The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [22]
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