The Barbary Plague Read online

  Autopsy and cremation was the fate prescribed by health departments for any victim of an epidemic disease. But cutting and burning of the body violated the Confucian principle of filial piety. Autopsy was considered an affront to the parents of the deceased, who gave him life; and cremation was the final desecration. Such practices left a disembodied spirit in the void. “The ashes will be scattered in the air,” wrote the reporter for the Chinese daily, “and let go to the home of nothingness, the cave of emptiness.”9

  Chinatown had its own view of what ailed Wong Chut King, and it was certainly not the plague. Elders confided that the lumberman, like many bachelor workers who visited the green mansions—suffered from “notorious gonorrhea,” also known as “poisonous mango-shaped lump.”10

  In a community of lonely laborers living a continent away from their wives, such ills were as common an occupational hazard as callused hands. Although venereal disease was an unsavory topic, it would not bring down the fiery retribution on the neighborhood that was promised by a diagnosis of plague.

  Speculation about the torching of the Globe Hotel reached the ears of its tenants, who fled their bunks and vanished like smoke. But the Globe wasn’t burned to the ground. Instead, the city continued its chemical assault, fumigating and spraying acrid chemicals in hopes of purging the disease. The sanitation had its drawbacks. The smoking pots of sulfur smudged paint, spoiled hangings, and ruined upholstery. In neighboring stores, it would yellow pale silks and silt carvings with gritty smoke residue. Thick, rank clouds blinded residents with tears and sent them choking and sputtering into the streets for air. If the disease didn’t kill them, they guessed the cure surely would.

  The confined stared longingly at the world outside the cordon. Outside were jobs, money, food. A brave and foolhardy few tried to vault over or slip under the barricades. The crack of a billy club brought the escapees back into quarantine.

  From his official residence in Chinatown, the Chinese consul, Ho Yow, watched the street scene unfold below with a leaden heart.

  At home in two worlds, Ho spoke perfect English but posed for portraits in the traditional silk robes and dark silk skullcap of a senior Asian diplomat. Although he was his country’s designated representative of Chinese culture, he enjoyed Western sports like harness racing, and he raced his champion mare, Solo, all over Northern California. Solo trotted to victory behind a driver clad in red-and-blue racing silks, embroidered with a magnificent dragon with shimmering scales and flashing eyes.

  Ho knew well the danger of Black Death. In his father’s household in China, two servants had died of plague.11 But, he argued, blockading the whole district was discrimination. Anyone could see the quarantine rope markedly zigzagged to exclude white stores on the boundaries of Chinatown.

  More than the plague itself, Consul Ho feared that the quarantine would provoke a relapse of exclusion-law fever. He begged the city to be fair to his people. Immigrants born in China were barred from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. They were legally subjects of the emperor of China. Even Chinese people born in America hadn’t been deemed citizens until two years earlier, when the 1898 U.S. Supreme Court formally recognized their status in the case of Wong Kim Ark. Still, in the eyes of the white majority, their Asian features and golden hue stamped them indelibly as aliens.

  Ho sought out the Chinese Six Companies. More than just a Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the group functioned as de facto diplomats, working with the consul to keep peace between the tongs and untangle immigration snarls. Now, facing quarantine, Ho and the Chinese Six Companies had another mission: protecting the civil rights of their people. So they hired lawyers and vowed to defend their small stake in America.

  On Gold Mountain in the Year of the Rat, the bad times were about to get worse.

  “A Lively Corpse”

  CRADLING AUTOPSY SAMPLES from Wong Chut King in glass vials, city bacteriologist Wilfred Kellogg boarded a streetcar. When the driver signaled the Ferry Building stop, Kellogg got off and bought a ticket for Angel Island. Ascending the ramp to board the ferry, he no doubt saw the water afloat with garbage, the screaming gulls swooping down to pluck tidbits from the waves, and the rats gorging at low tide.

  The ferry churned north, over waters ruffled into whitecaps by the stiff bay winds. Past the stony outcrop of Alcatraz, the ferry continued on toward to the tree-dotted, tan hulk of Angel Island. In mid-bay, as the ferry slapped over swells, Kellogg clutched his samples more tightly for safety. One misstep could send the stoppered tubes crashing to the cabin floor, and the translucent pink lymph fluid and bits of bloody pulp would be lost amid shards of glass. The mystery of Wong’s death would remain unsolved.

