But just as Blue arrived to help White clean Chinatown, a mysterious pause in plague cases occurred. Joseph White had his suspicions. “The cases shown to us and the corpses brought to us for examination after death have distinctly the appearance of having been culled,” he reported to the surgeon general. The sick people he was allowed to see suffered from cancer and other chronic ailments; he never saw any acute cases of fever. It was strange for a population of Chinatown’s size. “These people,” he said, “do not wish us to find plague.”6
Poring over death records for Chinatown, White was struck by the plunge in mortality figures to a fraction of the normal toll. “I feel sure that they are hiding the dead,” he told Wyman. So with the chief of police, he plotted a new strategy. The police would conduct raids on gambling dens. Once inside, they would look around for sick people, and they would let White know the results. It was a desperate ploy to reach beyond the few cases he saw that the state doctors had handpicked for him.7
Were bodies stowed beneath the sidewalk? Were they spirited out of the city under cover of darkness? White sent a telegram to Washington requesting authority to fan out around San Francisco for a radius of one hundred miles, in the hope of tracking down missing cases.8
While White wrangled, Blue dug in to inspect the blocks around Dupont Street for sanitary problems. He found cellars afloat with sewage and vermin, the result of years of landlord neglect.
Poking about a garbage heap in back of the store owned by Sing Fah on Dupont Street, Blue was appalled. Sing Fah’s was the finest store in Chinatown, stocking elegant Asian imports. But behind it, Blue found squalor. He recoiled upon discovering a garbage dump with about 150 pounds of rotten meat hidden underneath it.9
Still, they found no plague cases among the trickle of Chinese patients they were allowed to see. State-appointed doctors, meanwhile, insisted on being consulted each time the federal officers disinfected a house or fumigated a sewer. Finally, White could take no more. He fired off a furious letter to the governor, charging his medical team with concealment.
The tally of sick and dead was “ridiculously… preposterously out of proportion” with a community of Chinatown’s size, he wrote.10 He surmised that the sick and dead were being whisked across the bay to Oakland or as far away as Sacramento, one hundred miles to the east. Meanwhile, when White did manage to see a body, Gage’s men would appear at the morgue, demanding tissue samples, arguing over the meaning of symptoms, and pressing competing diagnoses that were naïve or downright fraudulent.
White was fed up. He wrote Wyman that the governor, after promising Washington to clean up Chinatown, had “complied with the meagre letter of the agreement, but not in its full spirit” of plague eradication.11
Moreover, White heard that as soon as six weeks had passed without a new case, Governor Gage planned to declare the plague over and end the campaign. That date—June 9—was fast approaching. White urged Surgeon General Wyman not to make a dishonorable peace with the state. The service should refuse to issue a false certificate of health to the city. It would be better to pull its men out of the state and simply “allow California to work out her own destiny.”12
Throughout this war of nerves, Blue didn’t seem to get riled—by the obstructionism of the state or the passive resistance of the Chinese. He deflected attacks rather than battering opponents head-on. Beneath his charming facade, he was a soldier’s son and a tactician.
White now saw the young officer as a potential successor, one who could free him to return to the East Coast. “Regarding Blue,” White reported to Washington. “His work to date has been most excellent…. The impression [that] he was not a man of pronounced personality and executive ability, although a very nice gentleman, is utterly erroneous. He has untangled a good many rather difficult snarls; has an immense amount of self-possession and good temper, and is altogether fully capable of acting as executive officer….”13
White’s endorsement helped Blue win a promotion. In later years, White might have felt regret. Blue would one day be his rival for high office.
San Franciscans—most oblivious to the plague intrigues—were fixated on a different medical drama. President McKinley arrived on May 13 in a San Francisco decked with bouquets and bunting. But the figure that emerged from the presidential Pullman coach looked not like the commander in chief people expected, but rather like the worried consort of a gravely ill First Lady.14 A string of daily bulletins, hinting at typhoid, said her death was near.
Banquets were canceled and bouquets wilted as Mrs. McKinley remained in a sickbed at the Scott mansion on Laguna and Clay Streets. The president scrapped most of his schedule. Citizens who lined the streets to cheer instead raised their hats and handkerchiefs in a silent salute. After receiving doses of heart stimulants, Mrs. McKinley rallied and returned with her husband to the East Coast.15
Granted his wish to return to Washington, Joseph White also left San Francisco in early June. Staying on to oversee the floundering plague campaign was Rupert Blue—assisted by two other officers.
California’s governor, as predicted, declared plague nonexistent and pulled his money out of San Francisco in June, leaving the federal doctors and the city holding the reins. Blue optimistically forecast that he would complete the hygienic and sanitary overhaul of Chinatown on June 22. But he also quietly set up headquarters that would serve as the nerve center for a much longer siege. He leased a morgue and laboratory for $75 a month on Merchant Street, a small alley near Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square. He was in business.
There was still the delicate matter of the disappearing corpses. Blue proposed that the federal government run its own hearse service. He asked the surgeon general for $35 a month to rent a horse, cart, and driver as the only way to prevent “surreptitious removals or substitution of bodies.”16 Dr. Wyman agreed but promised Governor Gage that Dr. Blue and two assistants would be around just a little while longer.17 He had only a skeleton staff to conduct what Wyman implied was a phaseout of the unpopular plague operation. Dr. Mark J. White inspected the sick, and Dr. Donald H. Currie ran the morgue and lab.
With public health threats apparently under control, San Franciscans now reclined into summer like it was a hammock. The upper class left for resorts in San Rafael or Santa Cruz. In town, Aïda opened the summer season at the Tivoli Opera House.
Just after Independence Day 1901, plague returned in a corner of Chinatown’s demimonde. Blue and his men had just finished testing the corpse of an asparagus harvester for plague on the night of Monday, July 8, and were washing off the smell of the lab, possibly looking forward to a drink, when the calls came. There was a cluster of fever breaking out in a Chinatown crib.
A Japanese physician, Dr. Kurozawa, was the first to arrive at the apartment at 845 Washington Street. The Yoshiwara House was a Japanese brothel in the heart of the Chinese quarter. It had a stable of seven women catering to an Asian and a citywide clientele. That night, three of its women—Miyo, Shina, and Ume—lay prostrate with fever and pain.
Under their kimonos, Shina and Miyo had egg-size lumps protruding from their pelvises. The third patient, Ume, had a tender swelling under her right arm. Alarmed, Dr. Kurozawa called a network of city physicians, who called the bacteriologist H. A. L. Ryfkogel. Ryfkogel alerted Rupert Blue.