Black Death at the Golden Gate Read online

  On nights when he could not sleep, Kinyoun listened to the faint sounds of the city drifting across the bay. His thoughts often returned to his unused laboratory equipment, whose gathering dust sometimes seemed as if it had been placed there by Wyman himself to mock him. The field of bacteriology was advancing so rapidly that Kinyoun feared that he would be left behind, and felt all the dreams that he had for himself dissolving away. The posting to Angel Island threatened “to make such a break in my scientific work that it will be impossible for me to ever catch up again,” he admitted in a letter to a friend.

  His only hope was that Wyman would relent and recognize that his laboratory skills were too valuable to the Service to be wasted on this tiny island, allowing him to return to Washington and resume the work that he felt more urgently every time he glanced at the yellowing photograph of Bettie hanging in their makeshift home.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE NIPPON MARU

  The ship appeared out of the fog at dawn, like a ghost made real.

  As it neared Angel Island, sailors hoisted a yellow flag, an international symbol that the ship carried diseased passengers on board. Only when it came closer could Marine Hospital Service personnel make out its name: the Nippon Maru. The ship, which originated in Hong Kong, was already notorious on both sides of the Pacific. It had languished in quarantine at both Yokohama and Honolulu after several of its passengers died of suspected plague on the open seas, but was ultimately cleared to sail on toward the United States. Now weeks behind schedule, it dropped anchor off the main cove of the island, once again tainted by an unexplained death on board.

  A doctor from the Marine Hospital Service met the ship and learned that a Japanese woman had died, apparently of plague, two days before the steamer reached San Francisco and had been buried at sea. He then examined the lifeless body of another passenger, a Chinese man who had died the previous day from what appeared to be the same illness. He took tissue samples from the corpse and ordered it cremated, while the remaining fifty-five passengers were placed under quarantine on Angel Island. A team of Marine Hospital Service men boarded the ship and began washing down its surfaces with boiling hot water, intent on killing any traces of the unidentified disease, while another removed all the luggage and cargo and fumigated it with a mixture of steam and carbolic acid, destroying all clothing in the process.

  Kinyoun, who had been the first American to study the newly discovered plague bacillus two years before, raced the tissue samples taken from the dead man to his laboratory, thrilled to once again put his research skills to work after weeks of self-doubt. There, he examined the cells under his microscope and began the slow work of growing them in a culture. Only then would he be able to determine how great a risk the men and women now in quarantine posed to the city. If plague had been on board and was spreading, then any one of the fifty-five passengers now in his custody would be capable of sparking an epidemic that could kill millions.

  The following morning, an Italian crab fisherman by the name of Joseph Casarino discovered the bodies of two men floating face down in the water about an eighth of a mile east of Fort Point, a Civil War-era fortification at the mouth of the bay which in time would fall under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. Casarino threw a rope over the bodies and towed them toward a small beach behind the nearby Fulton Iron Works. As he neared land, he noticed that the dead men wore uninflated life preservers bearing the name Nippon Maru, which by then was well-known throughout the city as a suspected plague ship. Fearing for his life, he left the bodies floating just offshore and alerted the city coroner, who paid him twenty dollars for his service.

  At the city morgue, the coroner on duty began the grim work of inspecting the bloated corpses to determine the cause of death. Both men were wearing only their underwear when their bodies were found, with the shorter of the pair having apparently tied a bundle of his clothing around his neck, strongly suggesting they had intentionally jumped into the cold, shark-infested waters of the bay and were attempting to swim to shore when they died. An autopsy revealed that their lungs and stomachs were full of saltwater, indicating that the immediate cause of death was drowning. Yet the coroner suspected more. “In my mind there is no doubt that the men were infected with the plague,” he told one of the city’s papers. “I would not be surprised to learn that the men were driven from the steamer by some of their fellow passengers in steerage who were afraid of being tied up at the quarantine station.” Dr. William Barbat, a member of the San Francisco Board of Health, took a sample of tissue from each of the bodies and without first conferring with Kinyoun announced the next day that after studying the specimens in his laboratory he was sure of the presence of bubonic plague, which had never before appeared in the United States.

  Kinyoun objected, and loudly. Given the Marine Hospital Service’s role in regulating all incoming sea and land traffic that originated outside of California, he alone had the authority to determine the risk that the passengers now sleeping on iron cots in the quarantine ward posed to the city. But more than that, he considered Barbat a scientist of far lower rank and skill whose opinion he was free to ignore. Not only had no definitive laboratory diagnosis of plague ever been made in such a short period of time, but the bodies of the drowned men were in such a deteriorated state after bobbing in the bay for at least twelve hours that all surviving tissue was unusable. Kinyoun’s own tests conducted on tissue samples taken from the undisturbed body of the Chinese man who died aboard the Nippon Maru soon came back negative for the disease, leaving him to wonder how two diseased patients would have the strength to try to swim for freedom while a passenger free of plague had resigned to stay and die aboard the ship.