  Forty minutes later, the vessel swung around the north side of Angel Island, cut its engines, and nosed into Hospital Cove. Kellogg steadied his sea legs and lurched down the ramp onto the pier, then walked on to the headquarters of the quarantine officer, Joseph J. Kinyoun. Kinyoun’s job was to inspect arriving ships, check the passengers and crew, isolate the sick, fumigate the cargo, and keep diseases out of the country. It was his duty to impose federal standards of hygiene on this port city that, after Washington, D.C., must have seemed like a frontier outpost. Sent to San Francisco from the capital just ten months before, he was a disease warrior. Angel Island was his fortress, and all San Francisco Bay was his moat.

  Kinyoun was a “Pasteurian,” a doctor trained in Europe in the new science of bacteriology founded by the patriarch of infectious diseases, Louis Pasteur. He was thirty-nine years old, portly and balding, with a cleft chin and an obstinate streak. He had a tender ego and a gut to match. Kinyoun was unsuited to his politically turbulent job. A public health officer needs the hide of a pachyderm, he told colleagues.1 Instead, he had the skin of an onion.

  Conceived on the eve of the Civil War, Joseph James Kinyoun was born in East Bend, North Carolina, in November 1860. The son of a Confederate army surgeon, John Hendricks Kinyoun, and his wife, Bettie Ann, Kinyoun spent his infancy in the care of his mother, who prayed and pined for her soldier husband. The Sunday after Christmas of 1861, Bettie Ann took up her pen to send him all the home news of churchgoing, hog raising, and Negro sales. The centerpiece of the letter was a sketch of their thirteen-month-old Joe, a whirlwind who was just then playing at her feet.

  “Our little darling,” she wrote, “…has improved a great deal in walking, and you would be pleased to see him running across the room which he does sometimes twenty times before he seems tired. He has a fashion of walking with his little hands laid upon his breast, which makes him totter a good deal…. [H]e eats as hearty as a little shoat.”2

  When the Civil War ended, the elder Dr. Kinyoun returned to practice medicine. His son would follow in his footsteps. Despite upheaval in family life—relocation to Centre View, Missouri, and the death of his mother when he was twelve—Joseph Kinyoun found his calling early as his father’s apprentice. Following his training at St. Louis Medical College in Missouri, and then at Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York, where he completed his M.D. in 1882, he returned to Missouri to join his father’s medical practice.3

  While at home in Centre View, he met a young Missourian named Susan Elizabeth Perry—Lizzie—and married her. They were both twenty-three. Within a year Lizzie bore a girl who died in childhood.4

  While working with his father, Joseph Kinyoun started reading exciting reports about the French chemist Louis Pasteur, who was exploring the world of microbes. Through the lens of a microscope, Dr. Kinyoun immersed himself in the study of bacteria as agents of disease.

  Kinyoun returned east with his bride to continue his study of bacteriology at Bellevue Hospital, and in 1886 he joined the U.S. Marine Hospital Service, the federal agency that inspected ships for disease, imposed maritime quarantines, and tended sick seamen. The service needed doctors like Kinyoun, with a passion for bacteriology, who could infuse service operations with the powerful new science. So the fledgling physician was asked to set up a bacteriolog
y laboratory at the quarantine station in New York. It was in an unimposing one-room lab, up in the attic of the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, that he started to make his name.

  A ship landed in New York Harbor with passengers racked by cramps and relentless diarrhea. Local clinicians feared the worst—cholera—but nobody knew for sure. The symptoms were variable and vague; they could mimick those of other diseases. It was Kinyoun’s job to confirm it or rule it out. From the ailing passengers, he obtained samples and prepared slides. Squinting through the microscope lens, he saw a swarm of short, rod-shaped bacteria with hairy little fringes called flagellae, swimming around on the glass slide. It was Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that causes cholera.

  This was the first bacteriologic diagnosis of cholera in the United States, or anywhere in the western hemisphere.5 At age twenty-seven, Joe Kinyoun was a force to reckon with.

