In the Robert Browning verse “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” the town failed to pay the piper his fee for getting rid of rats, and instead paid with the loss of its children. San Francisco, another heedless town, also paid a fearful price for its negligence: 281 sick and 190 dead of plague.2
Blue must have felt satisfied as he and Rucker surveyed the statistics of their public health campaign. More than 11,000 houses had been disinfected. Over 250,000 square feet of Victorian boardwalks had been replaced with concrete sidewalks. Over 6 million square feet of homes, shops, and stables were now girded with rat-proof cement floors.3
More stupefying were the rat statistics. Blue’s brigades had set out over 10 million pieces of bait. More than 350,000 rats had been trapped, killed, and collected from bounty hunters. Over 154,000 animals had undergone bacteriologic tests at the Fillmore Street rattery. Most of the vermin, however, were trapped far below the city streets. All told, the total kill was estimated at more than 2 million rats—
For months, San Franciscans saw great gray rafts of rat cadavers wash out of the sewers and into the bay, floating on the waves and bobbing against the rocks, until at last the tide swept them out to sea.
Gradually, the currents and the brisk salt winds swept away the stench of chemicals and rat kill. The city’s natural perfume of brine and sun, eucalyptus and woodsmoke, sourdough and coffee, returned. The campaign continued to deliver other dividends, too. Not just plague, but
Amid the city’s return to health, its rebuilt downtown area sparkled in the fall and winter of 1908. In two years since the earthquake, twenty-five new skyscrapers thrust up from the flattened city center. Nine reconstructed landmarks, including the Palace Hotel and the Chronicle Building, reclaimed their spots on the skyline.
A new Chinatown arose from the ruins like an electrified phoenix. Old wooden shops were replaced by illuminated pagodas that bathed the district in peacock hues. Old-timers along
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show brought its gaudy spectacle to Market Street in the fall of 1908. Nearing his eightieth birthday, the old showman Colonal William F. Cody shook his grizzled locks in wonder at the city’s rebirth. “San Francisco,” he said, “why she’s all right. The earthquake and the fire were blessings in disguise. They have made your city the most modern in the world. If it were not for the fatalities incurred, a shake-down would be a good thing for all big cities.”4
Nobody, not even Blue, would have claimed that plague was good for San Francisco, but the eradication program doubtless left it a healthier city.
Headlines on Thanksgiving 1908 proclaimed the long-awaited recovery:
Blue couldn’t celebrate right away. Just as plague left, the winter of 1909 blew a ferocious influenza into town. The past year, he’d escaped. This year, Blue caught the virus he called “my old and unterrified enemy.” Sicker than he’d been in years, Blue was confined to bed at the St. Francis and nursed for three days by hotel housekeepers and waiters. He was so weak that he apologized in his next letter to his sister Kate because his filigreed penmanship wasn’t up to par. “My hand,” he explained, “is somewhat shaky.”6 But he rebounded in time to receive the thanks of the city.
On the late winter night of March 31, 1909, San Francisco spread a feast on Nob Hill to honor the Pied Piper of Marion and his men. Nine years since the death of the first victim, Wong Chut King, and one year since the last plague case, the ordeal was over.
That evening, Blue and his officers shed their khakis for evening dress, straightened one another’s bow ties, and piled into cars and buggies, bound for the Fairmont Hotel. Once past the white stone-pillared portico, they traversed the gilt-and-marble lobby, en route to a balconied banquet hall. There four hundred of the city’s elite paid $7.50 to dine with the health officers whose mission they had scorned in 1900.
A vast expanse of black tails and broad white shirtfronts met their eyes. Photographers took flash pictures that burst like sheet lightning over the hall, blanching faces and making the celebrants blink. The white-napped tables boasted hothouse flowers and menu cards engraved with the evening’s bill of fare. Each course was a corny conceit on the theme of plague. Oysters came first, but not Blue Points, the menu said, because “he’s been giving them to us for years.” Next came a course of striped bass, released from quarantine. Vegetables were prepared from the city’s pristine produce district. For dessert, ice cream was molded in the shape of a mousetrap. Punch was poured into tin tankards that looked like garbage cans, with the slogan “Keep the lid on.” Lurking inside each drink was a toy rat favor.
Governor Gillett, Mayor Taylor, and merchant-activists applauded the release of new health figures showing that the federal cleanup had not only quelled bubonic plague, but slashed the rate of other communicable diseases like diphtheria and scarlet fever by 75 percent.
Blue looked across the crowd. There were the city’s prosperous and powerful, recent converts to the cause of public health. Then there were his men: his loyal aide, Colby Rucker; and thin, bespectacled George McCoy and black-bearded Carroll Fox, the flea wranglers. There were old faces from a decade ago, such as H. A. L. Ryfkogel, the crippled pathologist who had helped Blue and who was spied on, fired, and denied back pay for his trouble.
In keeping with early 1900s social customs, dinner was a masculine affair. Not invited to dine, the women of the plague campaign were cloistered in a gallery high above to hear the speeches.
When Blue was called to the dais, an ovation roared for five minutes. His old shyness flooded back, and he flushed scarlet. “It’s difficult to say much when the heart is full,” he began. “I feel as if I were one of California’s adopted sons.” He saluted the local men—the inspectors and rat catchers—whom he called “the brawn and sinew” of his campaign.
“San Francisco has set an example,” he said. “It behooves all seaport cities to look to their sanitary defenses, for there is where the disease enters. San Francisco has fought her battle, and as one of you, I am proud of the victory she has gained.”7
Mayor Taylor presented Blue with a gold pocket watch. The heavy gold disk sprang open to reveal an inscription engraved within: “To Rupert Blue, Passed Assistant Surgeon U.S.P.H. & M.H.S., from the citizens of San Francisco in grateful recognition for his services to the city while in command of the sanitary campaign of 1908.” The mayor then pinned medals on fourteen public health service officers.
A bass chorus of hurrahs erupted again, joined by cheers from the women in the gallery. As Colby Rucker had often reminded them, the city’s cure was their triumph, too.
With Hearst’s usual flair, the
But it wasn’t really over. The plague that had menaced the city still thrived in the hills and grasslands just east of the bay. As soon as the winter rains subsided, and the mud-softened country roads were firm enough for buggy wheels, Blue sent his forces rolling into Contra Costa County with camping equipment and War Department tents. By striking early, he hoped to prevent a crop of human cases during the summer. He wanted Colby Rucker to lead the charge on the squirrel plague again. Surgeon General Wyman had other ideas. He planned on transferring Rucker up north to Seattle. But Blue begged the surgeon general to reconsider. Rucker was the most seasoned plague warrior he had. And there was the matter of Annette.
By now, her diagnosis was unavoidable.
“Mrs. Rucker, I regret to state, has pulmonary tuberculosis,” said Blue in a handwritten postscript to Wyman. She was feverish now and bedridden. “The doctor does not desire that any special provision be made for him on this account but does not wish to have to take her to Seattle as the climate is not good there. R.B.”8