  In his first important decision in San Francisco, Kinyoun fell back on his worst instincts. Unmoved by the opinions of local doctors that clashed with his own research, he announced that the detained passengers would be allowed to enter San Francisco once the fifteen-day quarantine period was over as long as they showed no symptoms of disease. When the Board of Health publicly questioned his findings, he was quick to resort to sarcasm, unconcerned that there might come a day when he may need its help. “I think there must be two kinds of bubonic plague, the real thing and the state quarantine plague,” he quipped to a newspaper reporter. After Barbat took a ferry to Angel Island to complain in person, Kinyoun mocked his technical abilities and threatened to throw him into quarantine for handling specimens that he was unqualified to touch.

  After fifteen days had passed without any signs of plague, the detained passengers formed lines and were led onto ferries to take them to San Francisco. Kinyoun stood watch on the dock, receiving handshakes and words of thanks from men and women as they passed on toward freedom. The fifty-five passengers who first walked into quarantine were joined by one addition, an infant named Margaret Francis Hill whose mother went into labor the day after she arrived on Angel Island and gave birth under Kinyoun’s care in a makeshift delivery room. None of the passengers later came down with the disease, proving that Kinyoun’s diagnosis was correct. Yet once again, he had put being right above anything else, destroying the possibility of making new allies only three weeks after he had arrived in a city he did not understand.

  Six months later, an urgent bulletin arrived from Hawaii. Marine Hospital Service doctors stationed on the islands were the first to tell the outside world that bubonic plague had emerged and was spreading in Honolulu. Kinyoun knew then that his mission had changed. With San Francisco the most heavily trafficked port on the Pacific Coast and the main link between the United States and Hawaii, it was inevitable that the disease would be lurking in one of the hundreds of ships that were bound this way.

  There was no room for error. If he failed to spot a single infected passenger, Kinyoun would hold himself responsible for the spread of death on an unimaginable scale. Not only was the city he glimpsed across the bay in danger, but a person carrying the disease could easily hop on one of the countless trains connecting San Francisco
with the rest of a nation stretching across the continent. A train heading east would stop in every major city along its route, making it possible for one infected patient to scatter plague from Salt Lake City to Denver to Chicago and New York within the span of days, a speed never before seen in history and which would overwhelm any attempt at containment.

  Yet with this news came the chance to reclaim what Kinyoun saw as his rightful position in Washington. Quickly spotting and preventing the disease from establishing itself in the country would cement in the public’s mind the notion that laboratory science could save lives, accelerating the legitimacy of his profession and increasing his own prestige. A posting that Wyman had intended as punishment had become the primary line of defense against a disease that had never before reached North America. If he succeeded, Kinyoun would finally have redemption.

  As the new century began, Kinyoun spent his days staring at the ships coming in through the Golden Gate from his perch on Angel Island, waiting. One of them would eventually bring a patient infected with plague, and he vowed to himself that he would be ready. He pored over every dispatch from Honolulu, where much of its Chinatown remained under quarantine, effectively turning one of its most populated districts into a jail. Kinyoun hoped the flurry of telegrams would offer some clues that would help him protect San Francisco. Instead, it soon became clear that the largest city in Hawaii was falling into chaos.

  On January 20, firefighters in Honolulu set a small shack next to Kaumakapili Church ablaze, taking care to position their horse-drawn fire engine between the fire and the mammoth building whose twin Gothic spires towered over the city. An hour later, the winds unexpectedly shifted, sending burning embers flying over the most famous house of worship on the islands. Firemen watched in disbelief as smoke began pouring out of the top of the church, too high for their hoses to reach. Within minutes, the entire building was in flames, and became the center of a firestorm that quickly engulfed the neighborhood. The horses harnessed to the fire engine bolted in fear, leaving firemen with no way to douse the swirling flames.

  Men scrambled through the inferno, dodging burning debris as the fire tore through the densely packed neighborhood. Panicked residents began dynamiting buildings over the objections of their owners, desperately hoping to create a firebreak. Amid the chaos, dozens of white Hawaiians rushed to the edge of Chinatown with axes and revolvers in hand, threatening to kill any Asian resident who tried to flee from the burning quarantine zone. Firecrackers exploding in abandoned buildings sparked rumors throughout the district that soldiers were gunning down men and women in their homes. Desperate families were trapped as the flames bore down on them, left with the choice between burning to death or getting shot or bludgeoned by men who feared plague.

  Finally, at mid-afternoon, the military relented and allowed residents of Chinatown to escape the firestorm through a single exit. More than a thousand armed white Hawaiians lined King Street to stand guard as shocked refugees made their way downtown to the grounds of Kawaiaha’o Church, the former national church of the Hawaiian kingdom. There, they were issued tents and blankets and waited in silence as their former homes were reduced to ash. Health officials soon moved the residents of Chinatown to a former barrack in the hills far away from the city center. Over the following weeks, refugees from the district were required to take daily showers in front of doctors who were convinced that their filthy bodies would spread plague. The fire continued to burn on in Chinatown for another seventeen days before it was fully extinguished, leaving nothing but rubble behind.