  In 1891, Kinyoun moved his one-room operation to Washington, D.C., to what came to be called the National Hygienic Laboratory, where he gained broad powers to pursue bacteriologic diagnoses of other epidemic diseases. Out of his slides and test tubes emerged the embryo of a vast biomedical research empire that decades later would become known as the National Institutes of Health.

  But back in 1899, Kinyoun was simply helping America catch up with Europe, where the original microbe hunters, like Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany, had begun the revolution in infectious disease study. Kinyoun now made a pilgrimage to the mecca of microbiology, studying at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and at Koch’s laboratory in Berlin. From Koch he learned the classic protocol, essentially a recipe for how to prove a germ caused a disease: 1) isolate the germ from a patient; 2) grow the germ in pure culture; 3) inoculate the germ into a lab animal and reproduce the disease; and 4) isolate the identical germ from the test animal. A century later, this circle of proof would continue to govern the diagnosis of infectious diseases. He also learned how to make an antitoxin against diphtheria by harvesting disease-fighting antibodies from the blood of horses exposed to the germ.

  When he returned to the National Hygienic Laboratory in the United States, Kinyoun brought with him the European techniques that helped to transform the practice of medical diagnosis, from the ancient bedside art of observing symptoms to a lab science using microscopes, cultures, stains, and slides. Symptoms like fever and pain could be vague and misleading. Bacteriology offered a way to test a diagnostic hypothesis. Its truths were verifiable; it had the beauty of certainty. Or so he thought.

  Just after Kinyoun’s National Hygienic Laboratory marked its first decade, his boss cut short his tenure and gave him a job far away. The supervising surgeon general of the Marine Hospital Service was Walter Wyman, a great gruff walrus of a man. A brusque bachelor, Wyman regarded the men of the corps as his family, and he was famed for abrupt transfers. He also regarded his primary mission as the imposition of the police powers of quarantine.6 Now, quarantine duty was calling from the Pacific Coast, and he had Kinyoun in mind for the job.

  With bubonic plague now ravaging China, Wyman rightly knew that the Pacific portal of the United States was vulnerable, so he enlisted Joseph Kinyoun to combat it. He told Kinyoun to pack up his family—which now included three children and a pregnant Lizzie—and go west.

  Kinyoun was shocked by this abrupt transfer. After running the National Hygienic Laboratory, being sent back to police a port city against disease must have been a humiliating demotion. But Wyman had homed in on Kinyoun’s replacement at the Hygienic Lab, so Kinyoun was California bound. Although Kinyoun was a brilliant bacteriologist, he was decidedly the wrong man for the job of quarantine officer on the Golden Gate. The port, a melting pot simmering with racial tensions, needed a doctor with a diplomat’s touch. Instead, the city got an intellectually acute but autocratic scientist with a bruised ego who expected a level of deference the city wasn’t prepared to give.

  On the eve of Kinyoun’s reluctant departure from Washington, D.C., his fellow physicians feted him with a farewell banquet at Rauscher’s Restaurant. Their toasts were printed up in a cream-colored program bound with blue silk cord. Rumpled and stained from the night’s festivities, a copy would rest with his papers until he died.

  “Ah, happy, proud America! Thrice happy to possess men of Kinyoun’s stamp, with all their faculties calmly and resolutely bent upon the fulfillment of a noble duty to mankind,” intoned the toastmaster that night. “I wish you God-speed in your journey across the continent to the Golden Gate of the Pacific Ocean, where new fields of activity and new friends await you….”7

  After a week on the train with a pregnant wife and three small children, Kinyoun reached his foggy exile. Temporarily ensconced in the plush and gilt Palace Hotel, with its liveried doormen, he found rates that no health officer could afford. It was “the spider’s trap for the eastern fly, and everyone pays tribute to these money sharks, on setting foot in San Francisco,” he wrote to relatives and colleagues back East.8

  He checked out. Kinyoun bundled his family into a carriage that clopped down Market Street to the Ferry Building, where they boarded the steamer George Sternberg. Five miles and forty minutes later, the boat swung into a sheltered inlet on the northern shore of Angel Island.

