COOPED UP IN RAILROAD CARS for two weeks, Blue was restless and itching to get back to the plague lab and morgue on Merchant Street. After his brief personal leave, he seemed eager to plunge back into the fray and forget his own troubles. “Work of any kind, after such an experience, would [be] a blessing,” he told the surgeon general.1
His life with Juliette was unraveling. Since their marriage in 1895, they had moved nine times for the federal health service. The life of a circuit-riding sanitarian—as rootless as a soldier’s, but without the status—was rough on families. Now, seven years later, the nomadic life, with its constant transfers, modest pay, and no permanent home, took its toll. If Rupert and Juliette’s marriage in 1895 didn’t give his mother the vapors, then their breakup certainly did. Divorce was scandalous in his church and his state. But despite the stigma, their union ended in 1902. After they parted, all traces of Julie—as he once affectionately called her—disappeared from his life. No letters, pictures, or mementos of the young actress he loved survive in his family’s records or correspondence, as if purging her name would efface the shame of divorce.
Blue would immerse himself in the plague zone. He had a lot of catching up to do; the men had been very busy in his absence. But at least the team now had a Chinese translator.
Before he had left San Francisco, Joe White had tried to hire Wong Chung, the Chinese Six Companies’ old secretary, to act as the Marine Hospital Service interpreter for the then substantial wage of $5 a day. Wong had been a key to the success of the independent plague commission. Guiding the men through Chinatown, he opened up access that only a native speaker could provide. But apparently the interpreter wasn’t eager to work with the white doctors as a steady job—not yet, anyway. After White’s overture, Wong Chung shied away, left town, and stayed incommunicado for several weeks.
But federal doctors intensified their courtship and overcame Wong Chung’s reluctance. Wong took the job. After his brief stint as translator for the visiting plague experts in early 1901, he now expanded his role into that of regular translator for the Washington doctors. Translators in that day wore many hats, from simple interpreter to cultural emissary to negotiator with the whites. (Indeed, one term for translator, cheut faan, literally means one who goes “out to the barbarians.”)2 So it’s likely that Wong’s access to federal health officials helped keep Chinatown leaders informed of Washington’s next move against the plague. However, it’s also likely that Wong now saw that plague wasn’t merely the invention of white racists, or a pretext for a crackdown on Chinatown, but a dangerous disease that imperiled his people. Whatever his private motives for taking the job, it was a role that carried heavy personal risks—the risk of being censured by the state, and shunned by his own kind.
The translator was proving to be a font of medical and political intelligence. Wong tipped off the federal doctors that a clerk was sick in the basement of Fook Lung & Company, a Washington Street grocery. Mark White—not to be confused with Joseph White—set out to investigate. Languishing in a basement bunk beneath the sidewalk, twenty-eight-year-old Ng Chan burned and shivered with a fever of over 103 degrees. The walnut-size lump in his groin conformed with the clinical picture of plague. It seemed clear-cut.
But not to the doctors of the state health board, who called it venereal disease and advised Ng Chan not to cooperate with the federal physicians. Ng denied requests for a blood test or a photograph of his bubo. At the Oriental Dispensary, he received visitors, five and six at a time, who chatted at his bedside as if he had a cold.
One evening during visiting hours, the friends of Ng Chan hatched a plot to smuggle the patient to a Sacramento River ranch—with help from the state health board. A hospital janitor let in on the scheme slipped word to Wong Chung. Wong alerted Mark White, who posted guards at the bedside, foiling the getaway.
Spiriting sick people away to the country had to be prevented, or all plague measures would be for naught. But Mark White was aware that the situation was delicate. If he were punitive or disparaging, as Kinyoun had been, he’d lose the trust and goodwill of the people. “I do not think the Chinese here very different from the Human Race elsewhere,” he wrote to Washington. By treating people with respect, he added, public health goals “can be far more readily attained.”3 It was a simple observation, but radical for its day.
The city’s rats continued to gnaw through the illusory wall separating whites and Asians. Their next victim was a middle-aged white seaman. Alexander Winters, a fifty-year-old salt, toiled aboard small schooners and scows from San Francisco Bay to the Sacramento River Delta. He’d never had anything more than a case of clap in his youth.
“I made one trip on the Agnes Jones up to Rio vista to get hay, which was unloaded at the foot of Third Street, San Francisco,” he told Rupert Blue. “About September 9th, while still in the vessels, I had a very heavy chill, with headache, fever and vomiting, and at the same time I noticed the bubo in my groin. It was very painful and interfered with walking….
