Chasing Secrets (22 page)

Chasing Secrets
is fiction. Lizzie and Noah's story is purely imagined. The account of the 1900 outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco was true. I tried to stick to the facts as much as possible, but I altered the timing of some events. I took creative license in extending the time between when the guinea pigs and the rat died and the monkey's demise. I moved up the forced immunization using Haffkine and only included one quarantine, when there were actually two. The chronology at the end of this section lays out the true dates of events.

THE CITY

“In 1900, white San Francisco was a sophisticated city of 350,000 people,”
¹
many of whom were freewheeling, chock-full of optimism and bravado. Some had become millionaires nearly overnight, finding their fortunes in the Gold Rush, the railroads, the Comstock silver mines, or the sugar business. The city was suffering the growing pains of turning a Wild West mining boomtown into the Paris of the Pacific. And though it was the Victorian era, in San Francisco there were “fewer rules and regulations than in well-established cities back East.”
²

At the turn of the twentieth century, there were “only
about eight thousand cars in the country.”
³
Many people did not welcome the new contraptions. One of the reasons people were seeking to develop this form of transportation was because of the pollution caused by horses. Manure, dust, and dead horses on the street were all big problems. But the first motorcars were quite primitive. In early auto races, a car was considered successful if it reached the finish line. The winner of the first American race clocked in at seven miles an hour.
⁴

Street performers were also a big part of the vibrant city life. Though the Astral Dog scene was fiction, the idea came from a memoir by Malcolm Barker about late-nineteenth-century San Francisco that included this line: “A trick dog knows which girl is your soul mate.”

CHINATOWN

Prejudice against the Chinese, who stood on the lowest rung of the immigrant ladder, was at its zenith at the turn of the twentieth century, and “Chinatown was the district San Francisco demonized.”
⁵
Chinatown was its own city within San Francisco, an exotic ghetto crowded with twenty thousand Chinese Americans. Many white San Franciscans held the Chinese responsible for all manner of diseases and social ills.

“As long as times were good, the Chinese were accepted, but a late-nineteenth-century depression turned the tide. Formerly prized for their productivity, the Chinese now were cast as cunning and insidious job stealers.”
⁶

Chinese children were not welcome in public schools:

The (Chinese) boys were sent to school; that is, to the Chinese school; they were not allowed to go to the European school. At that time, there was one public school of about four rooms, on Clay Street, between Stockton and Powell Streets, those in attendance being mostly Japanese and other races….The Chinese boys went to their own school.
⁷

This account makes it sound as though Chinese girls did not attend school at all. I did find other sources indicating that some Chinese girls attended school along with Chinese boys. Donaldina Cameron, who appears in this novel, was a real person known as the Angry Angel of Chinatown. She made it her mission to rescue Chinese girls who had been sold into slavery.

MEDICINE

Rudyard Kipling once said, “Wonderful little our fathers knew. Half of their remedies cured you dead.” And that was certainly true of medicine in 1900, though it was a fascinating time, on the verge of epic change. Germ theory was in its infancy, yet many doctors did not understand—much less believe—the science behind it:

To the San Francisco citizens of 1900—even to most practicing physicians—the new bacteriology was still a form of black magic: mysterious, dimly understood, untrustworthy and inferior
to the laying on of hands and the observation of symptoms at the bedside.
⁸

Hospitals were widely distrusted. Doctors routinely made house calls and performed operations on kitchen tables. Many barely made a living. Better to have your son be a blacksmith or a bricklayer than a physician.

Some daughters of doctors did accompany their fathers on house calls. One such girl wrote: “Whenever it was possible, he took me with him on his calls in the country. I was always eager to go: I loved just being with him.”
⁹
And from the memoir of a country doctor: “When the roads were good and the trip not too long, I took my black-eyed little daughter with me.”
¹⁰

There were very few female doctors. And of course, women did not yet wear pants or have the right to vote, and they were often refused entry to bars, restaurants, and other businesses.

THE PLAGUE

Bubonic plague is one of the most feared diseases of all time, thought to be responsible for the death of one fourth to one third of the total population of Europe in the Middle Ages. It is generally
*
transferred from person to person via rat fleas. The fleas suck the blood of the infected rat. When the rat dies, the flea hops to a new host. The infected
flea bites its new host and injects the plague directly into the bloodstream.

In 1897, Paul-Louis Simond discovered that rat fleas spread the disease. He published his findings, but his research had not yet been given the blessing of the scientific community. In 1900 the U.S. Surgeon General published a report stating that the plague was contracted by breathing contaminated air. Though incorrect, it was the prevailing opinion at the time.

Throughout history, there was anecdotal evidence that linked rat death to the plague. “An ancient Indian text the Bhagavat Puran, had, long before, warned people to leave their houses when a rat fell from the roof, tottered about the floor and died; for then be sure that plague is at hand.”
¹¹

San Francisco rat fleas differ slightly from Asian rat fleas and are less successful at plague pathogen transfer. This may be one of the reasons the plague did not do as much damage in San Francisco as it did in other locations. Even so, the plague is mysterious. As author Edward Marriott stated, “If diseases have personalities, plague is an escape artist, a criminal Houdini.”
¹²
How, for example, did the scourge of the Black Death finally end? Nobody really knows.

