ship and shore. Now at Blue’s urging, the city began to order the building of metal and concrete wharves and piers, replacing the old, rat-ridden wood pilings. On the hawsers that moored ships to the docks, shippers placed new effective rat guards, some with traps, to thwart the four-legged stowaways. Meanwhile, on dry land, Blue and Rucker refined their training of the rat-catcher corps.
“A man can no more be made into a rat-catcher by giving him a rat trap than he can become a soldier by being provided with a rifle,” Blue wrote.9 He was concerned that his own crew was being undermined by the shoddy and dispirited local laborers they’d hired to catch rats. Many of the men were out-of-work streetcar operators and political hangers-on who had signed up thinking they wouldn’t have to break a sweat. So Blue imposed a merit system, firing the slackers and rewarding the diligent with pay raises. He also transformed rat catching into a precise science.
His executive officer, W. Colby Rucker, wrote a detailed treatise titled “How to Catch Rats.” Take a nineteen- inch French wire trap, placed where rats come to drink, and camouflage it with a layer of hay, straw, or wood, he advised. Then tempt the beasts with an ever-changing smorgasbord of raw meat, cheddar cheese, smoked fish, fresh liver, corned beef, fried bacon, pine nuts, apples, carrots, and corn. Scatter a trail of barley to attract animals to the trap. Smoke the trap with a burning newspaper to mask the telltale scent of human hands. As an added lure, place a small chick or duckling nearby to peep enticingly. When a female rat is caught, leave her in the trap so her cries will summon her suitors and offspring. However, Rucker warned, “It is not wise to kill rats where they are caught, as the squealing may frighten the other rats away.”10 So irresistible was Rucker’s regimen that hundreds of thousands of rats were drawn to their doom.
Khaki-uniformed public health officers patrolled the city’s thirteen plague districts—Blue had added one more district as if to mock superstition, Colby said. The men were becoming a familiar sight to the San Francisco citizenry. Public antagonism now softened a bit. Perhaps overconfidently, Blue chose this moment to venture into the heart of his opposition.
Making an appointment at the editorial offices of the
“We need your help,” Blue beseeched. He begged the publisher to offer his readers factual reports on the plague. Without that, the public health service could not engage the support of the people in the gritty business of rat eradication. De Young’s face was opaque, his reply cold and noncommittal. He was used to being courted
“I had an interview with Mr. De Young,” wrote the crestfallen plague commander to Washington. “He is a strange, stubborn man and may turn his guns on us with greater effect than ever.” However, he noted, “The city authorities, press and people, with the single exception of the
Back at the rattery on Fillmore Street, Stansfield and other officers were drained. Yet only a fraction of the lab tests Blue needed was getting done. Fewer than two hundred rats a day were being examined for the infection. He needed more data. The nests of plague—both human and rodent—were so widespread that only three of the city’s thirteen districts remained free from infection.
Just after Thanksgiving, the plague toll reached 106 confirmed cases and 65 deaths. Outwardly, Blue kept up his can-do outlook. His men needed him to be a perfect model of the “sanitarian spirit.” But in private, Blue was anything but cocky.
Blue was late sending funds to his mother and sisters in South Carolina. A bank panic triggered by Washington’s trust-busting made it difficult to buy a draft. So he wrote promising to send his next paycheck home in its entirety and gave his family a report on his progress. “My campaign is showing marked results in reducing the number of cases,” he wrote Annie Maria. But he added, “We have yet a great work to do this winter.”12
Seven days a week, the lights in the mullioned windows of 401 Fillmore Street burned into the night. Weekends and holidays did not interrupt Blue’s calendar. He drove his men hard. They thought him insatiable, a zealot. But remarkably, few men had complained so far. Hundreds of laborers laid thousands of traps, baited with tons of cheese, every month. But the rats still flourished, and the deaths still rose.
By the end of 1907, doctors had diagnosed 136 people with plague and buried 73 of them—almost all in four months. That December, Blue sent Washington a grim prediction for the New Year:
“Conditions are not improving as rapidly as I would like them to…. There can be no doubt that the city is infected from one end to the other,” he said. He felt his campaign was at a crossroads: Rid the city of rats by winter’s end or face “an outbreak of unprecedented proportions.”13
But despite the months of strenuous rat work, eradication seemed as far off as ever. In the war room of his headquarters on Fillmore Street, Rupert Blue paged through medical journals for clues to the plague’s next move. In Manila, when just 2 percent of rats became infected, it ignited an explosive epidemic among the populace. Among San Francisco’s rats, his tests showed that the infection rate was 1.5 percent and rising.
His mission was to exterminate all the rats before the infection rate in San Francisco reached this trigger point. He seized worksheets for the week ended January 11, 1908, and ticked off the figures: 352,000 bits of poisoned bait placed, and thousands of rats collected from traps and the bounty program. He was disheartened to see that the rats’ infection rate had tripled since the fall.
They would have to work harder. Spring was coming on fast. They had little time before new litters of baby rats and hungry hatchling fleas would emerge, ensuring that plague would bloom again.
The logjam in the lab was intolerable, Blue decided. It was moving too slowly; they were testing just one- third of the burgeoning daily rat catch. It was simple: Stansfield must speed up.
Pushing past the glass doors, Blue entered the lab in search of his bacteriologist. There amid the vials and flasks, bathed in the yeasty smell of his bacteria broth, sat Halstead Stansfield. Blue found it hard to choke back his impatience. The lab was falling behind; it needed to run more tests. “I need a trained assistant,” Stansfield replied wearily. Blue replied he’d already asked the surgeon general; the request had been vetoed on budgetary grounds.
Instead of soldiering on, Stansfield was giving up and giving in to his demons. Chronically melancholy, soured by hangover, he’d erupt in a rage when his fellow officers tried to buck him up. Stansfield was still grieving over the deaths of his wife and child. Blue was sorry for his loss, but he had an epidemic to fight.
As if work weren’t troubled enough, an unforeseen accident almost derailed the rat eradication campaign. It was bound to happen in a town as studded with rat bait as a panettone is with raisins. Three children at play spied what looked like a picnic in a French wire basket. Morsels of bread and cheese were buttered with a puree they did not recognize. The children bit into the purloined snack and instantly regretted it.
It was laced with Stearns’ Electric Rat and Roach Paste, containing phosphorous poison, which burns the mucous membranes and leaves a searing trail down one’s throat and stomach. Though wretchedly sick, the children survived. Had they died, the campaign might have died with them.
Blue ordered a ban on phosphorous poison. It was simply too dangerous to use in a densely populated city. The campaign would switch to Danysz virus, the germ that was fatal to rodents but harmless to people. Blue instructed the laboratory at 401 Fillmore to brew up extra-strength batches of the stuff at once.
Once again, Stansfield balked. He now spent days at a time away from his lodgings at the Majestic Hotel. Drowning his grief in alcohol, he was deaf to the pleas of his fellow officers. The lab work languished. Blue had no choice but to ask that Washington replace Stansfield. “I have no hope of a change in him. I have exhausted patience in reasoning with him,” Blue wrote to Assistant Surgeon General Glennan. “The work and the campaign have become so exacting that I scarcely have time to eat and sleep properly, I simply cannot have a controversy with an officer at this time.”14
But Colby Rucker was performing admirably as Blue’s right-hand man. Installed in a modest residential hotel with his wife, Annette, and young son, Colby, he played dominoes and entertained his family with a player piano at night. By day, he and Blue each gave half a dozen speeches to trade and civic groups, schools and clubs. Slowly, the
