The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation (7 page)

July had also been a month of exciting, if not strange, occurrences. First a well-known citizen had been crushed beneath a streetcar amid all the celebration and festivities on July 4; another had been struck by lightning just a week later. Streetlamps explodedand caught fire, while mules fell dead of heat stroke in the fields. Citizens gathered downtown to listen to a technological breakthrough, the Edison speaking phonograph. Then, it was reported that a five-and-a-half-foot rattlesnake had been killed in Memphis. The strangest of all, however, was the approaching solar eclipse. In a fit of brevity, there had even been two new cocktails created that July—one was called the Quarantine, the other the Eclipse. The Quarantine, it was said, would isolate and insulate from all other drinks; the Eclipse would shut out what your neighbors are taking in theirs.

For those who followed the stars, the solar eclipse would occur during the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent carrier, and the little-known thirteenth zodiac. Ophiuchus is the only constellation based on a real man, a doctor who lived in ancient Memphis, Egypt, and a solar eclipse under his sign was said to bring disease and struggles between life and death. Another solar eclipse happened under his watch in Philadelphia in 1793 just before an outbreak of yellow fever. That epidemic, one historian wrote, “ushered in the longest and deadliest string of yellow fever years yet known in North America.”

On the afternoon of July 29, Memphians braved the ninety-degree heat to stand in the streets and along the bluffs at 4:28 in the afternoon. They held opera glasses and smoked glass heavenward and watched the moon cross the sun. An onyx sphere crept partway across the bright light, and to the spectators on the bluffs of Memphis, there seemed little question as to which was stronger as the dark eclipsed the light. It was like dusk had suddenly descended upon the city.

When yellow fever first arrived on the streets of Memphis, it did so silently. On July 21, a man arrived off of a riverboat to visit his wife who worked as a cook at 279 Second Street. The Victorian home was the downtown residence of Attorney General G.P.M. Turner. The man fell feverish, but soon recovered. Ten days later, Turner’s two children burned with fever. One survived, the other died.

July 25, Willie Darby, an employee of Farrell Oysterdealers who lived at 277 Second Street was taken with a fever and soon recovered. Though no doctor confirmed it, Darby’s was the second known case of yellow fever in July of 1878.

Other unconfirmed cases along Second Street surfaced, and Memphis police learned that travelers had evaded quarantine in South Memphis, a suburb that had recently been incorporated, slipping by night into the unguarded yard of the gas works.

Then, the plague-stricken steamboat
John D. Porter
passed upriver with her tow at the end of July. Crowds of Memphians, who had heard that the
John Porter
carried yellow fever from New Orleans, gathered along the river to watch it approach their city. Dr. John Erskine was called in under the laws of quarantine. He rode a tugboat across the river and boarded the ship. The captain, denying any cases of yellow fever, reported that four men had died and one crewmember was sickly from sunstroke. It is unknown whether or not Erskine saw any of the dead crewmembers, nor if he saw any obvious signs of yellow fever on board. What is known is that the suffocating confines of the cabin made it easier to blame the deaths on overheating. The
John Porter
was asked to bypass Memphis, and the towboat would continue up the Mississippi River, spreading yellow fever all the way to Ohio, where its crew finally abandoned the cursed boat.

On August 1, the steamer
Golden Crown
landed three feverish ladies on the banks of Memphis. The same week, the newspaper reported, “The city is quiet and yellow fever rumors appear to have abated . . . This should effectively dispose of the tale circulated by sensationalists about the presence of yellow fever here.”

In hindsight, it seems negligent that the board and the press would be so quick to dismiss the possibility of another epidemic. Epidemics hit in 1867 and again in 1873, the latter taking 2,000 lives in Memphis. But it also proves true of the time period, one in which men began to see themselves as governing over nature itself. Hubris abounded. And as was the case with most American cities, civic and business leaders alike looked more at commerce and industry, new roads and railroad tracks, than at sanitation or poverty-ridden districts. A
New York Times
columnist writing of the devastating epidemic in the South editorialized, “It would have been only necessary for the deadly germs to get abroad in one of our filthy tenement house districts to spread terror and dismay and defy all human efforts to exterminate it.” In a struggling city like Memphis that depended heavily on river traffic, another epidemic, or even word of one would be costly. The board unanimously promised, however, that should symptoms of yellow fever arise, they would make no attempt at concealment.

