“MY CAMPAIGN IS STILL in full blast,” Blue wrote to his sister Kate Lilly in March 1908. A dozen medical officers and over 400 inspectors and laborers had carried on through the winter rains. But, he confided, “I fear an outbreak by the advent of dry weather.”1
Worse, if the city’s support flagged and his team couldn’t finish the job right, he predicted the city would have “a plague scare every summer for the next 20 years.”2
Barnstorming on the speaker’s circuit, Blue was becoming a celebrity. Newspapers found that the courtly Carolinian made good copy. Pauline Jacobson, a reporter from the San Francisco Bulletin, came to the two-story Victorian house at 401 Fillmore Street seeking an interview.
Colby Rucker escorted Jacobson upstairs, where she saw a six-foot khaki-clad officer behind the desk. He stood and turned his blue gaze on her. If her prose is any indication, she swooned a little. Her story read:
A man of action rather than word—big, broad-shouldered, handsome, commanding in his plain brown officer’s uniform. Yet modest and unassuming… a quaint drawling Southern wit and kindly sympathy always lurking in his eyes and under the slim mustache, one to inspire confidence and to make one feel if worse should come to worse, we would have a man at the helm.3
The reporter wanted to know why San Francisco was so resistant to public health measures and whether it was uniquely obstinate.
“I have encountered it before,” Blue said. “In the South, fighting yellow fever, I have had to deal with a bristling shotgun quarantine.” Here in San Francisco, he added smoothly, “it is your robust optimism.”
Then Jacobson engaged Blue in a discussion of how Western civilization was blinded by hubris to the threat of disease. San Franciscans, she said, were far too smug about “our purifying tradewinds and our wonderful climate… our sanitation [and] our lovely porcelain bathtubs.”4
“Plague is no respecter of individuals or places,” Blue agreed, explaining that San Francisco was as liable to experience plague as India. “The Hindus have a religion which does not allow them to kill vermin of any kind,” he added. “But if they have more vermin to transmit the plague, you have more garbage. You have more food for rats than any city I know of.
“Prejudice and ignorance may frustrate the best efforts of the sanitary authorities,” he concluded. “I do not wish to alarm the people. I want them to get busy.”
“Get busy” became the theme of the campaign. More glowing press followed the Bulletin’s profile. The San Jose Mercury sent its reporter Herbert Bashford to visit 401 Fillmore. Sparing no superlatives, he called Blue “the greatest sanitarian in the United States.”5
The abundance of good press was irritating to some senior members of the medical profession. And no one was irked more than University of California medical school professor Robert Langley Porter. A distinguished pediatrician, infectious disease specialist, and neurologist, Langley Porter pitched in to help control plague on the city’s waterfront. While he formed a warm bond with Colby Rucker—their two families dined and took carriage rides together—he developed an intense dislike for his commanding officer. “Rupert Blue was just a public relations man,” he grumbled years later. “Colby Rucker was the fellow who really did the work.”6
But Rucker was equally adept at orchestrating publicity for the plague campaign. He was Blue’s disciple, spreading the gospel of urban hygiene. He helped write his speeches and articles. He walked to work with him, lunched with him, planned professional dinners, and drank with him. They dined with officer friends or local politicians at the city’s Bohemian Club, the private preserve of politicians and tycoons, artists and writers. Public health officers weren’t rich enough to be regular members. But as visiting officials, they were welcomed as guest members and even admitted to the club’s extravagant costumed theatricals—called the “jinks”—at the Bohemian Grove in the redwoods north of town. Eating and drinking, singing songs or telling tales, the animated Colby tried to ease Blue’s doubts and dark moods.
Blue was nearing exhaustion, and despite signs of progress, he had plenty to brood about. The rat eradication campaign was superficial. At street level, the city looked cleaner. But what went on beneath city streets? The subterranean life of rodents was a mystery to him. Where did they hide and migrate? Infected rats had been found in every part of town except the city’s sparsely settled western neighborhoods, the Sunset and Richmond districts. Now that many of the rats were trapped, poisoned, and cemented out of homes, where would they go next? He had to find out.
That’s when it hit him—colors. He would dye healthy white laboratory rats red, blue, or green, each color denoting a district. Then he would release the rats back into the sewers, in order to see where they popped up next. The scheme disclosed the animals’ migratory routes and helped him guide exterminators about where to place the tons of rat bait they purchased every month.7
But Blue’s rainbow rats provoked howls of derision in the press.
