The Barbary Plague

Under the superintendence of Rupert Blue of the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, a war of extermination was waged…. When these Pied Pipers finished their work, there were no rats left in San Francisco, and as a consequence the plague has been effectually [sic] stamped out.²²

No one from the Times had bothered to interview Blue. Had they done so, they would have learned that, far from being over, the rat war had captured 4,929 rats that very week and 5,000 the week before—including several plague carriers.

Blue spent a lot of time that season setting the record straight, countering press reports that were too optimistic or pessimistic. Progress was undeniable now, but a premature pullout would ensure a return of the disease. He warned his family that he wouldn’t return home for awhile.

“My work may be satisfactorily completed by late fall, and I may then return to the ‘Effete East’ in quest of other adventures,” he wrote his sister Kate in late June. “On the other hand, the disease may reappear and hold me in the ‘Golden West’ for six months longer.” Moreover, he allowed, the social opportunities for a single officer in the West were tempting.

“Tell Mother that I am still single but that the ‘fair heads’ out here are very hard to resist,” said the forty- year-old bachelor. “That sometimes in the course of human events, I extricate myself with difficulty and reluctance.”²³

The daily grind of the rat campaign was wearing down Colby Rucker. In early July, he took to bed with chest pains. Although he was only thirty-two, he felt sure that he had heart disease and resorted to a then-popular cardiac compound: digitalis mixed with arsenic. The pills left him anxious and depressed.

On July 4th, Rupert Blue called on his second in command at home. The two men sat together out on the front porch, chatting and chewing over politics in the public health service’s commissioned corps. Blue and Colby’s five-year-old son observed the holiday by lighting caps together. “The quietest Fourth I have ever known,” Rucker reflected.²⁴

Three days later, the Great White Fleet weighed anchor and took its leave of the city. Rucker, feeling stronger, took a carriage to the Presidio to watch the flotilla depart, savoring the sight of each white-and-gold vessel dipping its flag in farewell as it left the Golden Gate.²⁵

In a real sense, the city owed the visit of the fleet to the plague doctors, just as the doctors owed their success to the fleet. But Blue could not enjoy the spectacle. He was stewing over the fact that his annual report on the plague war wasn’t ready. Surgeon General Wyman, a martinet with a penchant for perfect paperwork, would surely send a reprimand. Rucker interpreted Blue’s preoccupation as a personal reproach. He felt Blue didn’t value the fact that he’d worked every day through his illness. Struggling through his own chest pain and Annette’s coughing, Rucker tried his best to keep up with the mounting workload.

Rucker also took pains to try to humor his moody boss. The men often lunched together at the Bohemian Club, the Fairmont, or the Majestic Hotel, sometimes playing dominoes afterward. They dined at Coppa’s, a Latin Quarter bistro offering crusty loaves and rough red wine, fresh pasta, and Chicken Portola for under a dollar. Long a favorite of hungry artists, Coppa’s walls were chalked with murals of nude gamboling nymphs and gods, which the upright Rucker found mildly scandalous. Champagne suppers at the club or officers’ dinners in the leather banquettes at Blanco’s often lasted till two A.M., leaving a four-hour nap before he had to rouse himself and get to the office on Fillmore. Annette wasn’t pleased about these escapades.

On his wedding anniversary, Rucker took a rare day off, hired a buggy, and drove with Annette to Lake Merced for a picnic celebrating their six years together. They had a rustic feast, strolled the lakeside, made peace. But Rucker’s diary entries betray the strain of struggling to please those closest to his heart.