On August 1, a man named William Warren, a deckhand from the
Golden Crown,
landed in Memphis and visited an Italian snack shop in the Pinch District. Named for the “pinch-gut” appearance of its hungry Irish immigrants, the Pinch was the closest neighborhood to the river, wedged between the Wolf River and the Gayoso Bayou. Here, the river traffic congregated, and it was not uncommon to hear drunken laughter and the roll of bone dice. Gambling, prostitution and drunkenness flourished. The next morning, William Warren grew feverish. Dr. Erskine was notified once again and admitted the man to a quarantine hospital on President’s Island where he died three days later of fever. Though yellow fever proved hard to distinguish from other tropical diseases at its onset, it was unmistakable at the time of death. The deep yellow skin appeared like tarnished brass, marred by violet-colored spots. Still, Warren’s case never went on record.

The first case to go on record for the public was not for twelve more days when Mrs. Kate Bionda, owner of the Italian snack house Warren had visited, died of the fever on August 13. Hers was officially reported by the Board of Health, on August 14, as the first case of yellow fever in the city. Bionda’s shop, a clapboard shack reeking of fish and catering to the river traffic in the Pinch, was fenced in, blockaded. All adjacent buildings were disinfected. The body of Mrs. Bionda was burned within five hours of death. On that day, the
Appeal
published a warning: “The sad case of Mrs. Bionda, who left two little children and a grief-stricken husband, does not prove necessarily that others will follow. There is no need of a panic or stampede.” Only two cases of yellow fever went on record that day; at least twenty-two cases existed.

YELLOW FEVER IN MEMPHIS flashed across telegraph wires nationwide. It would chill residents from New York City to Philadelphia to Charleston and every town, small or large that fed from the Mississippi River.

The same trains and steamboats that brought thousands into Memphis for Mardi Gras that spring now carried away over 25,000 Memphians, more than half of the population, in a span of five days. In mass exodus, the rich fled by train, carriage, or boat, leaving dinner tables still set with silver and doors wide open. Traffic clogged the roads, and dust sprayed in the wake of carriage wheels. At the depot, ticket sales in one line alone exceeded $35,000. Platforms were piled high with trunks, suitcases and furniture. In an age of honor and Victorian manners, people trampledover one another. As one man commented, “For the sake of humanity, men became inhuman.”

The city collapsed, hemorrhaging its population, its income, its viability. Trains pulled away, leaving people weeping beside the tracks, their last chance at escape gone as the final train cars rolled to a start. A morbid calmness fell over Memphis, so still and quiet as to be serene if one didn’t know it was simply the pallor of death. In July of that year, the city boasted a population of 47,000. By September, 19,000 remained and 17,000 of them had yellow fever.

Once free of the city, Memphians did not fare much better. Nearby farmers locked their gates and doors, with shotguns ready. Public roads were wrecked and bridges burned to prevent travel. Many cities and towns refused admittance in fear of the dreaded fever. People were crowded into train cars with no food or water, the smell of sulfur still fresh on their shoes. A man jumped off a train to fill a bucket with fresh water at one stop. He sold the precious commodity to passengers for one dollar a cup at a time when a dollar was considered a decent day’s wage.

One train sent a message to the nearby town of Milan for food and water. The townsfolk set up tables of food and tubs of water along the river bottom, four miles outside of town limits. The people gathered on a hilltop a mile away and watched as the men, women and children released from the train cars ran toward the provisions. Then, guards with shotguns herded the Memphians back into the suffocating train cars. Those were the lucky ones. Left behind in the ruined city were the poor, the sick and the dead.

Immediately, a Citizen’s Relief Committee, headed by Charles G. Fisher, convened in the Memphis opera house. Since most wealthy city officials had fled, ordinary citizens took up the call. Their first priority: to get the poor out of the city and organized in refugee camps. Already, families sought out chicken shacks and abandoned slave quarters throughout the countryside. The committee turned every stall and booth of the county fairgrounds into shelters. It was said that the flutter of canvas could be seen on every grove in Memphis.

The Howard Association, formed specifically for yellow fever epidemics in New Orleans and Memphis, organized nurses and doctors. They asked Dr. Robert Mitchell, newly resigned from the Board of Health, to be medical director. He accepted the position in what must have been a state of despair. Mitchell had known this would happen; he had seen it coming and could do nothing to stop it. His fate, it seemed, would be fixed to this fever.