Clever as it was, the rainbow rats project didn’t produce any breakthroughs for Blue. For the rats were so widespread that nothing but massive, citywide extermination would suffice.
Pulp satirists weren’t Blue’s only problem that spring of 1908. A delicate diplomatic problem arose at headquarters. A friend of President Roosevelt’s, it seemed, had an interest in the Stearns Company, the manufacturer of Stearns’ Electric Rat and Roach Paste, the same product that had accidentally poisoned San Francisco children. In the wake of this mishap, Blue had banned the use of the product as too dangerous. But now Wyman—who knew of the poisonings—wrote a letter asking Blue to review the merits of all products and forcefully promoted Stearns’ Paste as worth another try.
Wyman, never prone to lavish praise of his officers, even sweetened this request with an unwonted compliment. “I have been intending to write you a personal letter, especially to express my gratification at the way things have been handled in San Francisco, but I have been so busy that I have been unable to get at it,” he wrote.9
Would Blue choose science and safety or yield to pressure from the surgeon general? There was only one right answer. Blue steeled himself. The choice of rat bait was a city matter, he replied. (That wasn’t strictly true. True, the city paid for the bait, but Blue got to pick his poison.) Pressure to funnel business to a presidential friend didn’t come every day. However, when the safety of San Francisco’s children was at stake, favoritism toward a hazardous product was out of the question. He turned Wyman and the favor-seeker down.
Now Blue began driving his rat catchers to kill more animals, the laboratory men to run more tests. Carroll Fox, with his black spade-shaped beard and meticulous scientific method, had been appointed to succeed Halstead Stansfield. Blue had tried to brace Stansfield up, but to no avail. Stansfield was mired in depression and undone by drink. Blue was a sanitarian, not a clergyman or counselor. He could only hope Stansfield would master his grief and return to the campaign.
But on the morning of Monday, April 13, Stansfield left his rooms at the Majestic Hotel on Sutter Street. He rode out to Sutro Forest, a eucalyptus grove on the flanks of Twin Peaks. He walked into the brush. From his coat, he withdrew a .38-caliber pistol, put it to his right temple, and squeezed. Two men hiking after dinner found his body in the brush.10
Blue assigned Colby Rucker the grim errand of claiming the corpse and attending the city inquest. Officially ruled a suicide, Stansfield’s death drew an attack on the plague campaign by a popular journal of satire and political commentary called the Wasp:
Upon His Work Has Been Based the Fake Plague Panic in San Francisco…. Proofs of so-called plague in San Francisco rest entirely upon the bacteriological findings of the late Dr. Halstead A. Stansfield, who committed suicide on Monday April [13th], in the Sutro Forest…. The evidence was indisputable that Dr. Stansfield had been erratic for a long time and his melancholia [was] intensified by intemperance. Yet it is upon the scientific findings of this mentally unhinged specialist that Dr. Blue and his associate plague experts pronounced San Francisco as suffering from an epidemic.11
Blue had seen trouble coming. He had always worried that if Stansfield ended up in the drunk tank, he would bring scandal and discredit to the public health service. But this was worse than he’d feared. Stansfield was in the morgue. His tragedy, splashed across the press, now cast doubt upon the plague diagnosis. Blue gave laconic interviews, outlining the facts for the newspapers. If he felt guilt over his officer’s death, he kept his own counsel.
Colby Rucker had seen Stansfield’s sprees as the prelude to disintegration. Without blaming Blue directly, he privately deplored the public health service’s failure to diagnose mental illness and offer help to its men. Elsewhere, an unstable officer was discovered playing Peeping Tom by beachside bathhouses. Later, he died in an insane asylum. Another officer lost his mind, after struggling to mesh three clashing sets of data. He wrote a confession and killed himself. Rucker faulted the service for failing to recognize when its own doctors were in distress.12
Despite the shock of Stansfield’s death and the gleeful press frenzy, Blue had to marvel at how steadily his team carried on. They worked long hours. They created fresh strategies against the predatory rats. Their novel solutions saved lives.
Officer Richard Creel ran Plague District One, which encompassed Chinatown, from a small frame cottage in Portsmouth Square. One day he discovered rats scuttling beneath the plank floors. Creel thought back to his Missouri boyhood. He recalled his parents’ tales of how local farmers had saved the harvest from rats by raising the corn bins onto stilts. Dr. Creel propped up his own office on stilts and evicted the vermin.
