The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [21]
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,