The reported death rate fell from 93 percent in 1900 to less than 50 percent in 1908, due in part to earlier diagnosis and better supportive care. The absence of racial scapegoating, and Blue’s conduct of the second campaign, left people less fearful, less prone to conceal their sickness, and more willing to see a doctor.37 However, it’s also possible that a certain number of undiscovered cases in the Chinatown outbreak actually survived plague; had these been diagnosed and counted, they might have lowered the death rate. No one will ever know; the true toll remains part of the last century’s secrets.
But Blue now began quietly trimming his city crew, hoping it was safe to do so. At the same time, he was uneasy about the situation in the East Bay. He renewed his demands that Washington fund a corps of squirrel trappers to pursue the infection spreading in the countryside.
Back in town, Colby Rucker was worn out by work and worry over Annette’s lungs. “Foggy bad morning,” he noted in his diary. “Walked home in the rain. Spent the evening at home feeling rotten blue.”38
An unnerving discovery in October 1908 shook the team’s confidence. In a warehouse strewn with discarded fruit and nut shells, a rat was lured by the scent. Up the elevator shaft to the fifth floor it scuttled. A trap sprang shut. Back at 401 Fillmore Street, the men chloroformed, skinned, tacked, and dissected the rat. They prepared the tests. They hoped for a negative result. No luck. The rat was teeming with plague. It was the first plague rat found in eighty-five days. As Blue had warned so often, they couldn’t discount the stealth or the staying power of an entrenched foe.
There would be no victory just yet. Colby Rucker wrote of the reversal in his diary that day. In an aside, he jotted a bit of 1908 slang: “Ain’t it awful, Mabel?”39
The Pied Piper
THE CITY’S DANGEROUS decade seemed to be ending. After trapping the plague rat inside the California warehouse, inspectors tore the place apart, looking for stragglers. It turned out to be the last of its infected breed.
The San Francisco Call hailed Rupert Blue as a hero and a “modern Pied Piper who can charm rats out of their holes with a whistle.”1
In the Robert Browning verse “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” the town failed to pay the piper his fee for getting rid of rats, and instead paid with the loss of its children. San Francisco, another heedless town, also paid a fearful price for its negligence: 281 sick and 190 dead of plague.2
Blue must have felt satisfied as he and Rucker surveyed the statistics of their public health campaign. More than 11,000 houses had been disinfected. Over 250,000 square feet of Victorian boardwalks had been replaced with concrete sidewalks. Over 6 million square feet of homes, shops, and stables were now girded with rat-proof cement floors.3
More stupefying were the rat statistics. Blue’s brigades had set out over 10 million pieces of bait. More than 350,000 rats had been trapped, killed, and collected from bounty hunters. Over 154,000 animals had undergone bacteriologic tests at the Fillmore Street rattery. Most of the vermin, however, were trapped far below the city streets. All told, the total kill was estimated at more than 2 million rats—five times the human population of the city.
For months, San Franciscans saw great gray rafts of rat cadavers wash out of the sewers and into the bay, floating on the waves and bobbing against the rocks, until at last the tide swept them out to sea.
Gradually, the currents and the brisk salt winds swept away the stench of chemicals and rat kill. The city’s natural perfume of brine and sun, eucalyptus and woodsmoke, sourdough and coffee, returned. The campaign continued to deliver other dividends, too. Not just plague, but all infectious diseases started to subside. Clean homes and shops, remodeled sewers, pure food and water—together, these improvements curbed a host of diseases from typhoid to diphtheria.
Amid the city’s return to health, its rebuilt downtown area sparkled in the fall and winter of 1908. In two years since the earthquake, twenty-five new skyscrapers thrust up from the flattened city center. Nine reconstructed landmarks, including the Palace Hotel and the Chronicle Building, reclaimed their spots on the skyline.
A new Chinatown arose from the ruins like an electrified phoenix. Old wooden shops were replaced by illuminated pagodas that bathed the district in peacock hues. Old-timers along Do bahn gai, Dupont Street, shook their heads in dismay over this transformation. But the tourists returned in droves to stroll, sip tea, and buy curios. The city’s sense of fun, which years of suffering had all but eclipsed, came roaring back.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show brought its gaudy spectacle to Market Street in the fall of 1908. Nearing his eightieth birthday, the old showman Colonal William F. Cody shook his grizzled locks in wonder at the city’s rebirth. “San Francisco,” he said, “why she’s all right. The earthquake and the fire were blessings in disguise. They have made your city the most modern in the world. If it were not for the fatalities incurred, a shake-down would be a good thing for all big cities.”4
Nobody, not even Blue, would have claimed that plague was good for San Francisco, but the eradication program doubtless left it a healthier city.
Headlines on Thanksgiving 1908 proclaimed the long-awaited recovery:
Blue couldn’t celebrate right away. Just as plague left, the winter of 1909 blew a ferocious influenza into town. The past year, he’d escaped. This year, Blue caught the virus he called “my old and unterrified enemy.” Sicker than he’d been in years, Blue was confined to bed at the St. Francis and nursed for three days by hotel housekeepers and waiters. He was so weak that he apologized in his next letter to his sister Kate because his filigreed penmanship wasn’t up to par. “My hand,” he explained, “is somewhat shaky.”6 But he rebounded in time to receive the thanks of the city.
On the late winter night of March 31, 1909, San Francisco spread a feast on Nob Hill to honor the Pied Piper of Marion and his men. Nine years since the death of the first victim, Wong Chut King, and one year since the last plague case, the ordeal was over.
That evening, Blue and his officers shed their khakis for evening dress, straightened one another’s bow ties, and piled into cars and buggies, bound for the Fairmont Hotel. Once past the white stone-pillared portico, they traversed the gilt-and-marble lobby, en route to a balconied banquet hall. There four hundred of the city’s elite paid $7.50 to dine with the health officers whose mission they had scorned in 1900.
A vast expanse of black tails and broad white shirtfronts met their eyes. Photographers took flash pictures that burst like sheet lightning over the hall, blanching faces and making the celebrants blink. The white-napped tables boasted hothouse flowers and menu cards engraved with the evening’s bill of fare. Each course was a corny conceit on the theme of plague. Oysters came first, but not Blue Points, the menu said, because “he’s been giving them to us for years.” Next came a course of striped bass, released from quarantine. Vegetables were prepared from the city’s pristine produce district. For dessert, ice cream was molded in the shape of a mousetrap. Punch was poured into tin tankards that looked like garbage cans, with the slogan “Keep the lid on.” Lurking inside each drink was a toy rat favor.