Governor Gillett, Mayor Taylor, and merchant-activists applauded the release of new health figures showing that the federal cleanup had not only quelled bubonic plague, but slashed the rate of other communicable diseases like diphtheria and scarlet fever by 75 percent.
Blue looked across the crowd. There were the city’s prosperous and powerful, recent converts to the cause of public health. Then there were his men: his loyal aide, Colby Rucker; and thin, bespectacled George McCoy and black-bearded Carroll Fox, the flea wranglers. There were old faces from a decade ago, such as H. A. L. Ryfkogel, the crippled pathologist who had helped Blue and who was spied on, fired, and denied back pay for his trouble.
In keeping with early 1900s social customs, dinner was a masculine affair. Not invited to dine, the women of the plague campaign were cloistered in a gallery high above to hear the speeches.
When Blue was called to the dais, an ovation roared for five minutes. His old shyness flooded back, and he flushed scarlet. “It’s difficult to say much when the heart is full,” he began. “I feel as if I were one of California’s adopted sons.” He saluted the local men—the inspectors and rat catchers—whom he called “the brawn and sinew” of his campaign.
“San Francisco has set an example,” he said. “It behooves all seaport cities to look to their sanitary defenses, for there is where the disease enters. San Francisco has fought her battle, and as one of you, I am proud of the victory she has gained.”7
Mayor Taylor presented Blue with a gold pocket watch. The heavy gold disk sprang open to reveal an inscription engraved within: “To Rupert Blue, Passed Assistant Surgeon U.S.P.H. & M.H.S., from the citizens of San Francisco in grateful recognition for his services to the city while in command of the sanitary campaign of 1908.” The mayor then pinned medals on fourteen public health service officers.
A bass chorus of hurrahs erupted again, joined by cheers from the women in the gallery. As Colby Rucker had often reminded them, the city’s cure was their triumph, too.
With Hearst’s usual flair, the Examiner’s editorial page declared the next morning, April 1, that the dinner presaged a golden age of health in the twentieth century. “Man’s conquest of disease,” it said, “is certain.”
But it wasn’t really over. The plague that had menaced the city still thrived in the hills and grasslands just east of the bay. As soon as the winter rains subsided, and the mud-softened country roads were firm enough for buggy wheels, Blue sent his forces rolling into Contra Costa County with camping equipment and War Department tents. By striking early, he hoped to prevent a crop of human cases during the summer. He wanted Colby Rucker to lead the charge on the squirrel plague again. Surgeon General Wyman had other ideas. He planned on transferring Rucker up north to Seattle. But Blue begged the surgeon general to reconsider. Rucker was the most seasoned plague warrior he had. And there was the matter of Annette.
By now, her diagnosis was unavoidable.
“Mrs. Rucker, I regret to state, has pulmonary tuberculosis,” said Blue in a handwritten postscript to Wyman. She was feverish now and bedridden. “The doctor does not desire that any special provision be made for him on this account but does not wish to have to take her to Seattle as the climate is not good there. R.B.”8
Surgeon General Wyman relented and let Colby Rucker stay with the campaign. When the spring sun dried the roads, Rucker returned to the East Bay hills leading a handful of men armed with sacks of poisoned wheat.
But during the years of delay, the infected squirrels had dispersed widely, migrating over a vast swath of north central California. By mid-1909, plague had invaded 1,500 square miles of suburban and rural terrain—more than thirty times the space it had occupied in the forty-nine-square-mile city of San Francisco.
Surveying this new infected zone, Rucker underwent “the most terrifying and grizzly experience of [his] life.” One Sunday morning, he and two colleagues struck out to explore some infected burrows with a load of guinea pigs. To test for infected fleas, the scientists tied a string to a guinea pig’s leg and lowered it into a suspect burrow as a flea magnet. Then they would fish out the guinea pig, comb it for insects, and analyze them for plague. That day, however, they needed no guinea pig. From several paces away, they beheld a graveyard of squirrel skulls around an abandoned burrow, out of which swarmed a strangely pale cloud—fleas.
Three feet above its opening, the famished fleas attacked the men. “Is your life insurance paid up?” one colleague joked nervously. Rucker fought the urge to run away. Now the fleas jumped and wriggled under his clothes, biting furiously. When the work was done, Rucker returned to his hotel and stripped off his fatigues to find his skin as mottled with bites as if he’d had a full-blown case of measles.
An entomologist on the team assured him the fleas were hatchlings, too young to have sucked the blood of plague squirrels. Rucker thought grimly of all the corpses he had seen, bulbous and stained with the blue-black tokens of plague. “I knew just what they would find on my body at post-mortem,” he said. But the entomologist was right: The beige hatchlings were baby fleas. All three men escaped unscathed.9
The squirrel plague worsened inexorably, as did Annette’s health.
“It is impossible for me to be in so many places at one time,” Rucker confessed, and asked for an assistant. “Mrs. Rucker’s condition is very critical,” he said. “It is only a matter of time until I shall be obliged to ask for a leave on her account, and I would very much regret seeing my work pass into untrained hands.”10
Rucker stayed with the campaign. To carry him on his rural surveys, he got a noisy Buick roadster, which lurched over country roads. He left the ailing Annette in camp with a trained nurse. But fearing his son might contract tuberculosis if left by his mother’s side, Rucker took the boy on his road trips, tying him into the car with an improvised seat belt to keep him from bouncing out over the country roads.11
Rucker found that about 1.2 percent of the animals were infected already. Burrow to burrow, the infected squirrels were crossing the coastal hills, migrating eastward toward the Sierra Nevada. Surgeon General Walter Wyman asked his officers to map the territory, so Rucker sketched the state of California and shaded the plague zone with black ink.
Studying the plague map, Surgeon General Wyman finally beheld the results of years of red tape and delay: The lands now inhabited by wildlife infected by the plague spread out to cover a vast area that resembled a giant letter P.12 P for “plague.”
Digging in for a protracted battle against the squirrel plague in 1909 and 1910, Blue closed up the old Victorian headquarters on Fillmore and moved his office to San Francisco’s rebuilt downtown area. On New Montgomery Street, he outfitted his office with unusually posh appointments: a swivel chair, a rolltop desk, and a $35 rug from W. & J. Sloane. He now divided his time between the city and travels abroad as the government’s epidemic expert-at-large. When Chile suffered a plague outbreak in 1910, he sailed down to the coastal town of Iquique, where one hundred patients languished in a rat-infested lazaretto. When Panama and Hawaii were menaced by yellow fever mosquitoes, Blue advised the canal zone and the islands on epidemic control.