One night shortly afterward, Creel met Blue and another officer, Charles Vogel, for dinner at the Little St. Francis, where all three lived. Vogel was despairing over the persistent plague deaths in the Lobos Square refugee camp. The camp’s 750 Red Cross cottages had been soaked with carbolic acid. But even after disinfection, the pestilent rats returned. Then Creel spoke up. He told his story of the corn farmers and his own success in outsmarting the predatory rats. Convinced, Blue ordered the cubelike cottages of Lobos Square to be mounted on stilts eighteen inches off the ground.13
After eighteen plague cases in Lobos Square, the disease simply ceased. Raising the frail shacks on poles placed them too high for rats to climb in and created a crawl space for cats and dogs to chase them out from under the cottage floors. “Rat-proofing by elevation,” a country cure that saved the corn, now became an urban success story that saved lives.
As the inspectors soldiered on, condemning slovenly houses and sordid cafés, they risked the wrath of property owners. The owner of a greasy spoon cursed and swung a claret bottle at inspectors, while a gun-toting housewife railed at the “grafters.”14
Entering suspected plague houses was also fraught with risk of disease. Before crossing the threshold, the inspectors unleashed guinea pigs, letting them run through the building as furry flea magnets. This technique—along with doses of antiserum—limited the risk of lethal bites.15
The Chronicle and the Wasp continued to print acid attacks on the plague campaign. Chronicle publisher Michael de Young changed the tenor of his campaign in the Chronicle. Now, instead of flatly branding the plague a fake, he refined his editorials, affecting a new tone of scientific skepticism about the link between plague and rat fleas. He ran guest columns by contrarian physicians who lent an air of authority to de Young’s plague denial. Blue warned Washington that de Young’s pseudoscientific articles threatened to erode support of the public and of City Hall at a critical moment.16
This time, however, the state and county medical societies leapt to Blue’s defense. Without naming names, they blasted certain newspapers as “a disgrace to reputable Journalism, a menace to Public Health and safety and an outrage upon the cities of their publication.”17
The Chronicle backed off, and City Hall stood firm.
The rat work ground on. For the week that ended May 4, Blue quickly scanned the figures: 20,907 houses inspected, 190,104 bits of poisoned bait placed, 4,063 rats trapped, 2,518 rats collected from bounty hunters, and 691 rats found dead. Of these, the men tested 2,952 rats for bubonic plague bacteria. Sixteen animals were infected. The prevalence of infection was subsiding—from the flashpoint of 2 percent, it was down to 1.2 percent—better, but not good enough.
San Francisco was visibly cleaner by May. The produce markets were pristine. Butchertown was rebuilding. Though some work remained, the trends were so favorable that Surgeon General Wyman called on President Theodore Roosevelt to deliver the good news for which the city had been waiting. It was safe for the Great White Fleet to land inside the Golden Gate.
Half a million people stood on the hills and headlands that May morning. Cannon concussions split the air and thudded in the chests of the onlookers as the flotilla of white-and-gold warships glided through the Golden Gate. From the ship decks, the men could hear the cheers and see the fluttering of thousands of tiny flags, antlike in their agitation, on the hillsides. The city was awash with joy. Businesses were ecstatic.
A bisque-complexioned Gibson girl in a pale gown adorns a commemorative poster. Poised gracefully on a giant bar of Pears’ soap, she is shown gazing out over the bay, waving her handkerchief at the fleet. The Great White Fleet and Pears’ soap, said the ad: “Two of the world’s most valued necessities to protect our women and keep them happy.”18
On the eve of his fortieth birthday, Blue seemed immune to the thrill. Perhaps seeing the city’s excitement over the navy aroused some buried boyhood rivalry with Victor. For certain the municipal holiday stole attention away from his duties at the lab. “Owing to the enthusiasm over the presence of the Fleet, things are very quiet at the present time,” he wrote Surgeon General Wyman. “As soon as this temporary excitement is over, I will resume the educational campaign.”19
Blue was itching to unveil a new “stereopticon” lecture series that had dazzled his audience at a recent state medical convention in San Diego. While he lectured, the device could display a picture of a warty-tailed Rattus norvegicus, then magically dissolve the image into a picture of a flea. He could make a slide of a patient with classic buboes dissolve into a microscopic mugshot of Bacillus pestis. He wanted Colby Rucker to take the stereopticon lecture on tour to the American Medical Association in Chicago.