  Facing north, away from San Francisco toward the tiny Marin County hamlet of Tiburon, his new headquarters was an eyesore in paradise. The biggest island in the bay, Angel Island was an ancient Miwok Indian camp, now occupied by U.S. quarantine and military officers. Its 740 acres were canopied with oak, madrone, bay laurel, and eucalyptus. Washed by the blue-green waters of Raccoon Strait, Hospital Cove might have made a beautiful spot for a resort hotel, Kinyoun mused. Then he beheld the primitive quarantine station and sparsely furnished cottage. His wife, Lizzie, was appalled. Kinyoun’s heart sank.

  The ramshackle wharf and quarantine station’s dirt roads melted into mud rivulets in the rainy season. And if the quarantine officer’s quarters were primitive, facilities for immigrants were even worse. There was no shed to shelter immigrants after their disinfecting bath. So the new arrivals had to stand, soaked and shivering, in the bay wind. It was a cold hygienic threshold to what would become in later years the Ellis Island of the Pacific Coast.

  His new island home had few neighbors, no school, and little amusement for the children: Mary Alice, Conrad, Perry, and their new redheaded baby, John Nathan. There was a pier for fishing, but Kinyoun found Pacific fish to be insipid fare. Lizzie had a bad foot that kept her housebound. Too frail for more than one evening out in fourteen months, she was often in a raw temper.9 They were isolated and made few friends. At night, it seemed that they were the ones in quarantine, bound by the sigh of the waves, the tolling of fog bells, and the pulse of the lighthouse.

  The bright spot in their island exile was photography: Lizzie spent evenings in her darkroom, conjuring blurry portraits of her children out of the vinegary chemical bath. This hobby kept a kind of peace; Joseph had his lab, and Lizzie had hers.

  Kinyoun chafed in the epaulets of his federal public health officer’s uniform, which made him look ridiculous, he said, like a “major-domo” or a “government mule.”10 He’d been a young star in the Marine Hospital Service, nailing the cholera diagnosis while still in his twenties. Why had Dr. Wyman rewarded him with a transfer to this rude place, remote from the nerve center of public health? Kinyoun bitterly joked that Dr. Wyman had sent him out West to bury him. Writing to one of his mentors, Kinyoun swore that if that were the case, he would prove to be “a rather lively corpse.”11

  For certain, his scientific pedigree wasn’t worth a wooden nickel in this rowdy town, where bankers, bosses, and broadsheets ruled. Kinyoun resented the grip of merchants on the life of the city and its public health. “You know,” he wrote the folks back East, “San Francisco is frequently called ‘Jew Town.’ Well named.”12 He imagined that the city’s Jewish businessmen were trying to get rid of him. About that, Kinyoun was wrong; all the city’s businessmen wanted to get rid of him
. His plague work was bad for business. The more the city reviled him, the more Kinyoun relished his image as the hero of a lonely public health crusade.

  “I fortunately for one time in my life assumed the role of Dav[ey] Crockett… knowing that I was right,” he confided to a friend.13 Guarding the nation’s health, he felt that he was under siege, much like his coonskin-capped hero in the Alamo.

  One night, his wife, Lizzie, dreamed that the surgeon general came unannounced to Angel Island and requested a candle from her so he could inspect the quarantine station in the dark. Wait for my husband, she protested. What does it mean, Joe? she asked Kinyoun later. The surgeon general was in the dark, and he needed Kinyoun to light his way—it seemed clear enough. Kinyoun longed to be like his namesake, the biblical Joseph, honored by Pharaoh for his interpretation of the nightmare about to unfold on this alien coast.14

  THE SPECTER OF PLAGUE had risen up before here. In June 1899, the Japanese steamship Nippon Maru had docked in San Francisco after two deaths at sea and two stowaways who jumped overboard with alleged plague ravaging their bodies. It had been impossible to prove the diagnosis. Indeed, Kinyoun’s own lab analysis disputed it.

  But now the memory of another ship haunted Kinyoun—the steamer Australia, which arrived from plague-stricken Honolulu in January 1900. It moored at the dock where the sewers from Chinatown emptied. The Chinese soon observed great numbers of rats dying on their roofs and in their courtyards. It seemed probable the rats had gained entrance to Chinese homes through the sewer pipes.15