I am indebted to the people of Marion, South Carolina, for graciously tolerating a Yankee reporter who came to town in hot pursuit of the ghost of their native son Rupert Blue. The hospitality of Tom Griggs, cultural guidance of Tommy Lett, and the social history provided by Mmes. Elizabeth McIntyre, Suzanne Gasque, and Lucia Atkinson, along with Judge T. Carroll Atkinson III, imparted understanding and flavor to my project. Special thanks to Robert McCollum, owner of Bluefields plantation, for letting me tour the house where Rupert Blue grew up.
My friend Mary Christine Kartman deserves thanks for helping with the quest for information on Lillian Latour, Rupert Blue’s vivacious, jet-eyed autumnal romance, and for braving the handwritten notes of the historian Bess Furman, and locating a plague journal on microfilm.
It is a challenge to do research on a hermetic hero who “never complains, never explains” and rarely divulges his personal life in his professional milieu. For such was the persona of Rupert Blue. After much searching, I located descendants of the Blue family—Eleanor Stuart Blue of Washington, D.C., and J. Michael Hughes of Jacksonville, Florida. Ms. Blue, the great-niece of Rupert Blue, cordially shared memories and memorabilia of her great-uncle, including the gold watch given him by the city of San Francisco. Mr. Hughes, Blue’s great-nephew, was patient with my persistent inquiries, and finally located in his attic a cache of personal letters of Rupert Blue’s covering almost a half century of his extraordinary career. Boundless gratitude to both for entrusting me with family treasures.
I owe similar thanks to Colby Buxton Rucker of Arnold, Maryland, for entrusting me with diaries and other writings—both unpublished and published—of his grandfather William Colby Rucker’s, who was, for almost forty years, Rupert Blue’s sidekick in battles against bubonic plague and yellow fever. Dr. Rucker was Dr. Blue’s Boswell, and was as transparent and emotive as his boss was opaque and stoic. His account of the plague campaign opened a window on Blue’s character.
None of my research and writing would have been possible without the support of many editors and colleagues at The Wall Street Journal, including managing editor Paul Steiger and deputy managing editor Daniel Hertzberg. Thanks to bureau chiefs Gabriella Stern, Michael Waldholz, and Elyse Tanouye, and to deputy bureau chiefs Ron Winslow and Bob McGough. In San Francisco, thanks are due many colleagues, including Steve Yoder, Carrie Dolan, Ann Grimes, and Sharon Massey.
My agent, Henry Dunow, is a champion for his swift and intuitive grasp of my project from early days, and for prodding me to mine those mountains of inert documents until I found the human pulse of my story.
Nobody could be more fortunate than to have Random House editor in chief Ann Godoff as mentor and guide, grooming my book from the mortifying mechanics of a first draft to the finished manuscript. Her zest for everything from the scientific arcana to the dynamics of narrative drive opened my eyes to the storyteller’s art. I’m grateful for the energy of Sunshine Lucas, and the early enthusiasm of editors David Ebershoff and Courtney Hodell of the Modern Library.
Every researcher stands on the shoulders of giants, and I found a dozen willing to put aside their professional duties to read my manuscript: U.S. Public Health Service historian John Parascandola, plague scientists Drs. David Dennis, Ken Gage, and May Chu, Dr. Moses Grossman, Chinatown historian Him Mark Lai, San Francisco historians Gladys Hansen and Charles Fracchia, medical historian Guenter B. Risse, law professor Charles McClain of U.C. Berkeley, and law and public health scholar James G. Hodge of Johns Hopkins University. Their constructive comments were invaluable.
Finally, a huge helping of love and gratitude goes to my husband, Dr. Randolph Chase, and my children, Jordan Andrew and Rebecca Claire, for joining me on this adventure.
Notes
PROLOGUE
1. Personal communication, Bob Browning, U.S. Coast Guard historian, Washington, D.C., and Wayne Wheeler, president of the U.S. Lighthouse Society, San Francisco.
2. Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 126–127.
3. Ibid., pp. 274–279.
4. More San Francisco Memoirs, 1852–1899: The Ripening Years, ed. Malcolm E. Barker (San Francisco: Londonborn Publications, 1996), pp. 269 and 225–226. (The English novelist Anthony Trollope was unimpressed. “There is almost nothing in San Francisco that is worth seeing,” he said. “There is an inferior menagerie of wild beasts, and a place called the Cliff house to which strangers are taken to hear seals bark.” He added that the only noteworthy city feature was its stock exchange, which he pronounced even more “demoniac” than the one in Paris.)
5. Ibid., pp. 265–269.
6. Ibid., pp. 207–217.
7. For the flavor of immigrant life, see Marlon K. Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
8. Barker, ed., More San Francisco Memoirs, pp. 237–239.
9. George Rathmell, Realms of Gold: The Colorful Writers of San Francisco, 1850–1950 (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Co., 1998), pp. 174–176.
10. Philip P. Choy, Lorraine Dong, and Marlon K. Hom, The Coming Man (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), p. 85.
11. Ibid., p. 92.
12. Joan B. Trauner, “The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870–1905,” California History 57, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 70–87 (published by the California Historical Society).
13. “The hoodlum is a distinctive San Francisco product,” wrote a writer for Scribner’s named Samuel Williams. “One of his chief diversions when he is in a more pleasant mood and at peace with the world at large, is stoning Chinamen.” Other etymologists trace the word to a mispronunciation of the Bavarian word hodalump, or the Irish noodlum, a corruption of the surname Muldoon. See Barker, ed., More San Francisco Memoirs, pp. 228–231.
14. Charles F. Adams, The Magnificent Rogues of San Francisco (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1998), p. 196.
15. “Wing Chung Knew the Game, But a ‘Tin Roof’ Came High,” San Francisco Examiner, May 13, 1900.
16. Rathmell, Realms of Gold, pp. 77–78.
17. Harriet Lane Levy, 920 O’Farrell Street: A Jewish Girlhood in Old San Francisco (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1996), pp. 144–145.
18. Report of the Special Committee on the Condition of the Chinese Quarter, San Francisco Municipal Reports for the Fiscal Year 1884–1885, published by order of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (San Francisco: W. M. Hinton & Co., 1885). Thanks to the Reverend Harry Chuck, Donaldina Cameron House, San Francisco, Calif., for sharing this document.
19. Bess Furman, A Profile of the United States Public Health Service, 1798–1948 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1973), pp. 230–231.
20. “Why San Francisco Is Plague-Proof,” San Francisco Examiner Sunday Magazine, February 4, 1900.
21. Vernon B. Link, “A History of Plague in the United States,” Public Health Monograph no. 26 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Public Health Service, 1955).
22. Quarantine Officer Joseph Kinyoun thought the Australia was likely to have been the ship that introduced the plague that caused the March 1900 outbreak in San Francisco. See Joseph J. Kinyoun, Letter to Dr. Bailhache, August 9, 1900, p. 16, Joseph J. Kinyoun Manuscript Collection 1860–1913, Ms. C. 464, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md. For descriptions and photos of the Australia, thanks to the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Library.