodshot gaze was baleful, and her face was a mask of pain and fear—the “pestlike expression” that doctors now saw as a sign of plague. During examination, doctors discovered a mass of swollen, tender glands in her left thigh. Doctors gathered up her limp form, bundled her into a horse-drawn ambulance, and carted her to the isolation hospital, where her three-year-old Joseph lay fighting for his life. There she was admitted and injected with massive amounts of Yersin’s antiserum, her only hope of withstanding the infection. In a nearby bed, the resilient Joseph began to improve.
Meanwhile, at home, Mrs. Bowers’s two-year-old daughter and her sixty-year-old mother, Bridget Noiset, developed ominous fevers and swellings. The toddler and her grandmother were now admitted to the hospital with a diagnosis of bubonic plague. A third Bowers child was hospitalized, but he alone managed to evade the voracious fleas and stay healthy.
Confined in a county hospital isolation cottage, Mrs. Bowers seemed to respond to the antiserum infusions. Her fever wavered and dipped. Doctors hoped she could outlast the siege. But she still complained of an ache beneath her left breast and ribs.
Sudddenly, on the evening of December 6, Margaret Bowers’s fever shot up to 104 degrees. The germs had flowed through her bloodstream, colonizing her lungs. Now she had pneumonic plague.
As she fought to breathe, the bacteria and debris from dead cells clogged the air sacs of her lungs. Her blood frothed but failed to pick up any oxygen. Each breath was labored; she starved for air. On December 8, with her little boy recuperating nearby and her helpless nurses looking on, Margaret Bowers suffocated. Her heart stopped in midcontraction. She was twenty-seven years old.7
The Bowers boys, now orphaned, told the doctors of their dead rat discovery, its mock funeral, and the cardboard tomb. Investigators backtracked to Mission Street, unearthed the coffin, and transported the rat to the plague laboratory at 401 Fillmore Street. There, Blue’s team split, skinned, and autopsied the animal. No one was surprised to find the bacteria of plague.8 An innocent game had killed the boys’ parents.
Not until the second plague was under way did San Francisco address the rats’ portal of entry: the waterfront. Although ships had long been fumigated, few barriers had prevented the rats from scuttling between