Amid shimmering light and supple breezes on August 23, the Board of Health finally declared a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis. It was two months after Mitchell’s ill-fated battle for quarantine; one month after the fever’s first victim.

A City of Corpses

Dust from the lime blew in the air, bone colored and sifted fine as flour. There was no traffic to stir it up. No horses to kick dirt beneath their hooves. It rose and fell of its own energy, occasionally accompanied by the pitch of a mosquito’s wings.

Only six months after the lavish Mardi Gras celebration, Memphis was a city of corpses. Streets, white with disinfectant, were deserted. Once lined with cotton bales and parade bleachers, Main Street now held piles of coffins, stacked one on top of another, so that walking the thoroughfare felt like entering a tomb. Instead of pageant masks, the occasional pedestrian would hurry by with a sponge tied across his nose to cover the smell. Where 3,000 horsemen had paraded, only death wagons now clattered by in pairs: One wagon of empty coffins, the other of full ones. The smell of cologne and rosewater, sprinkled on the bedclothes of the dying, seeped from doorways disguising the peculiar, pungent odor of illness. The sweet scent of blossoms had been replaced by the saccharine stench of death.

Wilkerson Drugs had closed, as had most other apothecaries, their colorful show globes void of light. Prescriptions could not be filled. McLaughlin’s grocery and Barnaby’s shop were boarded shut. Vegetable carts had long since closed, and the milk wagon had ceased its rounds weeks ago. Banks opened for only one hour a day. Memphis, having been quarantined from the rest of the country, became a colony left to burn. One journalist wrote: “A stranger in Memphis might believe he was in hell.”

City officials wired President Rutherford B. Hayes for help; little was given. Hayes wrote in a personal letter on August 19, “I suspect the Memphis sorrow (yellow fever epidemic) is greatly exaggerated by the panic-stricken people. We do all we can for their relief.” On September 2, Mayor Flippin again telegraphed the president for assistance, but it was the last of such correspondence. Four days later, the mayor was down with the fever.

Even the lime could not cover the smell of death as Constance stepped off the train platform on August 20, 1878. The wind carried the odor for three miles outside of the city. Sister Constance and Sister Thecla returned from a vacation on the Hudson as soon as they heard the news of the fever; the sisters were the only ones traveling into Memphis.

As they made their way through the town, signs of plague were everywhere. Across the street from the marble fountain of Court Square stood a white, clapboard building flanked by two staircases. It was the headquarters for the Memphis Board of Health. In front of it, wagons filled with disinfectant held shovels protruding out of the flatbed like broken limbs. On a trip through the city the shovels would empty the chalky chemical as downy as falling snow; on the return trip, the shovels picked up badly decomposed bodies.

The carriage pulled away from the downtown train station, up Poplar Street past the empty courthouse on Main. It moved slowly through the streets, navigating the huge sinkholes and corroded paving. The smell of the Gayoso Bayou and all its decay was heavy in the air. A hot breeze lifted the treetops and, already, the leaves began to burn at the edges. In spite of temperatures that hovered around 100 degrees, residents had been advised to keep fires burning within their homes to cleanse the air, and windows were boarded shut against the pestilence.

As the sisters entered the infected district, yellow pieces of cardboard marked the doorways of the ill. On many porch fronts, black replaced the yellow cardboard with white chalk scrawled across it—
Coffin Needed
—and the dimensions for a man, woman or child.

It was a pitiful parting in a time of extravagant mourning. Under normal circumstances, the dying family member would have had the opportunity to say good-bye to all loved ones as they gathered bedside to hear the last words. The family would then have drawn the blinds, covered mirrors in black crepe and stopped all of the clocks. Strands of the deceased’s hair might be cut and woven into shapes like a cross to display in a glass case in the parlor. Even the children and babies would take part in the mourning, wearing a touch of black. The body would be packed in ice if it was summer and laid out in the parlor—a tradition that with time would dwindle, and the term
parlor
would be replaced by the
living
room. Finally, the women would stay behind in the home, while pallbearers in black gloves carried the coffin to its place of burial, where it would be draped with fresh flowers. Formal announcementsof death would be mailed. And the widow would forgo any gold or silver jewelry, wearing a dark veil during the following year and black garments for the next two and a half years.