“I did not sleep well through worry about Annette and why R.B. has been so offish of late,” he wrote. “Possibly thinks I am trying to get ahead of him which is not true…. Perhaps I am over sensitive.”²⁶

The day after Colby and Annette’s anniversary picnic, Blue acted cool toward his second in command, as if to reprimand him for having taken his anniversary off. A workhorse who led by example, Blue wanted his men to work weekends and evenings, giving them just a half-day break on federal holidays. As a divorced officer of forty, he had no family to come home to; thus all days were alike to him. His world was the lab; his universe, the city and its epidemic. Rucker, on the other hand, had made a world with the wife he adored and their child. He radiated fulfillment, in painful contrast with Blue’s solitude. Rucker, an only child, had produced a son and heir. Blue, one of eight siblings, was childless and seemed more and more likely to remain so. Rucker was a constant reminder of Blue’s own failure at love.

Tension between the officers was exacerbated by fiscal strain. City leaders, their treasury exhausted, begged the public health service to stay the course. Mayor Edward Taylor appealed to President Theodore Roosevelt to keep federal funds flowing. “All the money and energy expended so far will count for naught unless the campaign is continued with unabated vigor until the last traces of the rat infection has [sic] disappeared,” Mayor Taylor said.²⁷ Blue backed his appeal.

Just when San Francisco seemed on the verge of being controlled, an unforeseen tragedy struck in the East Bay.

Joe Farias, the seven-year-old son of a Portuguese rancher near Concord in Contra Costa County, fell sick with symptoms that were by now too familiar: fever and tender glands under his arm. The public health doctors would immediately have recognized the peril, had they known. But before they even heard of the case, the boy was dead. The microscopic evidence pointed to plague.

Two more East Bay victims followed that same week. Rumors from the local ranchers told of rats, staggering around as if dazed or drunk, reeling in slow motion, and so helpless that the ranchers killed them easily with a stick.

Blue dispatched his most trusted officer by ferry, train, and buggy into the tawny grasslands to solve the mystery. Despite his grim errand, Colby Rucker was dazzled by the rural bounty. “This is a rich, fine, warm country, full of olive oil, fruit, wine and wheat,” he wrote in his diary. “A campaign against squirrels must be waged if we are not to leave a frightful heritage to posterity.”²⁸

Within a week after the death of Joe Farias, Rucker zeroed in on a site heavily infested with rodents, just a mile and a half from the Farias family ranch. Rucker found dead rats at the site and brought one grim trophy back to the city in a glass jar. McCoy tested the animal. It had the plague.

Tightening the noose, the trappers next closed in on the ranch itself. There, on August 5, they found something unexpected: a sick and listless ground squirrel. Tests on its body confirmed that the animal was suffering from the same Bacillus pestis as the city and country rats.²⁹

It was a breakthrough. In Asia, scientists had long known that plague could jump between city rats and wild mammals like marmots. But here was the first proof that, through the exchange of fleas between rats and squirrels, American plague had infected western wildlife. And it had happened with disturbing speed. Now they had a new animal host, and the perimeter of plague was flung wide open.

The discovery, Blue wrote Washington, was “perhaps the first demonstration of the occurrence in nature of bubonic plague in the ground squirrel (Citellus beecheyi) of California.” As the animals inhabited the whole state, he added, “the discovery has caused considerable apprehension.”³⁰

In San Francisco, the team was tackling another question. Back at 401 Fillmore Street, Blue ordered the rat trappers to bring rats back alive. Baskets of the wriggling prey were emptied into glass jars with chloroform-soaked gauze.

Once the scrambling rats slowed in their struggle and grew still in their death sleep, district officers combed their fur for fleas—by now also dead. They put the fleas from each rat into glass bottles filled with alcohol. Each bottle was labeled with the date, type of rat, and the district from which it was captured. The flea wranglers then sent their catch to 401 Fillmore Street.

Colby Rucker pored over flea anatomy with a sense of wonder. He marveled that the flea has the largest, most powerful hind legs of any creature its size, enabling it to jump five hundred times its length—a feat equal to a human vaulting over a skyscraper of almost two hundred stories. The flea, he asserted, was responsible for more annual deaths than any monstrous reptile or carnivore in nature.

For an essay entitled “The Wicked Flea,” Rucker peered through the microscope and discovered that the