Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [11]
Narrative accounts of smallpox outbreaks—whether recounted aloud to neighbors, scratched into a letter, or prepared, like Dr. Long’s history, for a government report—rarely failed to include a few words about the first case. These sketches of suddenly infamous men and women cast flashes of light on obscure figures, most of them otherwise untraceable. The way these stories were told reveals at least as much about their tellers: their forensic certitude, their fixed ideas about race and place, and their faith that buried somewhere in the human wreckage of an epidemic lay the stuff of larger moral reckonings. The desire to begin at the beginning, with a cognizable first case, was particularly strong at a time when the actual agents of so much misery and loss—the unseen, unseeable particles of the variola virus—were so imperfectly understood.13
After the fashion of Harvey Perkins, or the minstrel actor who stayed over on All Nations Block, the alleged source of infection was typically an outsider or a marginal local figure whose work or wanderings brought him in promiscuous contact with strangers. Consider three first cases reported by county physicians to the Kentucky Board of Health during the outbreaks of 1898 and 1899: smallpox invaded Boyd County in the body of a deckhand who worked on a “steamboat plying between Pittsburgh and St. Louis”; the disease was spread around Clay County by “a young girl of bad reputation”; and it struck Lincoln County in the person of a peripatetic real estate salesman named Joseph Sowders, a white man whose taste for the “biled juice of the cereal corn” had landed him in a smallpox-ridden Catholic mission in Columbus, Ohio, before he stumbled home to Lincoln. When smallpox struck Los Angeles in the winter of 1899, infecting thirty-five people and killing seven, officials blamed unnamed “tramps or trainmen from Arizona.” In port cities from New York to San Francisco, anyone arriving by boat, especially in steerage, loomed as a potential threat. North and south of the Mason-Dixon line, itinerant African Americans were the most prime of suspects: laborers “traveling afoot,” performers in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” shows, missionary preachers, Pullman porters, coal miners, roustabouts, even, in the case of Columbia, South Carolina, a “runaway student” from a black college.14
Other reports attributed the spread of smallpox not to a single individual but to the undifferentiated inhabitants of entire encampments of people on the move: railroad camps, mining camps, logging camps, Army camps, convict labor camps, African American revival meetings, fairs, lodging houses, and any other short-lived settlement where strangers crowded in an unfathomable mass. “The camp as a focus of disease is more potent than all others,” wrote Dr. James N. Hyde, a smallpox expert at Chicago’s Rush Medical School. In such places, Hyde argued, people who had become adapted to the particular microbial environment of their distant homes were thrown together, “under subjection,” unable to choose where or with whom they slept. “The chances of thus begetting disease are enormously multiplied.”15
The United States was not just a nation of farms, small towns, and industrial cities. For the country’s poorest working people, America was a vast archipelago of camps. Nothing did more than smallpox to reveal this rarely mentioned fact about American society at the turn of the twentieth century.
During his tenure as state smallpox inspector, Dr. Long developed his own theory about the origin of the great wave of epidemics that struck the southern states beginning sometime in 1897: it all started in a single labor camp in Mexico. A few years before the southern epidemics, Long explained, a railroad contractor from Birmingham had taken a crew of African American railroad workers across the border to do a job. They contracted smallpox in the camp there and brought the