It would take more than magic lantern slides to reclaim the public’s attention after the splash made by the Great White Fleet. Next to all that glamour, San Francisco’s zest for the plague campaign slumped, in a kind of morning-after languor. “The people, I fear, are lapsing into an apathetic state again,” Blue reported to the surgeon general. He added bitterly, “The occurrence of a case at this time would tone them up a bit.”20
Of course, Blue wasn’t hoping for another human casualty. But the persistence of infected rats told him that pockets of plague still smoldered underground. Such a reservoir of germs could fuel outbreaks indefinitely. As long as danger persisted, his work wasn’t done. If he couldn’t keep the public engaged, he would fail. He’d been battling plague for eight years now. If San Francisco could stay the course for another eight months, he could finish the job and leave behind him a healthy city.
Blue realized by his birthday on May 30 that San Francisco hadn’t suffered a human plague case in months. This wasn’t a guarantee of anything, as recent reports from Sydney, Australia, had shown. There, plague came roaring back after a seven-month respite. Here, summer was approaching, high season for fleas, when plague cases peak. Blue wrote to Washington to head off the city’s efforts to win a premature clean bill of health for the city.
“I fear,” said Blue, “that August and September will see a recrudescence of the disease.”21 Recrudescence—the ugliest word in the public health lexicon—means an epidemic outbreak after a latent spell. Like a war that flares up after a seeming peace, it humbles the soldier who has underestimated the enemy.
Somebody was bound to jump the gun. On Sunday, June 14, 1908, it happened: The New York Times declared victory against plague in the city of San Francisco.
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 sesame seed—size specks were armed with armadillolike plates, triangular slashing weapons, two lances, and a stiletto with which they pierced their victims’ skin and sucked their blood. Rucker also studied the mating habits of fleas; during their courtship, he watched as the “lordly” males sat back in a passive role, while the females engaged in a frenetic dance of seduction. After coupling, the female laid a clutch of waxy ovoid eggs that, over her lifetime, could produce up to five hundred hungry hatchlings.31
Even less savory were the fleas’ dining habits. With horrid fascination, Rucker observed the suckling parasites in action with his colleague George McCoy. McCoy rolled up his sleeves and, holding the fleas under inverted test tubes, allowed the insects to feed on his bare arms. The men found that, after eating, the flea left a deposit on the skin of its victim. When the victim scratched, this deposit got rubbed into the skin. Scratching helped to inoculate the bacteria with deadly efficiency. The lab fleas, fortunately, were healthy.
Years later, scientists would discover that the material injected by a flea into its victim was actually blood from a previous bite. After several feedings, these previous blood meals collected in the flea’s foregut, welling up like heartburn, to be injected into the bite wound on the next victim’s skin.32
But Rucker and McCoy’s colleague, Carroll Fox, made a curious discovery: In San Francisco, the prevalent flea species was not the Oriental or Indian rat flea, Pulex cheopis. While there were a few of those in the city, the main flea species on the Golden Gate was the northern European rat flea, Ceratophyllus fasciatus.33 Beyond being of academic interest to entomologists, what possible difference could that make?
Plenty, as it turned out.
For San Francisco had had a stroke of dumb luck. The plague flea’s key trait wasn’t its armor or its stiletto, but its gut. Although Fox didn’t appreciate the significance of his findings at the time, scientists now know that the Asian flea cheopis grows a basket of spines in its belly. Inside that basket, a clot of blood collects, forming a potent ball of plague germs. The clot also blocks new blood meals from reaching the flea’s stomach, so it begins to starve. That makes the ravenous flea attack more aggressively, biting any warm-blooded animal that crosses its path. Finally, its frenzied sucking dislodges the ball of germ-laden blood. It is, in effect, this flea heartburn that delivers a lethal dose of plague into its hapless human host.
Fasciatus, the Frisco flea, has a foregut without that spiny basket. So while it is capable of transmitting plague, each injection delivers a less potent—that is, less infectious—dose of the germs. Cheopis, the lethal flea, visited San Francisco, but it remained in the minority. Had it taken over to become the dominant species on the Pacific coast, the toll of the sick and the dead might have been far higher.
Although he didn’t know it at the time, Fox’s finding about local flea species provided a clue to later scientists as to why San Francisco’s plague claimed hundreds, rather than thousands, of casualties. The plague germs were as deadly, the rats as numerous, the fleas as hungry. The only difference may have been a quirk of flea anatomy.