“On the next day, I went ashore, when I was sick two days and thought I would surely kick the bucket,” Winters told Blue.4
Winters lived to tell his story. But his case only confounded the doctors. By the time he got sick, his ship had sailed away. The federal team traced his steps back to the France House, a sailors’ hostel at 149 3rd Street. They found the other boarders healthy.
Blue was stumped. Winters had had no contact with Chinatown, so his case hinted at a far wider plague infestation than previously thought. “I would rather find a Chinese origin for this case, than to think that the sailors’ haunts on the waterfront were infected,” Blue told Surgeon General Wyman. Since the waterfront harbored as many rats as Chinatown, plague there would be disastrous. “If we have then the two worst sections of the city infected,” he said, “eradication of the disease is entirely out of the question, and the danger of an indefinite stay is enhanced.”5
Before Blue could solve the mystery of Alex Winters’s plague, the sickness struck again.
Marguerete Saggau was a fifty-three-year-old matron who lived at the Hotel Europa on Broadway. Mrs. Saggau was a laundress. Her husband and son were teamsters who hauled goods in and out of Chinatown. But on September 23, Mrs. Saggau swooned, vomited, and developed shaking chills. The next day, her head throbbed, her temperature soared, and her senses wandered.
On admission at German Hospital, she had a fever of 103 degrees. After palpating the lump in her pelvis, they put Mrs. Saggau in isolation. But by September 27, she was dead, and the desperate detective work began anew. “It would not be an easy matter to trace the source of this infection,” Blue told Washington for the second time that week. Her teamster husband and son were healthy. Her laundry customers at the Hotel Europa were, too. So he ruled out Chinese goods and soiled linen as sources of infection.
“Then,” Blue wrote his boss, “the Hotel Europa, where the family lived, is only one block north of Chinatown, a distance easily covered by rats in their migration….”6
Here at last was a clue that meant something. Perhaps Mrs. Saggau’s fatal infection didn’t come from Chinese wares or dirty laundry, or food or dust. The agents of infection couldn’t be fenced or quarantined, because they were mobile, sequestered in the walls, slipping in stealth from house to house.
Sick rats had been seen as the harbingers of plague for centuries. However, their link with human casualties remained a mystery. But then Paul-Louis Simond, a Pasteur Institute scientist working in India, theorized that plague in rats and people had a common cause. Simond suspected that the missing link was la piqûre de puce—the bite of a flea. He conducted a simple but elegant experiment in 1897. He installed two rats in separate cages side by side. One had plague, the other was healthy. The cages prevented physical contact between the two rodents, but their open grillwork let the fleas hop back and forth. When the plague rat died, the fleas deserted its corpse and jumped through the bars to the healthy rat in the neighboring cage. As they sucked blood from their new host, they injected plague bacteria. Within six days, the second rat died, too, its blood brimming with plague.7
Unhappily for patients yet to come, Simond’s breakthrough only drew scorn from medical skeptics. Plague was still seen as a scourge of dark-skinned aliens. These prejudices persisted until 1906, when the British plague commission in India confirmed Simond’s findings. Only then would the medical establishment accept flea-borne transmission as the spark of deadly plague epidemics.
When San Francisco’s plague struck in 1900, Simond’s flea discovery was three years old. Scientists in Sydney that year gave the theory added credence by discovering plague bacteria in the stomach of fleas. The explosive impact of these findings, when taken together, was swamped in a sea of lesser theories.
Surgeon General Walter Wyman had published his own monograph on plague in January 1900. In it, he reviewed a host of hypotheses. Plague, he said, can be contracted by inhaling dust, consuming tainted food or drink, and handling contaminated household goods. In citing a successful German rat bounty, where people were paid 5 pfennig apiece for dead rodents, Wyman neared an insight.
“It is very possible that the fleas which infest rats, and which notoriously leave their bodies as soon as the cadavers become cold after death, may by their bites infect other rats,” he wrote. But after coming so close to the heart of the matter, Wyman retreated. “The bites of insects play a very small role,” he concluded.8 In the end, the surgeon general endorsed the racial theory of plague as a disease that selectively attacked Asians, owing to their poverty and vegetarian diets.
Meanwhile, San Francisco rats bred and spread, heedless of skin color or scientific fashion.