  In the coming weeks, no new cases of plague were discovered in Honolulu, leaving health officials content that the policy of fire had worked. For Kinyoun, however, his options seemed to narrow: either prevent the disease from establishing itself in San Francisco, or risk burning down the city in order to prevent the disease from infecting the nation.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE IMPERIAL CITY

  If San Francisco seemed like a stranger to Joseph Kinyoun, that was to be expected. The city often seemed like a stranger to itself, unsure of its place in the new century.

  Fifty years earlier it had been the epicenter of one of the greatest hysterias the world had ever seen. On January 24, 1848, a carpenter by the name of James Marshall spotted glittering flakes in the clear flowing waters of the American River near Coloma while building a sawmill for John Sutter, a Swiss immigrant who ruled over a fifty-thousand-acre fiefdom he called New Helvetia near what is now the city of Sacramento. Marshall gathered some of the material that caught his eye and rode on horseback through heavy rain to Sutter’s Fort some fifty miles away. Once there, he took Sutter to a private room and told him to lock the door. He then revealed a rag he had hidden in his jacket; nestled inside were more than two ounces of shimmering dust. The men at the mill thought him crazy, he said, but he believed that it was gold. Marshall paced as Sutter consulted the entry on gold in a nearby Encyclopedia Americana and began experimenting on the material. He soon determined that it was indeed gold, with a purity of at least twenty-three carats—a nearly flawless composition rarely found in the natural world.

  The men agreed to mention their finding to no one and left the next day for the sawmill, arriving just before sunset. Taking care not to draw attention to themselves, they walked along the sandy bank of the river, trying to determine whether Marshall could repeat his discovery. By nightfall they had collected an additional ounce without effort. The next morning, they again ventured out alone and found gold not only in the riverbed but in dried-up creeks and ravines twisting off it, in amounts so plentiful that Sutter was able to dislodge a solid lump weighing an ounce and a half with nothing more than a small knife he had in his pocket.

  Despite their precautions, they soon discovered that they had been followed. A Native American who worked for Sutter had trailed them all morning, and that afternoon rushed into a clearing full of ranch hands while holding a nugget he’d pulled from the river above his head and shouting “Oro! Oro!,” the Spanish word for gold. His secret lost, Sutter begged the men to keep the discovery to themselves for six more weeks, giving him enough time to complete a flour mill then under construction in nearby Brighton that had already cost him $25,000, a sum equivalent to nearly $720,000 in today’s dollars. Concealing the fact that gold nuggets were just lying there for the taking was beyond any man’s capacity for self-censorship, however, and word soon leaked out beyond Sutter’s realm, creating a golden myth of California that it would never shed.

  San Francisco, then a city of less than a thousand people that had changed its name from Yerba Buena the year before, found itself forever changed. For more than two hundred years, the fog engulfing the Golden Gate had acted like a false door, masking the entrance to the bay from European explorers even as settlements as close as Monterey grew into cities. Now, with the discovery of gold, the world came rushing in. With its deep bay, the city became the hub of gold country, through which all the spoils and sins of sudden wealth flowed. The value of horses, tin pans, axes—anything that could be of use in extracting metal from the earth—shot up in value beyond all rationality. Saloons, hotels, banks and brothels sprouted along the hills around the bay, leaving a travel writer by the name of Bayard Taylor to say of San Francisco that it “seemed to accomplish in a day the growth of half a century.”

  It seemed that every able-bodied man disappeared from the city and raced into the gold fields for days at a time, consumed by the proximity of wealth and what it could bring. Identities built up over a lifetime shattered upon the news of Marshall’s discovery, undone by the prospect of striking it rich. Family, friendships, responsibilities—gold drained the luster from everything that had previously seemed to matter and replaced it with the fever dreams of possibility. Even children were known to venture into the gold fields without supplies and come back after just one day with the modern equivalent of more than $250 worth of gold flakes in their hands.

  By the fall of 1848, rumors of gold had traveled
across the continent and reached New York. Skeptical of what seemed to be nothing more than tall tales, the New York Herald sent reporters to investigate. They came back with a story that declared that, compared to the wealth flowing through Californian streams, “the famous El Dorado was but a sand bank, the Arabian nights were tales of simplicity!” In December, President James Polk formally announced the discovery of gold to the nation, declaring in a speech to Congress that “the accounts of abundance of gold are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.”

  Across the country, farmers left their crops, captains abandoned their boats, and merchants closed their doors, all to head toward San Francisco and the gold fields that lay within reach of its bay. By the end of 1849, an estimated 100,000 Americans had set off for California, sparking what would become the largest mass migration in the country’s history. The young men who left their homes to head west called themselves Argonauts, a nod to what they saw as their grand quest for glory in an uncharted land. In San Francisco, dozens of clipper ships heavy with prospective miners emerged each day from the fog, as if it were an invasion. One Illinois paper printed a gold miner’s goodbye poem to his wife, in which he wrote,