With so much energy funneled into flea studies in the San Francisco laboratory, Indian summer commenced with little fanfare. Warm, sunstruck, and treacherous, September 1908 was ripe for a resurgence of human plague. Blue remained edgy and watchful.
Without warning, word of a setback came from the southern tip of the state. Health officers in Los Angeles, four hundred miles to the south, had a sick ten-year-old boy on their hands. Doderick Mulholland, who lived in the Elysian Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, fell suddenly ill with a fever and tender knobs sprouting from his glands. A dead squirrel was found near his house. The Mulholland boy was biopsied and tested positive for plague. The animal, too, harbored the bacteria. But the young boy lived. To everyone’s relief, his case remained an isolated one. Plague did not establish a foothold in Los Angeles—not yet, anyway.
Managing operations on three fronts, Blue decided that a frontal attack on the squirrels was the fastest way to purge the countryside. But squirrels are wary and lightning-fast, nearly impossible to bait and trap. He wrote to Washington, asking $1.50 a day to rent rifles and buy ammunition. Once more, he tripped over red tape. Washington reproached Blue for sloppy form in making his request, denying him funds.
Colby Rucker had greater woes. One evening, after giving a speech in San Jose, Rucker dined with Annette’s physician. The doctor frankly confided his fears about her cough. “In truth it worries me too,” Rucker wrote in his diary. “But I don’t know what to do.”34
As Annette lay pale and fatigued, her son, Colby, tried to beguile her with a popular new song on the player piano. He inserted the roll, and out pealed the song “Glow, Little Glowworm.” Annette smiled wanly, but a nurse hired to tend her hushed the boy. “Let the boy play,” Annette implored. He was allowed to finish the tune, but he never touched the instrument again, forever hating the song that couldn’t make his mother well.35
With rumors of many squirrels dying, and Washington dragging its feet, Rucker bought himself a $9 rifle and some maps. He packed up his family and ferried them to the East Bay. The warm, dry weather might be good for Annette’s lungs, he thought. He staged a buggy excursion to the East Bay peak of Mt. Diablo, with watermelon picnics by the roadside. Annette gained a bit of strength. When Rucker returned to San Francisco, he marked a birthday and found tufts of gray sprouting over his ears. He was thirty-three years old.36
Meanwhile, the epidemic retreated in San Francisco. The month of September, which had seen fifty-five cases the previous year, ended without a single new case.
By October 1908, Blue counted a lapse of eight months since the last case of human plague in San Francisco. From May 1907 to February 1908, plague had sickened 160 San Franciscans and killed 77 of them. It was a broader and swifter outbreak, more democratic in its choice of victims, but less deadly than the smoldering plague of 1900. That earlier episode in Chinatown took a narrower aim on the Chinese, and case for case, it was far more lethal, with an official count of 121 sick and 113 dead. However, given the suspicion by many white doctors that the community had hidden some of its sick and the dead, the true total would never be known.
The reported death rate fell from 93 percent in 1900 to less than 50 percent in 1908, due in part to earlier diagnosis and better supportive care. The absence of racial scapegoating, and Blue’s conduct of the second campaign, left people less fearful, less prone to conceal their sickness, and more willing to see a doctor.37 However, it’s also possible that a certain number of undiscovered cases in the Chinatown outbreak actually survived plague; had these been diagnosed and counted, they might have lowered the death rate. No one will ever know; the true toll remains part of the last century’s secrets.
But Blue now began quietly trimming his city crew, hoping it was safe to do so. At the same time, he was uneasy about the situation in the East Bay. He renewed his demands that Washington fund a corps of squirrel trappers to pursue the infection spreading in the countryside.
Back in town, Colby Rucker was worn out by work and worry over Annette’s lungs. “Foggy bad morning,” he noted in his diary. “Walked home in the rain. Spent the evening at home feeling rotten blue.”38
An unnerving discovery in October 1908 shook the team’s confidence. In a warehouse strewn with discarded fruit and nut shells, a rat was lured by the scent. Up the elevator shaft to the fifth floor it scuttled. A trap sprang shut. Back at 401 Fillmore Street, the men chloroformed, skinned, tacked, and dissected the rat. They prepared the tests. They hoped for a negative result. No luck. The rat was teeming with plague. It was the first plague rat found in eighty-five days. As Blue had warned so often, they couldn’t discount the stealth or the staying power of an entrenched foe.
There would be no victory just yet. Colby Rucker wrote of the reversal in his diary that day. In an aside, he jotted a bit of 1908 slang: “Ain’t it awful, Mabel?”39