THE FIRST PLAGUE OUTBREAK IN SAN FRANCISCO

On March 6, 1900, a Chinaman died of Plague in Chinatown and very soon thereafter others
of his countrymen succumbed to the same dread disease. The local and federal health authorities were thoroughly alive to the situation from the start, but encountered innumerable obstacles in their efforts to control the disease. The story of how short-sighted commercialism connived with lying newspapers to deceive San Franciscans as to the actual presence and extent of the Plague is a black chapter in the history of this fair city which will never be given much space in a lay history.
¹³

The wolf doctor, Dr. Joseph Kinyoun, was trained at the Pasteur Institute in the nascent science of bacteriology. He was able to extract the plague pathogen from the corpse of the first-known casualty and inject it into a rat, two guinea pigs, and a monkey. If the animals died, he believed it would confirm his plague diagnosis. But no one liked the arrogant, abrasive Dr. Kinyoun, and when first the rat and the guinea pigs and later the monkey died, it was easier to attribute the deaths to Kinyoun's intervention than to the plague virus.
¹⁴

The partial newspaper account in the text on
this page
is almost verbatim from
Chung Sai Yat Po.
Below is an extract from the
Call.

After appearing in a continuous performance of three days, in a scientific farce, which proved to be a commercial tragedy to San Francisco, the
Bubonic Board of Health, relying on the testimony of a rat, a monkey and a guinea pig, left the footlights, raised the quarantine of Chinatown and left the city to recover, as best it can, from the widespread damage inflicted upon its trade and every other material interest.

What a spectacle the incident presents! The Chief of Police hurrying at midnight to rope in a quarter of the city; the Bubonic Board adopting the phraseology of grave emergency by bulletins that had “the situation well in hand” and in other terms promoting the belief that it had identified the plague and had given the pestilence a flying switch from the glands of a Chinese into those of a guinea-pig; the stolid indifference of the city; the inefficiency of the quarantine maintained by the Chief of Police, which it is said, Chinese boast of escaping by the payment of a dollar a head—all go to make a record of official imbecility, and worse that has not been equaled in the history of the city. It is enough to make the guinea pig grin.
¹⁵

Still, clear evidence of the plague could be found. “In the Chinatown epidemic, eighty-seven dead rats, eleven dead of the plague, were found in the walls of a Chinese restaurant. Several cases of human plague had been traced to this place, but they immediately ceased when the rats were cleaned out.”
¹⁶

The Yersin versus Haffkine immunization question also closely hewed to actual events. The Yersin's did come from horses, and it was expensive. Medical personnel were given this immunization, which was thought to be more effective. The Haffkine immunization had significant side effects, and it was dangerous if injected into people who had already been exposed to the plague. There is now, however, some question about how effective the Yersin was—though that was not known at the time.

It is also true that the surgeon general “prescribed a mass vaccination of all the Chinese…[with Haffkine which] was violently unpopular in Chinatown.”
¹⁷
And one girl did jump out the window rather than be immunized.
¹⁸

CONFUSION AND DENIAL

Many people in both the Caucasian and Chinese communities had reason to deny the plague outbreak. San Franciscans were vested in the rise of their city. The railroads brought tourists to the jewel of the Pacific. Imports arrived and exports shipped from thriving ports. News of a plague outbreak would have brought the business of San Francisco to a grinding halt.

The Chinese feared scapegoating with good reason. The quarantine had been patently unfair. Any Caucasian person was allowed out of the quarantine area, whereas the Chinese were not. (Many San Franciscans believed only persons of Chinese descent could be infected by the plague, which was, of course, untrue.) Then, too, the Chinese
feared that Chinatown would be torched, as had happened when the plague struck Honolulu.
¹⁹
“By Friday, it is hoped that we will know that this was not the plague. Otherwise what happened in Honolulu might happen to us.”
²⁰
Even before the plague crisis, there were people who actively campaigned to burn Chinatown.

Perhaps the only businesses to be glad for a plague crisis were the undertakers and the Hearst newspaper enterprise. Hearst realized a plague scare would be good for circulation, and he made the most of it. All of the other newspapers conspired to keep any real news of the plague out of their pages. “In a stunning admission on March 25, the
Call
's editors admitted that they and the
Chronicle
's editors had made a mutual pact of silence on the plague.”
²¹

It is impossible to know how many people died of the plague. Doctors routinely misdiagnosed it. “Most physicians' attempts to understand plague amounted to little more than wild fumbling, their theories born of prejudice.”
²²

People hid their plague victims—either by shipping them out of the city hidden in barrels and boxes or via paperwork ruses whereby the cause of death was attributed to other diseases. Official plague death toll accounts vary from 250 to 280 people, but “to arrive at a better sense of the real numbers of deaths would require a careful biostatistical analysis of the unusual rise in deaths between 1900 and 1901 recorded as acute syphilis or pneumonia….”
²³

“Chinese residents, concerned that their homes would be burned down, hid their sick relatives and then shuttled
them out of the city in small boats at night. Sometimes when an inspector arrived before a body could be removed, a dead man would be propped up next to a table in an underground room, his hands arranged carefully over dominoes.”
²⁴

ERADICATING THE PLAGUE

By 1905 the first plague crisis had subsided. Chinatown and surrounding areas had been scoured from top to bottom, which made them less attractive to the rat population. When the second San Francisco plague epidemic hit after the 1906 earthquake, there were few if any plague deaths in Chinatown. “Between the first [plague] epidemic in 1900 and the second in 1907, the role of the flea and the rat in transmitting plague to human populations was elucidated.”
²⁵
And the new surgeon general, Rupert Blue, was able to stop the plague through an extensive rattery operation, which aimed to trap and kill 1,200 rats per day.