When doctors arrived the next morning, they found Margaret Bowers very weak. Her bloodshot gaze was baleful, and her face was a mask of pain and fear—the “pestlike expression” that doctors now saw as a sign of plague. During examination, doctors discovered a mass of swollen, tender glands in her left thigh. Doctors gathered up her limp form, bundled her into a horse-drawn ambulance, and carted her to the isolation hospital, where her three-year-old Joseph lay fighting for his life. There she was admitted and injected with massive amounts of Yersin’s antiserum, her only hope of withstanding the infection. In a nearby bed, the resilient Joseph began to improve.
Meanwhile, at home, Mrs. Bowers’s two-year-old daughter and her sixty-year-old mother, Bridget Noiset, developed ominous fevers and swellings. The toddler and her grandmother were now admitted to the hospital with a diagnosis of bubonic plague. A third Bowers child was hospitalized, but he alone managed to evade the voracious fleas and stay healthy.
Confined in a county hospital isolation cottage, Mrs. Bowers seemed to respond to the antiserum infusions. Her fever wavered and dipped. Doctors hoped she could outlast the siege. But she still complained of an ache beneath her left breast and ribs.
Sudddenly, on the evening of December 6, Margaret Bowers’s fever shot up to 104 degrees. The germs had flowed through her bloodstream, colonizing her lungs. Now she had pneumonic plague.
As she fought to breathe, the bacteria and debris from dead cells clogged the air sacs of her lungs. Her blood frothed but failed to pick up any oxygen. Each breath was labored; she starved for air. On December 8, with her little boy recuperating nearby and her helpless nurses looking on, Margaret Bowers suffocated. Her heart stopped in midcontraction. She was twenty-seven years old.7
The Bowers boys, now orphaned, told the doctors of their dead rat discovery, its mock funeral, and the cardboard tomb. Investigators backtracked to Mission Street, unearthed the coffin, and transported the rat to the plague laboratory at 401 Fillmore Street. There, Blue’s team split, skinned, and autopsied the animal. No one was surprised to find the bacteria of plague.8 An innocent game had killed the boys’ parents.
Not until the second plague was under way did San Francisco address the rats’ portal of entry: the waterfront. Although ships had long been fumigated, few barriers had prevented the rats from scuttling between ship and shore. Now at Blue’s urging, the city began to order the building of metal and concrete wharves and piers, replacing the old, rat-ridden wood pilings. On the hawsers that moored ships to the docks, shippers placed new effective rat guards, some with traps, to thwart the four-legged stowaways. Meanwhile, on dry land, Blue and Rucker refined their training of the rat-catcher corps.
“A man can no more be made into a rat-catcher by giving him a rat trap than he can become a soldier by being provided with a rifle,” Blue wrote.9 He was concerned that his own crew was being undermined by the shoddy and dispirited local laborers they’d hired to catch rats. Many of the men were out-of-work streetcar operators and political hangers-on who had signed up thinking they wouldn’t have to break a sweat. So Blue imposed a merit system, firing the slackers and rewarding the diligent with pay raises. He also transformed rat catching into a precise science.
His executive officer, W. Colby Rucker, wrote a detailed treatise titled “How to Catch Rats.” Take a nineteen-inch French wire trap, placed where rats come to drink, and camouflage it with a layer of hay, straw, or wood, he advised. Then tempt the beasts with an ever-changing smorgasbord of raw meat, cheddar cheese, smoked fish, fresh liver, corned beef, fried bacon, pine nuts, apples, carrots, and corn. Scatter a trail of barley to attract animals to the trap. Smoke the trap with a burning newspaper to mask the telltale scent of human hands. As an added lure, place a small chick or duckling nearby to peep enticingly. When a female rat is caught, leave her in the trap so her cries will summon her suitors and offspring. However, Rucker warned, “It is not wise to kill rats where they are caught, as the squealing may frighten the other rats away.”10 So irresistible was Rucker’s regimen that hundreds of thousands of rats were drawn to their doom.
Khaki-uniformed public health officers patrolled the city’s thirteen plague districts—Blue had added one more district as if to mock superstition, Colby said. The men were becoming a familiar sight to the San Francisco citizenry. Public antagonism now softened a bit. Perhaps overconfidently, Blue chose this moment to venture into the heart of his opposition.
Making an appointment at the editorial offices of the San Francisco Chronicle, Blue requested an audience with Michael Harry de Young. M. H. de Young—an autocratic publisher, Republican power broker, and disappointed Senate hopeful—long had linked the city’s fortunes with his own. A passionate and prodigious collector, he gave the city its first public art gallery, the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. As a lover of beautiful things, the fifty-eight-year-old publisher found no place in his city for anything as hideous as an epidemic. After surviving an attempted assassination and an earthquake, he wouldn’t countenance quarantine. Nor was he about to have his paper’s editorial policy dictated by a federal bureaucrat who would destroy the city for the sake of a scientific theory.
“We need your help,” Blue beseeched. He begged the publisher to offer his readers factual reports on the plague. Without that, the public health service could not engage the support of the people in the gritty business of rat eradication. De Young’s face was opaque, his reply cold and noncommittal. He was used to being courted before a program was launched. Blue’s mission was a failure.
“I had an interview with Mr. De Young,” wrote the crestfallen plague commander to Washington. “He is a strange, stubborn man and may turn his guns on us with greater effect than ever.” However, he noted, “The city authorities, press and people, with the single exception of the Chronicle, seem to be with us heart and soul.”11
Back at the rattery on Fillmore Street, Stansfield and other officers were drained. Yet only a fraction of the lab tests Blue needed was getting done. Fewer than two hundred rats a day were being examined for the infection. He needed more data. The nests of plague—both human and rodent—were so widespread that only three of the city’s thirteen districts remained free from infection.
Just after Thanksgiving, the plague toll reached 106 confirmed cases and 65 deaths. Outwardly, Blue kept up his can-do outlook. His men needed him to be a perfect model of the “sanitarian spirit.” But in private, Blue was anything but cocky.
Blue was late sending funds to his mother and sisters in South Carolina. A bank panic triggered by Washington’s trust-busting made it difficult to buy a draft. So he wrote promising to send his next paycheck home in its entirety and gave his family a report on his progress. “My campaign is showing marked results in reducing the number of cases,” he wrote Annie Maria. But he added, “We have yet a great work to do this winter.”12
Seven days a week, the lights in the mullioned windows of 401 Fillmore Street burned into the night. Weekends and holidays did not interrupt Blue’s calendar. He drove his men hard. They thought him insatiable, a zealot. But remarkably, few men had complained so far. Hundreds of laborers laid thousands of traps, baited with tons of cheese, every month. But the rats still flourished, and the deaths still rose.
By the end of 1907, doctors had diagnosed 136 people with plague and buried 73 of them—almost all in four months. That December, Blue sent Washington a grim prediction for the New Year: